Interact MegaMemory cart problems

[Scooter]

I have a memory cart that does not seem to be recognized by the Saturn any more. I've cleaned both the cart and the Saturn repeatedly and the Saturn can recognize my Sega memory cart, GameShark cart and NetLink without any issues. I suspect that the memory cart in question has gone bad but it was always treated carefully (I bought it new).

Does anyone have any ideas of things I could try or check to see if I can resurect this cart? It has a lot of great saves on it. Even if I could get it to be recognized I could reformat it and put it back into use.

[Warp2063]

I'd open it up to check whether or not it has a battery in it that needs replacing. Other than that, unless you felt up to testing it with a multimeter while it was running, I can't think of anything else to try.

[Manji]

yea that's strange. i have no idea but thats why i always use sega products with sega products. any system i do this for really. even though everything has a chance of failure, first party stuff is generally more reliable. it's too bad you couldn't have moved the saves onto your saturn and then transferred them to another memory cart, but nobody expects accessories to stop working in the first place.

sorry to hear about that man! i wish i could help more.

[Scooter]

No battery so it must be flash memory. Nothing inside looks bad, no broken solder joints or melted components. Not sure what a multimeter would tell me since I don't know what the various components actually do.

[Warp2063]

There's not a whole lot a multimeter could tell you except whether or not the proper voltage was traveling across the chip. You would need to know the pinouts for that and be testing it while it was powered. Unfortunately, the chances of you finding out anything that way aren't good. If you did find anything abnormal, there wouldn't be much you could do about it anyway, though.

[Silence the Fallen]

Does your Interact memory card look anything like the on at the top of this page? http://www.rockin-b.de/saturn/cartridge ... gePort.htm

These memory cards were notorious for failure and corrupting files. I had one and a friend had one. We bought them new back in the day and his died within a few months. Mine worked alright for about 6 months and then would start randomly corrupting game saves. It used a bad compression method. File names started to get jumbled and then Kanji started to appear over some of the letters in the file names. It slowly destroyed my old game saves and then a few months after that it completely quit working.

Fortunately another friend of mine sold me his Performance Memory Card Plus and it has worked like a charm for the past 12 years. It has a TON of space and also allows you to boot and play imports (Hence the Plus). Here is a pic of it. http://cgi.ebay.com/Sega-Saturn-Memory- ... 3efdf520a4

Other than this I have 2 different versions of the Interact Game Shark for the Saturn. They have a ton of space for codes but can also be used as memory cards. I recommend any of these, but as for the Interact Memory Card... Stay faaaaar away from them.

[Scooter]

Yes, it's like the one pictured at the top. I have a Game Shark and an official Sega cart to save games on, I'd just like to salvage the saves on my Interact cart if I could. Sounds like that's not likely to happen.