After reading this post http://forums.benheck.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=37099, I wanted to make one for myself, but rather than creating an adapter to solder the TSOP chip onto, I'm thinking of just designing a PCB and building the whole card from scratch. The only thing is, I have to order PCB's in multiples of 10, and I'll never need that many, so I'm wondering if there's enough interest for me to order a batch and build them and if people wanted to buy the rest from me. Here's the plan:

1Mbit (4x) capacity (that's 4x the original, not 4Mbit) with 4-position bank select switch
Nonvolatile F-RAM does not require a battery, and will never lose your saves
Board comes fully assembled, no shell. Designed to fit inside of the official memory pak, you'll need to dremel a slot for the switch but beyond that it's just ready to use.

If you're interested, let me know and I'll order parts. I'll probably order the boards regardless, but if I don't get enough interest, I won't order more F-RAM chips.

Update: 1x boards will be ready to ship shortly after New Years. I should have 4x prototypes by then as well, and as soon as I have them tested, they will be ready to sell and ship. If you're interested, post here and I'll update you as soon as they're ready. Also, with the latest 64Drive update, I am now currently able to offer card cloning as well. I'd be willing to do it for free with the purchase of any card, you just have to pay to ship it to me and then cover any additional shipping for returning it (which shouldn't be much, if anything at all considering they only weigh a couple ounces a piece...

Update 2: It has become very difficult to acquire Ramtron parts, and prices have gone up a bit, most likely due to the fact that Ramtron just got bought out by Cypress Semiconductor. I've managed to get my hands on enough chips for the 1x boards, albeit at a higher price than I'd hoped. This won't affect my sale price, it's just frustrating. I hope Cypress gets their act together and gets these chips back into production quickly. As for the 4x chips, those are significantly more expensive than I had previously been quoted, so for now I'm just getting 2 of them for prototypes. I'll keep this thread updated, and hopefully the prices will come back down once this whole buyout has settled and the chips come back into stock.

Final price:
1x card: $30
4x card: $40

I'd be interested if any others add themselves. I'd take 2.

I'd be down for two.

Just tried posting in the trading section for something similar, well except i didn't want all the extra space though. I just want someone to make it so that I can use my n64 memory card (no extra memory) and Super Smash Bros n64 game without the battery and have it still read/save. Do you think you could do this for me, how much would it cost for it to be worth your time?

I'll have to take a look at SSB to see what chip they're using for saving (I know it's SRAM, but I don't know the pinout or capacity or even the package). I have a copy, so I'll take a look when I get home. Right now, I haven't had the time to look into actually designing the cards that I'm discussing here, I was just seeing if there were enough people interested to make it worthwhile. It does appear that there are, so I will likely look into the design this summer. If you're just looking to mod an existing, normal-sized memory card, that is a lot easier to do, and I'd be willing to give it a shot. The only difficulty is whether or not you care about retaining existing saves. I can almost definitely retain the SSB save, but I don't really have any way of cloning controller paks. I'm not sure on price, I'll have to look into it and get back to you.

I'd be down for one once I see more evidence that work has been done on this

Ok, after pulling apart several third-party 1M controller paks to get a good idea of the circuitry involved, I finally found one that I think will be simple to replicate easily (just diodes and resistors + a single memory chip). Once I trace out the connections, I can start work on building one myself. I was getting a little worried, since the first couple I looked at had glop-top ASICs that I thought I was going to have to figure out. Now I just need to figure out what the ratings on these diodes are.

I am very interested in getting one!

Anyone looking to transfer N64 saves or 'clone' memory cards, look into getting a Dexdrive. Ran me about $10 on ebay. Even transfer emulated game saves onto controller paks.

I would offer pak cloning as part of the deal if I had a computer with a serial port... but I don't, so no DexDrive. >.<

Any update on the memory cards, just checking in since its been a few months. I'm just interested in a normal sized memory card (only need to save one game) so if we could make a deal soon that would be great.

Sorry, my summer was crazy. Worked 2 jobs, 60 hours a week. I now have a new laptop and don't have all my projects moved to the new machine. I'm still interested in pursuing this, but I got hung up on the SNES FRAM conversion (which sadly still isn't working), so it will be awhile before I can commit to working on this. If anyone with experience in this area is interested in collaborating, I can provide schematics for an unmodified memory card as a starting point. I found a 3rd party card with a really simple design that should work well as a starting point.

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Some good news, for anyone that's curious. The latest 64Drive menu appears to have added Memory Pack dumping, so I will be able to offer data transfers if and when I manage to get this all figured out. Also, seeing as it's already been established that the Ramtron F-RAM chip does work in this application, I may shelve the SNES version in favor of this and see if I can't whip it out fairly quickly. The annoying thing right now is that I haven't had much luck hand-etching TSOP footprints, and I really don't want to wait 2 months just for a TSOP breakout. I guess I'll try to etch it myself and see how it goes, then take it from there...

Some good news, and some news I'm really just not sure about... I got my free F-RAM samples today to play around with, but it turns out I ordered the wrong part numbers... I accidentally ordered the 4Mbit chips instead of the 1Mbit chips. It should still work (16x card, anyone?), but the chips are $40 a piece... In any case, I did also get in the 256Kbit chips, so I can build a normal-sized test card and then move on to the 4x. But seriously though... anybody want a 16x controller pak? Cost would be around $50 plus labor for assembly... otherwise, I'm not sure what to do with these 4Mbit chips

If it didn't need a bank select switch and didn't have any compatibility problems (i'm guessing thats why there is bank select so that it reads that there are 123 pages or that people want to save multiple games on the same card) then I might be interested in the 16x memory but how big would it physically be (would it still fit into the original grey n64 memory card/controller pak)