Apparently, I under-estimated the desire of forum members to see inside of MSX cartridges in a previous post regarding an apparently rare DMS SRAM cartridge that I purchased in a three cartridge lot on eBay. I paid a total of AUS $114.09 (AUS $70.89 winning bid + AUS $43.20 international shipping to the US) for the aforementioned SRAM cartridge, the DMS-1 cartridge, and a YRM-102 cartridge.
Therefore, without further ado, here is a quick peek inside the "D.M.S. 1 Real Time Sequence/Recorder" cartridge for the Yamaha CX5M Music Computer (equipped with the SFG-01)...
The front, top, and rear of the cartridge are rather unassuming. Other than the rather cool looking DMS logo (bonus points given by me for finding the logo totally retro for an 80's indie MSX publisher, even if it seems a bit old today), the label is totally unassuming.
The cartridge snaps together, and holds a rather generic-looking PCB inside. To keep the label intact, I actually broke two pins at the top of the plastic when I unsnapped the plastic. (Oh, well...) I then immediately freak out when I see an EEPROM without a protective label:
Also, well played, whomever wrote IC in a pencil on that chip...
That's a bare PCB by any standards with only two components! The EEPROM is a Hitachi HN4827128G-25 -- I believe this is a 16kb x 8 ROM with a 250ns access time.The other component is a capacitor, which had two lines of text printed on it, the first being "1" and the second being "35+".
Interestingly enough, the EEPROM is at location ROM1, with an unpopulated ROM2 location presumably for larger cartridges assembled by the same contract manufacturer. (I presume DMS was not large enough to make their own cartridges, especially given how the SRAm cartridge was obviously not designed by DMS.)
The back of the PCB is even less interesting than the front:
Unlike the SRAM cartridge, there's no indication of who the contract manufacturer might have been. However, given the generic nature of the PCB, I suspect that it might have been manufactured by a company that also contract manufactured other third-party MSX cartridges.
