My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Wed Feb 10, 1999

Thoughts about the InterAct 4x to 24x Memory Card

Well, last night I did not do much Gran Turismo. I tried the purple tuned Concept Car a bit, and discovered it is a little screwy.

Low weight and moderate power is good for acceleration up to a point, but after that wind resistance takes over.

But this was mostly as a means of experimenting with the InterAct 24x memory card I bought. I went looking for more memory cards yesterday morning, but could only find full-price Sony ones.

So I decided to buy the InterAct card from Maxi's for $37.95 (I nearly typed "Cr37.95" . It's much as I expected, with the additional hassle that a flashlight is needed to read the LCD display because the PlayStation is permanently under a table right now.

The PlayStation knows nothing about this beast, and just thinks that you keep (slowly) changing cards when you operate the buttons to switch pages. The manual suggests that corruption could occur if pages are switched while you are running a game, as opposed to in the PlayStation memory manager. This would probably be true for games which do not explicitly tell you when they are saving, but in Gran Turismo saving and loading are always under your control, so you can wait until you know the card is stable. For loading, Gran Turismo will actually notice that a previously inaccessible card is now there and load from it when it can. There is a caveat, however, in that switching cards will not occur if the card realizes that it has run out of memory. The manual also suggests that no cards (of any sort) should be in the PlayStation when you power it on since a power surge may occur and wipe out data.

I actually only did one save to a card last night (that was to create a new 14 block Replay file; I promptly deleted the one replay after saving it to leave a completely empty file with 800+ "sectors" free). I copied (and deleted and recreated) data to three other pages using the PlayStation Memory Card Manager.

The card provides for 3 banks (A,B,C, selected by the left button) of eight pages each (1-8, selected by the right button). For Gran Turismo purposes, I find it easier to think of this as eight blocks of three. So I leave it on page 1 and cycle through the three banks to get three pages of GT data. I have verified that if you set it to page A5, say, you can switch to bank B and be on page B5 not B1.

One page is the main one with game state, car settings and a six block Replay file, plus an empty block and one single block Formula 1 game save file. The next page is one 15 block Replay file, while the third is the 14 block Replay file plus another single block Formula 1 game save file. The Formula 1 game save files are useful because the Formula 1 game allows you to add a personalized identifying portion to the file name, so you can use this to identify the page. The one I created last night I named "GTmore01", but now I realize I should incorporate the page number into the title.

Even when not using such a device, it's unfortunate that the PlayStation Memory Card Manager is not a process which can be called from within other games, but it would be exceptionally useful when using this 24 page card.

It's sort of amazing. A regular card, depending on how you interpret the figures you read, is either 64 kilobytes or 128 kilobytes. So this 24x card can store between 1.5 and 3 meg. The documentation for the card is rather vague as to whether 24x is the maximum you can get on the card or not. But, after careful reading you eventually realize that it is, and that, yes, you can run out of space on the card before you have filled up all eight pages on each of the three banks. And the actual amount of memory on the card is around either 256K or 512K.