How to make a homemade Action Replay
Things you will need:
Xbox Memory card or USB memory stick (1.0 compatible) (although compatibility of memory sticks is very hit and miss)
A Spare USB cable
An Xbox "breakaway" cable
A Soldering iron or those little plastic joiners for wires (what are they really called??)
A Wire Stripper
Some Insulating tape
and About 10 minutes
You can make a homemade AR in ~10 minutes for the cost of a USB cable (or if you're anything like me you've probably got one lying around) and a memory card. One word of caution before you start it MUST be a regular USB cable, not one of the mini ones you get with digital cameras, Mp3 players etc.
Remove the breakaway cable from the xbox controller, and cut it halfway between the thing in the middle and the xbox plug and using the wire strippers strip ~2mm of wire from each of the coloured wires on both halves.
You should end up with something that looks like this :
Take the USB cable and cut the plug off along with ~2 inches of cable and strip the wires on that so that it looks like
twist the xbox Plug's and the USB plug's wires together, making sure that you twist black to black, green to green etc. Ignore the yellow wire, it doesn't need to be connected to anything.
then join the newly conjoined wired back to the breakaway cable, again matching the colours using either solder (or "showing off" as I like to call it) or those little wire joining thingies as pictured
The finished article should look something like this:
(Yeah I know, it's not pretty, but it works)
OK, you've made the Action replay AND you can use that lovely controller S on your PC, now what??
Well, the only thing missing is the software, which (thankfully) is available from Datel themselves : here
So download that, install it on the PC and You have a fully fledged Action Replay for the cost of a USB cable
If you want to use the controller on the PC you will need drivers, which can be found here
In order for any downloaded save to be made AR compatible, it HAS to be in the following format within the .zip file :
The .zip can be named anything (as long as it keeps its .zip extension) and it should contain a folder called UDATA and NOTHING else at root level, within the UDATA folder there should be a folder named as a (Hexidecimal) number (in the case of MechAssault would be "4d530017") and again nothing else bar the folder, anything can be in that folder.
In order to transfer the save to the memory card, just drag it into the middle window and use the AR software to transfer it across to the memory card.
<img src="http://members.lycos.co.uk/hhahscreens2/uploads/ARtransfer.jpg" width=640>
Not just me that makes up names for stuff then