PS1/2 PS1 - Maximum Memory Card Size?

Jenetrix

New Member
OP
Newbie
Joined
Apr 29, 2018
Messages
3
Trophies
0
XP
114
Country
United States
I'm trying to look for a fairly large sized memory card for Playstation 1 but everywhere I look I only see the 1MB ones. Did Sony ever release larger memory card sizes?
Are there any third-party places to buy larger memory cards? Do modern third-party memory cards have issues? What is the maximum size memory card out there currently?
 

PewnyPL

Well-Known Member
Member
Joined
Feb 2, 2014
Messages
771
Trophies
1
XP
2,202
Country
Poland
Sony never released cards bigger than 128kB (or 1Mb if you preffer), that was due to them being internally divided into those 15 slots.
There are third party cards that have more, they work by paging (ie. I have a 8Mb card that to PS1 reports as a normal card, it has a display that shows which bank it's on and it can be switched with a button combo on the controller, but ONLY works on PS1, on PS2 the combos didn't work), but they are a hit and miss. Some tend to get corrupted after writing a certain amount of saves, and is what I experienced with mine. Once I got to the 4th page, saving a game suddenly wiped all my saves from 1st page...

All in all, as far as PS1 goes, the best would be to possibly get original Sony cards and not deal with the bigger 3rd party ones.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ZipMartin

Ryccardo

Penguin accelerator
Member
Joined
Feb 13, 2015
Messages
7,696
Trophies
1
Age
28
Location
Imola
XP
6,925
Country
Italy
Yeah, any PS1 memory card can't be a different size than 1 megabit (16 blocks of which 1 for the filesystem); there are good accurate clones (I can recommend the X-Technologies ones) but avoid everything with "compression", bank switching (leds/number displays), or the then-cheaper 5 volt memory chips

Of course if you are cheap you can move your saves to a PS2 card/HDD/USB when you're not playing those games ;)

(funnily, PS2 cards were actually intended to be available in different sizes - and a third party 16MB card was actually licensed, but after years of having yelled at game developers that the correct name is "Memory Card (8MB)(for PlayStation 2)", some of them actually made them only compatible with 8 MB cards: great job!)
 
  • Like
Reactions: ZipMartin

Site & Scene News

Popular threads in this forum

General chit-chat
Help Users
    Veho @ Veho: To ensure Florida is the freest state in the country, we will ban colors.