Cartridge
Dumping Station
Your cartridges are aging hardware holding data nobody sells anymore. This guide answers one question per console: which reader dumps this cart — ROM and saves — and what’s the catch? For cartridge consoles you don’t even need the console: a USB reader, the cart, and a PC. The ground rule, non-negotiable: dump games you own, keep the dumps private. Every link here is hardware or tooling. There are no ROM links on this page, and there never will be.
01Pick your console
The three platforms that cover most of the cartridge world: the Sanni OSCR (open-source, standalone — dumps to SD card with no PC, native slots for the big six plus a huge adapter ecosystem), the RetroBlaster Mini (USB, swappable adapters, Windows-only software), and the Retrode2 (USB, SNES/Genesis native, plugin adapters for the rest). Pick a system and the bench lays out its options.
02The long tail
Beyond the picker: the Sanni project’s adapter list also covers all of these — OSCR base unit plus the system adapter. Several adapters are community designs rather than stocked retail items, so expect a hunt, and verify the adapter matches the current OSCR revision before ordering anything.
- Intellivision
- ColecoVision
- Vectrex
- Magnavox Odyssey 2 / Philips Videopac+
- Fairchild Channel F
- Watara Supervision
- Pokémon Mini
- Super A’Can
- MSX
- Sega SG-1000 / Mark III / Sega Cards
- Atari 8-bit computer cartridges
- Atari Jaguar
- Emerson Arcadia 2001
- Casio PV-1000
- Casio Loopy
- Commodore VIC-20
- Commodore 64
- Bally Astrocade
- Bandai Little Jammer (and Pro)
- LeapFrog Leapster
- RCA Studio II
- Texas Instruments TI-99
- Tomy Pyuuta
- TRS-80 Color Computer
- Vtech V.Smile
- CPS3
03Discs are a different animal
No cartridge reader touches a disc. The method is a PC optical drive plus Redumper (the Redump project’s standard tool), with MPF as its graphical front end. PS1/Saturn CDs and PS2 discs want specific compatible drives — run redumper --list-recommended-drives before buying one for the job. GameCube, Wii, and Xbox discs need an OmniDrive-flashed Blu-ray drive (custom firmware; flashing the wrong file can brick the drive, so read the wiki’s drive tables first). Sega CD and PC Engine CD dump as ordinary CDs. Disc dumps cover game data only — saves live on memory cards and need their own adapters.
04Gaps, stated plainly
- Dreamcast GD-ROM: no standard PC drive reads them. Redumper’s GD-ROM support is trap-disc based and still in testing. Console-side methods exist; they’re out of scope here.
- PSP UMD: no PC drive reads UMDs. Dumping needs a PSP with homebrew. Not covered.
- Sanni project moved: the original sanni/cartreader repo was archived 2026-06-15; the project continues under the oscartreader organisation. Prebuilt V5 units from third-party sellers are unaffected — check the new home for current firmware and docs.
- RetroBlaster software is Windows-only as of the guide consulted, and its GBA save support was SRAM-only with EEPROM/Flash listed as coming soon. Check current firmware before relying on either.
- Not researched this pass: NeoGeo AES/MVS, Famicom Disk System. Absence here is a scope limit, not a claim that no dumper exists.