Ive taken to the idea that making my own pirate carts would be friggin awesome but I really have no idea how it would be done. As far as hardware goes, I figure I would probably need an eprom writer and the famicom boards at the very least. What kinds of technical information would I need to know? If anyone can shed some light I would be eternally grateful. Thanks!
EDIT: anyone know anything about the copyNES? found here -> http://www.retrousb.com/product_info.php?cPath=24&products_id=36
I looked into this recently. Making single games is not hard, but can get expensive and is rather tedious unless you're a total electronics wiz.
I got in touch with chinese wholesalers you can make your own custom multicarts which would be amazing, but they need a minimum order of 1000 and the cost is not as cheap as you'd expect, around $7 per board so I let it go.
You can get an EEPROM writer and burn games but it's so expensive it's really not worth it, I'd suggest getting a powerpak from retroUSB, you can then put any pirate you want on it unless it uses a rare mapper.
Don't get the copy NES, it's much better to just shell out on a powerpak and reap the rewards afterwards.
The CopyNES can do things that the PowerPak can't do. However, if all you're looking to do is put roms onto a cart, the PowerPak is probably the way to go.
What kind of things can it do? Sounds interesting.
Check the description on the site. I guess the big features are cart dumping and debugging.
right that's decided for me then, gotta get one of these at some point. Why would you want to reverse engineer games though?
Quote from: UglyJoe on September 11, 2009, 02:05:02 pm
if all you're looking to do is put roms onto a cart, the PowerPak is probably the way to go.
I guess the reason Im against the powerpak is because I like to have individual copies of my games.
Quote from: UglyJoe on September 11, 2009, 02:16:18 pm
Check the description on the site. I guess the big features are cart dumping and debugging.
What exactly does cart dumping entail. Does that mean it can bypass the need for an EEPROM burner and straight re-write the carts (unlikely but I had to ask as thats what it sounds like) Also, how difficult is it to write EEPROMS? Is it a fairly straight forward process or is it somewhat involved?
Quote from: L___E___T on September 11, 2009, 02:26:01 pm
right that's decided for me then, gotta get one of these at some point. Why would you want to reverse engineer games though?
For hacking purposes, mostly. Some people do it to analyze how experienced coders handled certain tasks or caused specific effects -- either out of curiosity or to use it themselves in homebrew stuff. I think most people stick to software debuggers now, though (although they're not quite perfect, so using the real hardware is required sometimes).
Quote from: toredauei on September 11, 2009, 02:31:26 pm
Quote from: UglyJoe on September 11, 2009, 02:05:02 pm
if all you're looking to do is put roms onto a cart, the PowerPak is probably the way to go.
I guess the reason Im against the powerpak is because I like to have individual copies of my games.
In that case, get an EEPROM burner from somewhere and some of those boards that MasterDisk posted a link to.
QuoteQuote from: UglyJoe on September 11, 2009, 02:16:18 pm
Check the description on the site. I guess the big features are cart dumping and debugging.
What exactly does cart dumping entail. Does that mean it can bypass the need for an EEPROM burner and straight re-write the carts (unlikely but I had to ask as thats what it sounds like) Also, how difficult is it to write EEPROMS? Is it a fairly straight forward process or is it somewhat involved?
The CopyNES does not write to carts (other than to the PowerPak Lite, which is not what you're looking for). Dumping gets the data off of the cart and onto your computer. Savegames can be written to carts since the SRAM is writable. I've never done EEPROM burning myself, but I don't believe it's too complicated. It's just a matter of getting the (kinda expensive) hardware for writing them.
Very enlightening. So once ive got the EEPROM burner and the pcb its just a matter of recreating the layout of the original cart? Ive found this site -> http://www.thenesdump.com/New%20Website/mapper%20info.html which includes most if not all of the different pcb mappers for NES repros and such. It doesnt sound that complicated unless I'm missing some important piece of information.
Alternatively, there is a guy who does repros via this method - but last time I asked him he hadn't much experience with famicom roms (though I don't see it should be any different.
Does any one know how to do this?
Just like UglyJoe and others mentioned, how to do it is no secret, but it gets kinda expensive.
where can i find an eprom chip and where can i find the burner?
Awesome!
But where can i find the famicom board to put the game on and where can i get the plastic? Famicom cart not nes
Check with the guy, because last time I asked him he wasn't doing Famicom repros. He said it was slightly different and needed to check it out more.
oh so do i have to put the chips on an Nes board? No problem. ;D
If you have a donor cartridge with the right mapper, you can just put chips in a Famicom cartridge. I don't see any difference with doing the exact same thing to a NES cart.
Oh cool so if i had an smb hack and an smb original cart i could just take off the original chips and replace them?
You may want to ask someone with more technological know-how, but I'm 99% sure that it'll would work.
Older carts can take EPROMs as drop-in replacements, given that they're the right size. You might have to reroute the programming voltage pin at most.
Later carts (like MMC3) have non-standard ROM pinouts and need substantial trace cutting and patch wiring to be able to take standard EPROMs. Nothing too complicated but still far from a Plug & Play solution.
Fortunately you can find tons of info about it on NESdev.
Would an original smb cart work as a donor cart?
Im using a smb hack for the new burned eproms
Btw how do i properly open a famicom cart?
Quote from: famiac on October 18, 2009, 07:38:03 pm
Would an original smb cart work as a donor cart?
Im using a smb hack for the new burned eproms
Yup. SMB is old so no problem about it. SMB uses 32 KB of PRG and 8 KB of CHR so make sure that you get 32KB EPROMs if you don't want to end up doing a lot of rewiring.
Also if your SMB hack doesn't have any graphics changes you can just replace the PRG ROM and leave the CHR ROM intact. (PRG stores the program code and CHR stores the graphics data).
Quote from: famiac on October 18, 2009, 07:38:03 pm
Btw how do i properly open a famicom cart?
http://www.famicomworld.com/forum/index.php?topic=943.0
How do i open carts without gaps?
Yeah, I was wondering how i would ever open one of my pirate carts. I think you just have to snap it open, breaking it in the process. Maybe patch it up with super glue to get it back together again.
MS-DOS4 got it spot on.
BTW I've managed to open carts without breaking them. It takes lots of patience and ludicrous amounts of luck.
crap! i still cant get my carts with gaps to open.
How do i use the screw driver to open the latches?
This is what worries me too. Especially with how you never know what you're gonna get with a lot of original's from Waixing and Nanjing that have batteries. Not uncommon to get some with a loose battery inside due to lazy manufacturing or something, and I hate to think someone would have to break the cart open to get it back in place just to be able to save their progress.