HVC-050 Family Computer Network System

Started by 80sFREAK, April 22, 2019, 12:08:28 am

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80sFREAK

Subj. Anyone own one of them? Is it booting in some sort of "browser"/menu? Any photos of guts? Any info, if ROM was dumped?

TIA
I don't buy, sell or trade at moment.
But my question is how hackers at that time were able to hack those games?(c)krzy

UglyJoe

Without a card in it, it'll just boot to a gray screen.  I have ROMs for two of the cards (the horse-betting one and the stock trading one), but not of the "network system" hardware itself.

I sent one off to bootgod a while back and he did some work on it.  He told me this about the hardware:

QuoteDid preliminary fooling around with the network system tonight... looking inside the main unit, it has 16KB CHR-RAM, 16KB WRAM, 3(!) custom chips, no standard mapper chips. The modem is completely modular too. I have managed to figure out a bit how the hardware registers work and I think I even managed a complete dump of card. It appears to be 128KB. It will not run in any emulator yet of course. Anyways so far I've figured out registers for: PRG bank selection, PRG bank mode, WRAM bank selection, both WRAM enables, and mirroring. I've haven't quite figured out VRAM banking yet, but I think I'm on track. Once that's figured out along with what I've got so far, it wouldn't be too hard to add basic support to an emulator to get it running at least. Figuring out the modem stuff is probably out of my league though.

80sFREAK

April 22, 2019, 04:51:43 am #2 Last Edit: October 24, 2019, 05:19:06 am by 80sFREAK
Thanks for fast respond. Very interesting, so there is no BIOS "onboard"? Any "tear down" photos? Any details about memory map etc.? Any chance to have a look on the ROM?

added

Found teardown thread @nesdev with lots of hardware pr0n :)

I don't buy, sell or trade at moment.
But my question is how hackers at that time were able to hack those games?(c)krzy

80sFREAK

Last night found video on youtube about HVC-050 made by french guy macgeekver. Really nice and clean review without "uhh&ohh" and shaking camera  ;D

I should get couple of these units for some experiments  ???
I don't buy, sell or trade at moment.
But my question is how hackers at that time were able to hack those games?(c)krzy

portnoyd

I've seen a Super Mario card floating around for it. Anyone know what that one does (or is that the stock market card)?

UglyJoe

I think that one was provided to game shops to download marketing info from Nintendo.  That seems to be the rarest card for it.  I want it, but not, like, $100+ want it ;D

80sFREAK

Once you passed stage, where baseball and majong can fill up your nostalgy hunger, this hobby getting quite expensive  ;D

I don't buy, sell or trade at moment.
But my question is how hackers at that time were able to hack those games?(c)krzy

portnoyd

Quote from: UglyJoe on October 24, 2019, 04:28:05 am
I think that one was provided to game shops to download marketing info from Nintendo.  That seems to be the rarest card for it.  I want it, but not, like, $100+ want it ;D


I hear you on that, I saw it once for cheap and wasn't interested at the time and passed on it... and now haven't seen it since. I am sure now that I would want it, it'll never be that cheap again.

UglyJoe

Quote from: 80sFREAK on October 24, 2019, 05:43:32 am
Once you passed stage, where baseball and majong can fill up your nostalgy hunger, this hobby getting quite expensive  ;D
These are worse, though, since you're basically just paying to see a title screen and, if you're lucky, a bunch of menus in Japanese.