How do you burn ROMs to carts?

[son_ov_hades]

Dream Mary: VERY easy, just switch the mirroring on a plain vanilla SMB cart. No EPROMs needed!

Super Mario Frustration: Easy, just burn a new PRG EPROM for a plain vanilla SMB cart.

Twinbee: Why bother? It's included in most multicarts. Anyway it's probably a mapperless game so you can burn EPROMs for it if you like (use any other 1st-gen NES/FC game as a donor).

SMW for the Famicom: Outright IMPOSSIBLE. HK originals use crazy weird-ass mappers. To build a repro of that game, you need its mapper. Where do you get the mapper? From a SMW pirate cart! That kinda defeats the whole purpose doesn't it?

...and that's why you don't see Kart Fighter, MK3, Somari or SMW repros

Game Reproductions has Kart Fighter, does that mean he uses the pirate cart to get the mapper?
http://www.gamereproductions.com/products/Kart-Fighter.html

[nintendodork]

http://www.gamereproductions.com/products/Burned-Eprom-w%7B47%7DGame-(2-chips).html

So, when he says game of your choice...does that mean it has to be a game in his store?  Or can it be any game?  And if it's already loaded to the EPROM, then all I'd have to do is put it in a (Famicom) cart...am I right?

[UglyJoe]

Kart Fighter is a mapper 4 rom, which means the actual cart probably has a clone of MMC3 or MMC6.  NES Reproductions lists SMB3 as a possible donor cart for it, which means MMC3 will work.

[133MHz]

Game Reproductions has Kart Fighter, does that mean he uses the pirate cart to get the mapper?
http://www.gamereproductions.com/products/Kart-Fighter.html

Kart Fighter is a mapper 4 rom, which means the actual cart probably has a clone of MMC3 or MMC6.

Yes. I stand corrected.
If you see any other pirate repros like Somari it's because the game has been hacked to work on a common mapper like MMC3.
My point was that you can't create a repro just from the original ROM image and hope it works with a common cart.
Now if you get a hacked image for a common mapper, please do!

http://www.gamereproductions.com/products/Burned-Eprom-w%7B47%7DGame-(2-chips).html

So, when he says game of your choice...does that mean it has to be a game in his store?  Or can it be any game?  And if it's already loaded to the EPROM, then all I'd have to do is put it in a (Famicom) cart...am I right?

It can be any game you provide that doesn't have more than 2 megabits of PRG and CHR data (4 megabits total).
And yup, you only need to solder them into a cart, but the cart needs to have the same mapper than the game you're using.
Also some boards need minor rewiring, but that's pretty well documented on the internets.

...and that's for NES games, you could ask him to burn a game from any other cartridge-based system, like SNES.
You can burn a separate 2 Mb game into each EPROM or piggyback them for a single 4 Mb game.

[nintendodork]

How much do you think it would be to get him to burn a Famicom game?

[vgthing]

This may be kind of a stupid question, but is it possible to fabricate your own board with your own mapper that mimics one of the strange pirate ones? or is this impossible? That guy on retrozone made his own games and I assume use custom mappers. So in theory, couldn't you design a mapper just like the SMW one for example?

[133MHz]

If you are the CEO of a chip factory in China and have the blueprints to the mapper (or a whole reverse engineering team dedicated to get them for you) of course you can. That leaves us plain mortals out of it. It's like saying 'could you build your own Pentium 3 processor at home?'

The guy from RetroZone hacks the ROM images to use a common mapper, like that SMB2j hack that was done some time ago to make it work on a standard MMC3 cart.

[vgthing]

Yeah, that makes sense. I wonder if someone could hack SMW. I know a lot of people (including me) would love to have a repro of it...

[nintendodork]

Me too, it's an awesome pirate.

[L___E___T]

Just as a tip  -  the guy at game repros is not familiar with fami carts just yet, he told me he wasn't able to get them to work properly but didn't go more into than that.

Then there's the legal issues.  He is ok with burning things to US NES carts as alot are hacks / originals and the rest are retails that weren't released in the US, so according to him there's no legal issues.
However, if i asked him to burn me an EPROM of something that was for sale, like adventure island 2 he may not be cool with that.


Personally, I quite like the idea of just having these on regular NES carts.  I'll be making my own labels a-la famicom box / famicom station.  Which leads me onto my next suggestion - could you then swap those into an actual famicom box unit?!!  I know the carts are NES like but do they use the same pin configuration?  Anyone know?

[133MHz]

Nope, FamicomBox/FamicomStation carts use a different pinout and CIC chip than their US NES counterparts.

[YamiMario]

How would you go about makeing repros out of these?

[L___E___T]

I also wonder then, If you could just house a famicom board in a nes case and stick it in a famicom box / famicom station - would that work??

[YamiMario]

I also wonder then, If you could just house a famicom board in a nes case and stick it in a famicom box / famicom station - would that work??

That would work, ive seen pepole done it.

[L___E___T]

get in!!   Sorry for the off topic post...  My aim then is to just make replica famicom station boards in those cases, that'll work for fun.