What would it take to make my own pirate carts?

[famiac]

oh so do i have to put the chips on an Nes board? No problem. 

[nintendodork]

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.

[famiac]

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?

[nintendodork]

You may want to ask someone with more technological know-how, but I'm 99% sure that it'll would work.

[133MHz]

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.

[famiac]

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?

[133MHz]

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).

Btw how do i properly open a famicom cart?

http://www.famicomworld.com/forum/index.php?topic=943.0

[famiac]

How do i open carts without gaps?

[MS-DOS4]

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.

[133MHz]

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.

[famiac]

crap! i still cant get my carts with gaps to open.

[famiac]

How do i use the screw driver to open the latches?

[Bramsworth]

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.