nesdev.org

it's alot easier to each a PCB if you use copper-fill/pour on the board, that way you don't need to etch away all copper between the tracks. And it's easier to solder the parts if you put the throuhole components on the other side of the PCB Good idea. I went ahead and flipped the DB9 header so it ...

The parts came in Saturday, started building today. I've never actually designed a surface mount board before, so I got a bit of a crash course. The etching took a few tries, but in the end it worked. Made the mistake of not using the bottom copper, so the solder joints on this one are on top. Like ...

I think there is a much faster way to load data if you're using an SNROM cart, maybe other MMC1 boards. Since the NES232 has 10 unused data pins, you could hook the 8 PortB pins to the PRG data bus and take the place of the WRAM chip. Remove/disable the WRAM chip and tie the CE & WE lines to the...

I think it would be good to put a max202 clone on the board Yeah, you're right. Most folks will need to have a turnkey solution. I went ahead and ordered enough parts to do 5 SMD boards with TTL-RS232 converters and DB9 headers. The only thing the user will need to do is supply a controller cable a...

Looking at Digikey, the 11.0592 is a lot more common than 11mhz, might as well spec it. Now that you mention it, I've been running at 11MHz because I'm using an ATTiny2313-10 instead of the -20 version. They only carry stock of the -20 surface mount version, but it costs the same. We could go up to...

Okay, here's the schematic. The serial RX/TX lines would need to go to a TTL to RS232 converter or similar device unless you're hooking it up to another TTL device. Just search "TTL RS232" on Ebay. There are also TTL to USB devices available, but I haven't tested any out myself. I imagine ...

how are you connecting it to your computer? The cans and a string didn't work - had high hopes for that, too. I play around with WRT54G's & OpenWRT, so I keep a MAX232 chip, DB9 connector and .1uf caps on my breadboard. Jumpered that to the ATTiny2313 and hooked it up to COM1 on the laptop. Goo...

Just about wrapped up the initial hardware design tonight... Finally got the NES232 talking to the NES using the full duplex method. The incoming buffer is working, up to 112 bytes can be queued. The full duplex method added enough cycles that the NES transmits and receives a bit slower than the 115...

thefox wrote:He told you the better way.

My bad - you're absolutely right. Thanks for the correction guys. I've updated the wiki. Down to 7 instructions from 8.

Also, maybe that CLC could be optimized out by changing 'ADC bufferbyte' to 'ORA bufferbyte'. I'm all for cutting out any unnecessary steps. The initial ROL sets C which is added by ADC #0 and outputted to STA $4016. If C is high, it will affect the ADC bufferbyte in step 7, thus the CLC. If there'...

I reworked the transceiving method. It's now full duplex and executes in roughly half the time on the NES. I've update the wiki and posted all the details. Click on the "NES232 Adapter" link on the main page and scroll down. You'll see the functional description for the device as well as t...

Wow - whoever mentioned standardizing serial communication was really on to something. I was looking at emulator support a few minutes ago and found something very interesting. The FCEUX guys replied back and said an existing controller module could be modified to emulate the function of the NES232....

Or look up "flow control": DSR/DTR, XON/XOFF, etc. Flow control alone still wouldn't give us the ability to queue up transactions for delivery while the NES is between the 14ms polling periods. As a consequence, it wouldn't guarantee a consistent stream of data. It would stutter and you'd...

I'm pretty sure SPI would work on the ATtiny's side of the NES controller cable If you can get SPI to work, that would be awesome. After trying it with the Arduino as well as the ATTiny2313, I gave up on it. Couldn't get transmits to work on either one. Receives worked like a charm, though. Oh well...

I hope something comes out of this. Standardized way of NES<->PC communication would be very useful. Yeah, hopefully what we're doing will extend beyond games communicating with the server. Downloading new games to a flash cart on the fly then playing then would be pretty sweet. Buffering the data ...