Additional mapper category suggestions

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Myask
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Additional mapper category suggestions

Post by Myask »

  • Mappers [originally] from company X
  • each non-company Mapper icon on 'Mappers':
    • Bad mapper Extant. Split/subcategory into...
      • BIOS ROMs
      • 'reserved'/private use mappers (e.g. 100, proposed:248)
      • Disk-copier mappers?
      • Mappers with collisions/underspecified/require NES2.0 disambiguation (e.g. mapper 4's MMC3 vs MMC6, 34's unrelated boards...)
    • homebrew mapper
    • ("pirate"/"pirate MMC3" seems less useful than those, though "pirate MMC3" seems like just an intersection between "pirate" and the extant "MMC3-like" category. Perhaps "licensed" seems like a better category, but...)
    • "needs additional/manufacturer information" as a stub-like "todo" category seems potentially useful, on the other hand.
Functionality wise,
  • Mappers with IRQs
  • Mappers with advanced nametable controls (e.g. beyond 1A, 1B, Vertical, Horizontal)
    • Mappers with mirroring control in general?
  • Mappers with expanded audio (observation: voice-synth-type mappers (18, 86) are not included in Category: Expansion Audio...?)
  • Mappers with unusual CHR switching (TODO: better name; but things like MMC2 switch-on-tile and Oeka Kids switch on PPU address)
Also, actually getting some handle on which mappers ARE assigned, distinct from "needs more info" "undocumented", though obviously "[un]assigned mapper" would be stupid categories.
Last edited by Myask on Wed Apr 15, 2015 7:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
lidnariq
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Re: Additional mapper category suggestions

Post by lidnariq »

Myask wrote:[*]BIOS ROMs
[*]'reserved'/private use mappers (e.g. 100, proposed:248)
[*]Disk-copier mappers?
Almost all of those are singletons; what's the point it having a category with a single entry?
[*]Mappers with expanded audio (observation: voice-synth-type mappers (18, 86) are not included in Category: Expansion Audio...?)
waveform playback ICs are ... a little weird. They're not really usable for anything else...

That said, we definitely should get better data on them; both in terms of mixing level and ideally reconstructing the recorded data.

This is probably something that's basically just a bit of US-centrism; all ones with sampled audio contain Japanese speech on sports games... not the most compelling thing to work on fixing up.
Also, actually getting some handle on which mappers ARE assigned, distinct from "needs more info"
I mean this the nicest way I possibly can, but: good luck.
I've already gone through FCEUX/Nestopia/Nintendulator's source to set the icons on nesdevwiki:Mapper. Anything that has an icon that isn't just the pirate skull and crossbones is one where I was able to find enough information as to who made the board at all.
There never was a central repository, so "unassigned" and "Needs more info" are two sides of the same coin. What's up with mapper 35? Is it actually a duplicate for mapper 90? Can we deprecate it? Can we ever deprecate anything? Tepples had previously added a bunch of other icons to the grid, but the unfindable mapper 122 is an unambiguous duplicate of mapper 184, and likewise mapper 169 is an unambiguous duplicate of mapper 15. What about mapper 243 and mapper 150? Mapper 151 and 75? ( Mapper 87 and mapper 101? )

None of this is meaningfully resolvable without collecting all the hardware ... and while BootGod has done a fantastic job on the entire US licensed set, and a pretty good job on the licensed Japanese set, the exercise of tracking down every single stupid Sachen board and figuring out what's going on .... AND every Waixing board, &c ... is going to be an exercise in pain.
tepples
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Re: Additional mapper category suggestions

Post by tepples »

lidnariq wrote:"unassigned" and "Needs more info" are two sides of the same coin.
I think "needs more info" was intended to mean "one of the emulators has an implementation of it" or likewise.

Yes, we can deprecate things by consensus. See, for example, items in the grid marked as Image bad: "Others are duplicate mappers that were assigned by mistake." 151 is among those marked Image bad for duplication.

35: Reportedly used for a pirate mapper hack of Kirby's Adventure. May need to track down the ROM, see if it can be emulated as mapper 90, and mark it Image bad if so.

122, 169: What's the source for these being equivalent to 184 (Sunsoft-1) and 15 (100-in-1 Contra Function 16) respectively? If these aren't used in ROM sets in the wild, we could probably just recycle their numbers for new mappers after purging their implementations from the major emulators for a couple versions.

101: I say mark it Image bad as a duplicate of 140. The only released 101 dump (Urusei Yatsura: Lum's Wedding Bell, a dolled-up NES port of Momoko 120%, a game that along with Umihara Kawase feeds into some wild-mass-guess conspiracy theories of another editor of my wiki) uses exactly the same board as other 32K+32K games on mapper 87, which differs from 101 only by having two CHR ROM address pins swapped. The bit ordering used on 101 is the same as on 140 (and GNROM for that matter). So you can either pin-swap it to 87 or just emulate the 101 dump as 140 and call it a day.

And with the deprecation of UNIF in favor of NES 2.0, we'll probably have to start allocating mapper numbers in the East Asian plane (512-767) to CaH4e3's dumps, plus find somewhere to put Drip.
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Myask
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Re: Additional mapper category suggestions

Post by Myask »

tepples wrote:Yes, we can deprecate things by consensus.
In such a case, it would be good to note (perhaps with another mapper category!) which mappers got re-assigned.
One could argue that principle
NES2.0 wrote:1.Retain 100% backwards compatibility with existing emulators/ROMs/etc. (*this includes "dirty ROMs" with crap such as "DiskDude!" in the header and other atrocities*)
precludes this, though. If one really wanted to clean up plane 0, contra NES2principle 1 [hereafter N2P1]
tepples wrote:So you can either pin-swap it to 87 or just emulate the 101 dump as 140 and call it a day.
I'd think moving toward Register-Transfer language* or a netlist* for mapper descriptions would be superior; there are a good many mappers that are just address-pin swaps (or mirroring-swaps), are there not? (Submappering pinswaps, alternately...but disrecommended.)
lidnariq wrote:
Myask wrote:
      • BIOS ROMs
      • 'reserved'/private use mappers (e.g. 100, proposed:248)
      • Disk-copier mappers?
Almost all of those are singletons; what's the point it having a category with a single entry?
Classification; navigation; information. Perhaps it is more suited to a database, but...it seems odd that "FDS BIOS", "reserved for private use" and "duplicate pirate baddump" are lumped together.
(Also: What number did the Game Genie ROM have? I keep thinking it had one and got de-allocated, {contra N2P1} thus, 2 "BIOS"/tool-ROMs. FFE's got 3-5 on the board.)
lidnariq wrote: I mean this the nicest way I possibly can, but: good luck.
I've already gone through FCEUX/Nestopia/Nintendulator's source to set the icons on nesdevwiki:Mapper[...]There never was a central repository[...]
None of this is meaningfully resolvable without collecting all the hardware.
tepples wrote:
lidnariq wrote:"unassigned" and "Needs more info" are two sides of the same coin.
I think "needs more info" was intended to mean "one of the emulators has an implementation of it" or likewise.
Yeah. Am a little sick, sorry. For a number to be assigned, it must have been [decided to be] implemented in an emulator; otherwise there is just the circuitboard un-allocated. So, then, I ask of you, who have done quite a lot of good on mappers from where I've been watching nesdevWiki:RecentChanges...

Mappers 81, 102, 109-111, 122, 127-131, 135, 160-161, 181, 190, 239, 247, 251 are not, then, implemented in any of those, yes?

Also, as of the implementation(s) of NES2.0 when? one could have asserted that the other 14† planes were unassigned, but the tables show the same question-block as plane 0's. I don't know how good NESdev's contact is with other-language internet communities for to see how far this remains true.

Further proposals, then:Category:
  • RE-assigned mappers.
  • Unassigned Plane 0 Mappers seems like a good category, should one be able to actually nail it down: it is small.
Icons
  • the ?-block seems more apropos of "details unknown, but assigned" mapper; a plain SMB brick for "not known-assigned" then? SMB3's if you want to keep similar-hued.
  • "authorized claim staked" [SMB-flag?] is also a possible icon-addition, but would see very little use.
  • Poison mushroom seems more in-theme for 'bad', but ok.
Do the other categories (those that you did not specifically object to) seem like good ideas to you? That's kind of the point of this, to seek consensus‡.

*ugh, it's been so long since I did circuit design I had to look up the names of these things
Plane 15 being reserved instead
‡Don't s'pose you could auth my fresh wiki-account? It's Image bad that, for instance, NES2.0 isn't bluelinked anywhere on Mapper.
tepples
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Re: Additional mapper category suggestions

Post by tepples »

Myask wrote:‡Don't s'pose you could auth my fresh wiki-account?
There should be a message from the wiki in your e-mail inbox.
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