nesdev.org

Hello, just joined this forum after lurking around for sometime now.
I am very interested at making NES repros but still have a lot to learn and haven't tried to make one...yet

Recently I stumbled upon a lot of these pirate carts:





They are Spica brand carts and I have no idea where they are manufactured (got them from a guy who owns a game store and clearing his warehouse inventory of NES games)
These carts are pirate SMB 3 carts

My question is, can I make repros out of these carts? what mapper does it use and what games can I put into them?

Any help and/or info is greatly appreciated. Thanks so much

SMB3 is MMC3. The 6264 is PRG RAM. The board appears to be "backward" compared to official NES boards. The BA002 and T025 appear to be PRG ROM and CHR ROM respectively. Is the 74LS32 part of the lockout defeat?

thanks for the info on the chips used. and yea i guess the 74LS32 is probably for lockout defeat although i haven't test it on a NES with the lockout chip enabled.
so if this is an MMC3 cart, i can burn any MMC3 game ROM into new PRG and CHR chip and resolder them to the cart? would that work?
if it does work, can you recommend a PRG and CHR chips i can use?

thanks

74ls32 to defeat CIC? famicoms or their clones don't have CIC protection, the 74LS32 does mapper stuff more likely...
there are even commercial carts that have it: http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/search.p ... wtype=chip

It's a 72-pin cart isn't it? Seems like it's intended for an NES, not a Famicom, especially with that transistor in there.

RetroBot wrote:can you recommend a PRG and CHR chips i can use?

Whether or not you'll need to rewire them depends on whether the ROM pinout is JEDEC or Nintendo.

keropi wrote:74ls32 to defeat CIC? famicoms or their clones don't have CIC protection

I counted too many pins for Famicom. (rainwarrior beat me to it.)

I stand corrected , it's 72 pin eh?
I still think though that the 74LS32 is doing other stuff than CIC , unless there is/was an exploit using it...
that "88" IC is most likely to deal with CIC IMHO

I'm 99% sure I've read about the 88 IC, it emulates MMC3.

The 74'32 is for using a 128KiB 28-pin CHR-ROM.

Two of the four CIC lockout pins aren't connected to anything; the other two seem to be connected to CHR D2 (wat?) and the transistor—it's almost certainly a CIC stunner.

Spica came from Turkey or Korea I think (could be wrong, I see alot of them coming from those 2 places). Did your
friend have a huge stash of these? If so you care to share the love and sell some? These are the Spica carts
that are in the off white shells or the black ones?

The two resistors, transistor and tantalum cap are used to stun the CIC.

It collects some "oscillation" from the PPU BUS (any address line works I suppose) to switch the transistor and use that to charge the capacitor which in turn stuns the CIC.

nintendo2600 wrote:Spica came from Turkey or Korea I think (could be wrong, I see alot of them coming from those 2 places). Did your
friend have a huge stash of these? If so you care to share the love and sell some? These are the Spica carts
that are in the off white shells or the black ones?

pretty huge man...hundreds of boards. taken off either grey or white shells. Check your PM.
anyone else interested on buying these boards? thinking of making repros out of these but maybe it's going to be better just selling them off.

thanks

Wouldn't one of those $4 RetroZone boards be cheaper in the long run, given the time it takes to desolder things from these boards? (hmmm, looks like they don't sell the MMC1 version of this board anymore, meh)

blargg wrote:Wouldn't one of those $4 RetroZone boards be cheaper in the long run, given the time it takes to desolder things from these boards? (hmmm, looks like they don't sell the MMC1 version of this board anymore, meh)

This is MMC3 with SRAM on this pirate mario 3. I have a hakko 808 so desoldering is no issue for me.

nintendo2600 wrote:I have a hakko 808 so desoldering is no issue for me.

Wow, yeah, I never knew it could be so easy.