nesdev.org

If the additional SRAM address lines are floating, that could cause issues.

I'm sure they aren't floating. Some games actually do have SRAM mapped a little bit differently. I think one of the Ys games is like that.

Yeah, getting it right all the time is not Ys-y.

I can give this a try and see what happens.

I'll start off by saying thank you! These boards are excellent and I will be getting more in the future!

First, a pretty basic question....Does it matter if a rom is padded or doubled? I padded a 1.5MB file to 4MB yesterday and noticed no issues. Will the padding cause an issue later in the game or did I just get lucky?
If I do a doubled rom do I just use a basic joining program to put them together or is there a better way?

Captain N wrote: Also does the Star Ocean 96Mbit no sdd-1 rom work on your boards? I could not get it to work.
I know the rom is good since it works on my SNES POWERPACK. I can get it to flash fully with out any errors and but it black screens. On my super wild card DX 2 it reads the rom internal data atleast.
i did remove the header and corrected the checksums. but still no go.
Is there a special way i have to split/combin the rom?

infiniteneslives wrote:Yeah that game's format is typically interleaved, my current firmware release only works for de-interleaved roms. I should have my deinterleaving firmware out soon now that I found the bug plaguing my NES flashing code. Shoot me an email and I'll help you get those issues resolved. paul@infiniteneslives.com

I was wondering if this had been figured out yet. I was thinking of doing this rom soon myself.

Once again, thank you!

Padding is fine if you know in advance that the ROM does not depend on address mirroring. A few commercial games such as Mega Man X appear to use mirroring as weak copy protection.

tepples wrote:Padding is fine if you know in advance that the ROM does not depend on address mirroring. A few commercial games such as Mega Man X appear to use mirroring as weak copy protection.

Thanks for the info! Still new to this and didn't know about address mirroring.....I'm really enjoying the learning process though and these boards are a great way to begin learning the basics.

For any ROM that is 4, 8, or 16 megabits, you should copy/duplicate the ROM data until it fills up the flash chip. Some games will function without doing this, but many will not.

Roms that are uneven sizes like 10, 12, 20, and 24 megabits may be a bit more complicated. There are also instructions somewhere for how to handle the 48mbit Tales of Phantasia and the 96mbit Star Ocean I think.

I think it's possible in some cases two games that are the same different size might expect different mirroring behavior as one might be using two ROM chips rather than one.

Hi guys,
I recently recieved my INL HiLoROM SNES 12MB Flash Cart and i am facing some problems:
Firstly, I can not use the flash cart on my pal snes without disabling the CIC. I tried to get some information on how to use the TENNIS JCIC properly, but i could not find any (might just be, that i can not set the region corresponding to my SNES).

Secondly, I can not play games that use more than 1MB (8MBit) of memory. I tried Super Mario World, it works flawlessly, even unpadded (just flashing the 512kb file). I also tried just for testing Axelay, which also worked without problems, same as before it also worked unpadded.
But if I try to flash Tales of symphonia, the way like mentioned some pages before with doubling last 2MB of the game and putting the first 4MB of the rom after the 2x2MB, it does not work. I thought it might be because of the uneven size which needs some trickery padding of the rom to fill the 12MB, but I had not luck with any game of a size from 2MB up to 12MB (like donkey kong country 2 or secret of mana which have even rom sizes, they also did not work padded to 12MB)

I would really appreciate help of you guys and i hope to get to play tales of symphonia on real hardware

If it helps, i have a super nintendo cart backup tool, which allows me to dump cartridges up to a size of 4MB (32mbit), might be helpful to analyze what is wrong.

Do you mean Tales of Phantasia? Since his instructions leave you with a 8MB ROM and you have 12MB of flash, you may need to copy more data around. Try copying the first 4MB of the 8MB ROM onto the back, that might work. If not then try copying the last half onto the back. I'd guess one of those might work.

SNgamer wrote:Hi guys,
I recently recieved my INL HiLoROM SNES 12MB Flash Cart and i am facing some problems:
Firstly, I can not use the flash cart on my pal snes without disabling the CIC. I tried to get some information on how to use the TENNIS JCIC properly, but i could not find any (might just be, that i can not set the region corresponding to my SNES).

Yeah I've been getting mixed reports as of late as to whether the SNES JCIC is working on PAL consoles. It's supposed to region switch on reset. I think there's a variation in SNES PAL CIC's out there that's causing an issue for some people. I added support for the superCIC to my second revision of the boards which showed up last week. I'd be happy to swap it out with the new revision for you. Please email me to handle that.

Secondly, I can not play games that use more than 1MB (8MBit) of memory. I tried Super Mario World, it works flawlessly, even unpadded (just flashing the 512kb file). I also tried just for testing Axelay, which also worked without problems, same as before it also worked unpadded.
But if I try to flash Tales of symphonia, the way like mentioned some pages before with doubling last 2MB of the game and putting the first 4MB of the rom after the 2x2MB, it does not work. I thought it might be because of the uneven size which needs some trickery padding of the rom to fill the 12MB, but I had not luck with any game of a size from 2MB up to 12MB (like donkey kong country 2 or secret of mana which have even rom sizes, they also did not work padded to 12MB)

Yeah right now the 12MB board is far from ideal to play anything other than lorom games or a full 12MB game. Someone has offered to help me with a new version of the host app to help resolve these issues. The main problem is there is no mirroring on a 12MB board, every rom address has a unique byte. So Hirom games need to be programmed into lorom space as well in an interleaved fashion to get things to work. Mottzilla's suggestion should help if you have a 8MB board. I'm expecting a beta release that I'll post here in the next week or so.

I would really appreciate help of you guys and i hope to get to play tales of symphonia on real hardware

I don't know anything about that game. If you can provide details of the hardware config it expects I can help instruct you how to modify the rom image to support.

I'd be happy to swap it out with the new revision for you. Please email me to handle that.

thanks for your offer, but If there is no need for chainging the pcb's layout or any parts besides the JCIC, then there is for me no need to get the new version.
if it is a common problem for the JCIC not to work properly on PAL snes, then i will hardwire a PAL CIC from some old sports game that no one will ever miss
But if your second version does handle bugs i am not aware of, then i might consider an exchange

I'm expecting a beta release that I'll post here in the next week or so.

very good, i will then wait for it's release.

and I also now get why only the two lorom games work.
i will then try star ocean with the no-sdd1-patch and see if it works (it is a lorom game if i recall correctly)

I don't know anything about that game. If you can provide details of the hardware config it expects I can help instruct you how to modify the rom image to support.

Whoops, sorry, i actually meant the game tales of phantasia I accidently swapped the names because the new hd version of tales of symphonia is coming out soon (which i am awaiting it's release in order to play).

For what it's worth, I'm the 'someone' who has offered to work on the host app for INL's flash carts.

I go by Danin online, but my real name is Skylar. You can call me Skylar or Danin, doesn't much matter which. I've been hammering away at this app for just short of two weeks now, and I think progress has been pretty decent. I've rewritten it from scratch, using up-to-date libUSB libs, and crammed as many features as I can think of into it. INL or myself will be making a proper release thread for my new host app, and I'll be your friendly neighborhood dev. I'm not a pro, so there will be bugs. I'll come back here and edit in a URL for the new host app once it's posted.

Thanks Danin!

For anyone wanting to test out the beta release of his host app you can find it in his thread here

Discussions of the firmware and software for the kazzo retro programmer are probably best placed there for now. Specific things about my board here.

On that note, I got the next revision of my boards in last week. Not too many changes though:
*added support for ikari's superCIC as things weren't working for all those guys in PAL land. Need to get a PAL SNES for testing to help out Jim's Cool.
*added a jumper to support halving the SRAM. This will ground A11, the CPLD can be configured to limit SRAM to 4KByte (32Kbit), with that this jumper will trim down to 2KByte (16Kbits) as some games require.
*added placement for a low pass RC filter on the back of the board for the reset signal for better multicart switching.
*they turned out a little more orange than yellow for this batch... oh well.

so, it's me again.
First off, the new host app is very well done (i know it does not belong in this thread, but i had to say this ).

Now i have tested my 12mb HiLoRom board with some other games, but i can't get some of them to work...
I tested super metroid, which at first did not work and i found out that it checks for the size of the sram available onboard. as there is 32kb installed for LoRom games, i manually grounded A14 and A13 in order to have 8kb of sram. i checked again if the game starts, but blackscreen like before...
I also tried dezaemon (with normal 32kb sram setup on the board), which also ended in black screen and castlevania dracula x too...
i also tried star ocean, which fills all the 12mb space of the board, but here again, blackscreen (but i think it is because the patch seems to interleave the rom in gd3 format and i could not deinterleave it properly, but this is a minor issue to the main problem i have).
the only games i could get to work successfully were mario paint, super mario world and axelay.
All games i tested are LoRom games which should work on the 12mb board, but as i said, some of them do not seem to work...
of course, the switch is set to LoRom.

is there any chance of getting this thing to work properly?