CHR RAM and the Kazzo (Paging INL!)

[Guilty]

Currently I am unaware of any sellers for flashable boards with CHR RAM! Specifically I'm looking for AxROM, mapper 7. Infinite Nes Lives is who I'm most comfortable doing business with, but seeing as how the site doesn't sell AxROMs right now is there anyone else to turn to? Ideally something I can use my Kazzo on?

Ultimately I'm just doing this to test my homebrew on hardware, so would the PowerPak or some equivalent be recommended instead?

[tepples]

AxROM (#7) is simple enough that a PowerPak will emulate it correctly. The biggest gotcha, as with other discrete mappers that switch the vector area (e.g. 7, 11, 34, 66, 180), is that the PowerPak may not randomize the power-on bank properly.

Infinite NES Lives has manufactured or will have manufactured at least four games with CHR RAM that I'm aware of: the first two volumes of Action 53 (both Action 53 mapper, #28); Haunted: Halloween '85 (oversize BNROM, #34); and Lizard (oversize BNROM, #34). BNROM is identical to AMROM except for mirroring, so I imagine INL will have no problems with that.

[rainwarrior]

If you know to put a reset stub in all banks, and how to deal with bus conflicts, those are the only significant things I can think of about AxROM that emulators or a powerpak/everdrive would fail to reproduce. Being one of the simplest mappers, it is one of the best emulated. It's also one of the easiest to build; almost any NES-ready board could be rewired to support AxROM without much trouble. There are several others besides INL that offer PCBs.

INL does have a "discrete mappers" board, though I do not know if it's for sale. It's possible that the website is just out of date. (It is often out of date; and the notes for AxROM say they were updated last in 2014.)

[Guilty]

reset stub in all banks

I have not yet played around with the bank switching, but I'm pretty confident I understand the way this works. I do wonder a bit about the discrepancies between the 'banks' that nesasm3 divides its code into and the 'banks' that get switched in and out via mapper, but I figure as long as I always have the vectors a $FFFA and labels for them to go to, I ought to be fine.

I do have a question about this though, at risk of going off topic; in order to minimize wasted data across banks, could I have the reset, nmi and irq labels in different locations in each bank? My idea is to, for instance, only have the initialization code and nmi code in one of the banks, and the other will contain dummies that merely switch to the other bank.

Now I wait patiently for INL to appear from the heavens and sell me a flash board that's not a $100 powerpak.

[thefox]

I do have a question about this though, at risk of going off topic; in order to minimize wasted data across banks, could I have the reset, nmi and irq labels in different locations in each bank? My idea is to, for instance, only have the initialization code and nmi code in one of the banks, and the other will contain dummies that merely switch to the other bank.

That's perfectly fine.