nesdev.org

Hello everybody. Im brand new to this site. For those of you who dont know me, my name is Mark and im an avid NES Collector. In fact i have EVERY US Ntsc Game made except for 7 of them. Anyways i was basically wondering if anyone has ANY information on making NES reproductions? Now not that im planning on competeing with leonki or gamereproductions.com. In fact both places seem great! and the owners seem like very nice people . Im actually planning on buying a few for myself. But i was basically wondering if anyone could help me on how to actually do this. I would basically just like to learn to fun, and make custom carts for my own. and if i get it down maybe sell, but i wouldnt be selling the same way they do. In fact i actually have some very very unique ideas of my own on makin the experience better, funner, and make them look unique. If anyone has ANY info please let me know. Plus i would love to learn, so there would also be another dealer. It seems both leonki and GR are very busy and backed with orders. Please let me know. i definetly have the time my email address is parpunk@aol.com. I have been getting a lot of info from this link:

http://noriaki_kakyouin.freepgs.com/nes.htm

But im still a bit confused about the Whole process works. I would love to find someone who could do a walkthrough with me, and id defintly hook them up when or IF i can get this thing rollin. any help would be Grealy appreciated thanks!
-Mark

Please be more specific. Reproduce 100% a NES cartridge is hard because of the plastic case. Placing a brand new PCB instead and just keep the case have been done several times up to now, and just replace a game by another is quite easy to do, as long as they're the same board. So just tell us what you want to do and what you are asking.

hey dude. i meant replacing a new rom on a board. like for instance the games that were never released. like adventure island 4, squashed etc. Basically what www.gamereproductions.com does. take a donor cart and overwrite the game with another. Please email me at parpunk@aol.com if you can help or hit me up on AOL IM under username parpunk , thanks man!

Hey parpunk. Thing is that this subject always comes up once in a while, and it can be a bit tiresome for the people here to cover it all from the ground every time.

If you take a quick look at the posts here in the hardware section you'll find lots of topics about reproductions/devcarts, so I advise you to take a look at those, and then come back here to ask what ever is unclear, because the basics have been covered many many times before.

Just to get you started: to reproduce a cart you need another one (donnor cart) that uses the same kind of board (or similar, because in some cases modifying them to hold the new game can be simple).

The hard part here is that there are tons of different boards used in NES carts, and some are quite rare. Specially if you want to make carts of japanese games, since quite a few japanese boards do not have american/european counterparts. These games sometimes can be hacked to use more common boards, but you need a very talented and dedicated person to give that a shot.

Once you get a compatible board, you have to desolder the ROM chip(s) (2 chips if it is a CHR-ROM game or only one chip if it is a CHR-RAM game) and solder the chip(s) with the new game.

The hard part now is that you must own an EPROM programmer (to be able to put the new game data into chips - but don't worry, there are some quite cheap ones) and you have to do some rewiring job when soldering the new chip to the board, because the pins on programmable ROMs have different functions from the pins on Nintendo ROMs.

You'll basically have to compare the pinouts of your chips with the Nintendo chips looking for any pins that don't match, and then you make them go to the correct holes by bending the pins up and soldering some wires to them, and then soldering the wires to the correct holes. That way you force the pins to be connected to the correct places.

Now, I suggest you take a look at the existing topics on this subject, and you'll see many conversations involving what I said above.

When you have more specific questions, we'd be glad to help you out.

Use the search button. People are tired of answering the same question over and over. SEARCH!

hey guys thanks a lot for the help and yea im really started to understand this now. ive been talking with a guy on how to do it and hes been very very helpful. Sorry i didnt search the forums first, im new here and was unaware that there were so many people who know how to do it. i only thought there was two lol. anyways thanks a lot guys!