nesdev.org

I've been using a Super Mario Bros. cart for testing my own roms on the NES. I was wondering what other original carts can be used for this purpose?

Thanks again,
T

all of them, which game or homwbrew will run depends on which mapper the games require. Oviousley you would need a cartrige that matches the memory mapper type required by the software

Thanks.

I'm not using any mem mapping in my roms. Which carts don't use mem mapping?

T

Just use NROM. It's the easiest to program for & you can get them just about anywhere. Pull any SMB or Duck Hunt (wouldn't go w/ SMB/Duck Hunt though, higher chance of blobbed ROM's) cart & desolder the ROMs.

i use UNROM cart for my nesasm demos. Why unrom? Because i like programming using NROM with VRAM (32kb + VRAM)

My 32kb+VRAM dev-cart:)

atari2600a wrote:Just use NROM. It's the easiest to program for & you can get them just about anywhere. Pull any SMB or Duck Hunt (wouldn't go w/ SMB/Duck Hunt though, higher chance of blobbed ROM's) cart & desolder the ROMs.

Thanks. Yeah, I've been using SMB.

*Been wondering what other carts are like SMB?

Duck Hunt?

Ok, thanks again.

T

Famicom too, very nice looking. Though I'm not a huge fan of CHR-RAM, though it really depends on the project if I'd prefer RAM or ROM. Mainly I don't like CHR-RAM as you have no options for banking, and there is no DMA to VRAM like on SNES.

If you want something nice looking and designed for EPROM or Flash ROMs you should get a reproduction board from http://www.retrousb.com

If you have to use a real game please make sure it sucks and is common. You wouldn't want to destroy a decent or rare game.

"If you have to use a real game please make sure it sucks and is common. You wouldn't want to destroy a decent or rare game."

I hear what you're saying. I don't like the idea of destroying carts.

If I get good at de-soldering, I really want to save each rom I remove.

I forgot to mention I'm not using any video, just experimenting with sound right now (beginner). I don't need CHR.

Thanks again!

T

MottZilla wrote:I'm not a huge fan of CHR-RAM, though it really depends on the project if I'd prefer RAM or ROM. Mainly I don't like CHR-RAM as you have no options for banking, and there is no DMA to VRAM like on SNES.

Lately, I'm starting to prefer CHR RAM. On NTSC, without using sprite 0 or an IRQ to end rendering early, you can blast 160 bytes to VRAM every frame in a 16x unrolled loop and still have time to blast OAM. (At least it works in Nintendulator and Nestopia.) That can be useful for double-buffering each sprite's next frame of animation, up to 10 tiles at a time. If you want to do something like the background tile animation seen in SMB2 and SMB3, you'll need a mapper capable of swapping 2 KiB or smaller CHR banks, and that's expensive to reproduce because you can't just use the CPLD MMC1 clone.

MottZilla wrote:If you have to use a real game please make sure it sucks and is common.

In that case, I've been told that UNROM (common as dirt) or BNROM (Deadly Towers) makes a good CHR RAM devcart. If you can't find those, you can put together a complete ReproPak from parts for under $20.

sdm wrote:i use UNROM cart for my nesasm demos. Why unrom? Because i like programming using NROM with VRAM (32kb + VRAM)

My 32kb+VRAM dev-cart:)

Cools pics, thanks.

T

MottZilla wrote:Famicom too, very nice looking. Though I'm not a huge fan of CHR-RAM, though it really depends on the project if I'd prefer RAM or ROM. Mainly I don't like CHR-RAM as you have no options for banking, and there is no DMA to VRAM like on SNES.

If you want something nice looking and designed for EPROM or Flash ROMs you should get a reproduction board from http://www.retrousb.com

If you have to use a real game please make sure it sucks and is common. You wouldn't want to destroy a decent or rare game.

You don't want to destroy any game.

No, not at all. I would preserve the roms and recycle if I do take that route.

BTW, I've seen your icon pic before on Long Island Oddities, a website for paranormal, ufo, etc. stuff on Long Island. Anyway, I assumed it was someone's real photo. ( I mean I thought it was the poster's real photo.)

Eh, I'm drunk. Don't pay any attention to me... (((hic up))0

electro wrote:*Been wondering what other carts are like SMB?

Just use this document for your board-checking needs. SMB uses an NROM board, as you can see in the list. You can search for other NROM games in there.

The thing with NROM though is that there are 2 version, NROM-128 and NROM-256, one can hold 16KB of PRG ROM while the other holds 32KB. SMB uses 32KB, so it wouldn't be compatible with a NROM-128 board without modifications. To find out the size of a particular game, just download it after you have found it in the list and check the size of the PRG-ROM (FCEU and Nestopia can tell you that).

The thing with NROM though is that there are 2 version, NROM-128 and NROM-256, one can hold 16KB of PRG ROM while the other holds 32KB. SMB uses 32KB, so it wouldn't be compatible with a NROM-128 board without modifications. To find out the size of a particular game, just download it after you have found it in the list and check the size of the PRG-ROM (FCEU and Nestopia can tell you that).

There is a lot of overdump arround, and it is really easy to transform NROM-128 to NROM-256 and vice-verse, just deal with the A14 pin which should be VCC in the first case, and A14 in the second (duh).

Yeah, but people who are getting started with devcarts get scared just from hearing the word "rewiring". I know I did.

When I made my first UNROM cart, someone told me how easy it would be to convert it to UOROM, but it sounded so complicated back then, because I didn't understand shit. A while later I ended up doing the UOROM convertion, and only later I realized I was afraid of it before (I didn't even remember someone had suggest it to me), because I was really getting the hang of it.

So I felt like I should mention how he'd be able to get the exact type of cart he wants, without worrying about rewiring, even if it is dead simple.