Question about a cart

shiny · Post by **shiny** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 12:05 pm

Hi,

I've got a famiclone cart from a flea market which seems to be 72-in-one game, with many interesting titles (b-wings, clu clu land, ice climber) none of which appears in the menu twice (quite rare for a multicart). However, no matter which game I choose I get dumped at the title screen again.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was a fake cart with just a list of titles and no actual game inside, but the cart itself looks way too expensive to produce for a simple fake. Too much effort, if you understand me. Take a look yourself:

http://i36.tinypic.com/2na89sh.jpg
http://i36.tinypic.com/w8n885.jpg

So, what do you think? Still possibly a fake, or rather contact/general famiclone issues? It's a bit rusty too.

2600 · Post by **2600** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 12:11 pm

There is a capacitor broken off on the right next to the diode and possibly 2 more in the middle of the board.

shiny · Post by **shiny** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 12:18 pm

Damn you're right! But how to figure out what the capacitance was?

Post by **Memblers** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 1:35 pm

.1uF, the capacitor should be marked '104'. These are bypass capacitors to smooth out (or rather, allow for) spikes in the power supply local to each chip.

shiny · Post by **shiny** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 3:03 pm

I'm happy to report that single 0.1uF capacitor on the right side fixed the cart completely. In a strange coincidence, I had plenty of those from an old famiclone I desoldered a few months ago

It works great, and it's the single greatest multi game cart I've seen. It actually has 76 games, and contains all the great hits of the earlier Famicom era.

Thank you very much for the help!

Post by **tepples** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 4:18 pm

A 76-in-1 probably has a 2048 KiB ROM: 24 KiB (size of NROM-128 game) * 76 = 1824 KiB, rounded up to a power of two.
Now assume that some games are bigger (NROM-256 games like SMB1 are 16 KiB bigger than NROM-128) and all games are about 2 to 3 KiB smaller (CHR compression), and it looks entirely reasonable.