Reorganize documentation on boards and ROM pinouts

[Bregalad]

Currently the doccumentation on the pinouts is a big mess.
I think we should determine a way how to organize things.

Currently there is one wiki page per mapper plus one wiki page per board, exept non-Nintendo mappers, and Nintendo mappers who only have one board, which have just one page. This leads to info being present on multiple pages, which can get redundant.

The pinouts for the ROM is almost the same for all Nintendo boards, except a few (such as SL1ROM) which have non-Nintendo standard pinout. (I don't talk about Nintendo's ROMs of size >64k having a non-standard pinout, I talk about the pinouts being different from other Nintendo carts).

So maybe a few pages should be merged, and info about pinouts should be centralized somewhere. (because put it in many pages once per board to have the same info over and over again isn't optimal).
Any ideas are welcome.

[blargg]

It makes sense in some ways to have a page for the mapper chip, and then one for each PCB that uses it. The main question is who the audience(s) are, and then find a set of pages that best serve them. A programmer wants to know the mapper registers, and the effects. He doesn't care about hardware. He might care about capabilities if he's selecting a board, but he still doesn't care about pinouts or anything. Someone modifying a cartridge wants to know all the details, but may not care about mapper registers, just what pins of the mapper chip have what function.

It seems that the following would meet people's needs, without there being too many pages:

* Tutorial describing how to use a mapper, with code examples. This doesn't cover every detail, just the main uses. This gives an overview of the mapper.
* Reference describing full behavior of mapper registers. Maybe a pinout.
* Reference page(s) for PCB(s) using mapper. If the PCBs are similar, they can all go on one page, with the commonalities described first. The only coverage of the mapper is how it's connected; mapper registers aren't covered.

I just looked at MMC1 and there are dozens of pages for each PCB. If they were all described on a page, the commonalities could be covered there. As it is now, it's hard to figure out what they have in common. All the pages make it harder to edit commonalities, because of the duplication.

That's my take, though haven't studied the Wiki in detail. The MMC1 page seems reasonable.

[Bregalad]

Well we should definitely work in order to reduce the # of different pages, but how ?

Even as a programmer you might be somewhat interested to the boards. For example if I'd like to have a MMC1 cart with 4-screen mirroring, the bord list will show me that no game was ever made with that configuration, although it's technically very possible. So maybe you'd avoid to use that.

The same applies to UNROM with 8kb CHR-ROM, having mapper 3 with 512 kb of CHR-ROM, SRAM + Battery, etc.... All those things are very possible in iNES, very possible in hardware, but were never made by Nintendo. Now if you were a developper back then maybe Nintendo would have made a board supporting that for you... and give it more funky names. There is no way to know what was supported and what wasn't.

Also not only the same mapper can be present on many boards (MMC1, MMC3, etc...), the same board can be multiple mapper (UNROM can be mapper 2 or 180, CNROM can be mapper 3 or 185), and for the worst the same mapping chip can lead to variants, such as TQROM and TLSROM (mappers 118/119).

For this reason maybe more accent should be made on the mappers on the programming side (i.e. as they are in iNES), but of course with pages with existing Nintendo boards, and their pinouts.
I already know people will hurl at me that iNES is crap, that boards should have used instead etc... But the same board can lead to completely different things (such as UNROM with a 74HC08), but a completely different board can lead to the exact same thing (you don't care if you are using SLROM, SLRROM, a pirate MMC1 clone or wathever).
Also this "board" approach falls flat for non Nintendo made carts.

[tepples]

Maybe boards that are very similar in function and have the same ROM pinouts should be combined. For example, UOROM is just the oversize version of UNROM, and AOROM is the oversize version of AMROM and ANROM. SUROM is the oversize version of SNROM (modulo some PRG RAM disable weirdness), and SGROM is the same as SNROM with no PRG RAM chip. There are a bunch of MMC1 boards whose only difference is what size of PRG ROM and CHR ROM they can take. To take it one step further, CNROM (mapper 3 version) and MHROM are strict subsets of GNROM and could go on the same page.

[Bregalad]

Yeah exactly. How the wiki currently is organized is in fact pretty good, there is just soo much pages.

So I'd say as a general rule, all boards with the same subset (SxROM, AxROM, etc...) should have only one page, which briefly lists each boards in the subset (as it's currently already the case), and then have a more detailed in-depth look at the various boards.

The exeption to this would be boards which actually have a different iNES mapper numbers, such as CPROM not being on the same page as CNROM, and TxSROM, TQROM being both on a distinct page from the others TxROM boards.

Information for special cases that applies to one board, but that is in the same iNES mappers (such as SOROM, SUROM) should be present on the main mapper page and/or on the general purpose board page (SxROM in this case).

Or maybe we should go a step further and merge the MMC1 page and SxROM page (similar for other mappers) ?

[tepples]

So I'd say as a general rule, all boards with the same subset (SxROM, AxROM, etc...) should have only one page, which briefly lists each boards in the subset (as it's currently already the case), and then have a more detailed in-depth look at the various boards.

I envision another exception: separate pages for boards in CHR ROM configuration vs. CHR RAM configuration, as the differences have implications for what the CHR bank registers do. To me, SGROM is as different from SLROM as BNROM is from the NINA-001 board that shares its mapper number or the VRC2 variants are from each other. This would result in three board pages, corresponding to NES-EVENT, SNROM (also covering SGROM, SUROM, SOROM, SXROM), and SKROM (covering everything else).

[Bregalad]

Well I don't know.... In MMC1's case there is effictively quite a difference, but is it really worth spreading the info on two pages ? Just add a paragraph to the main MMC1 page for board that have CHR-RAM and that use CHR-ROM higher swapping lines to other use (remember, the lower adress line STILL switch CHR-RAM banks, and Romancia (J) uses this).

For Konami mappers I think there is only one page for all "versions" of the same VRC mapper and it's fine as it. It's really just a board with literally two wires exchanged, and this was made on the only purpose to make life of hackers harder.

For mapper 34 it's an entirely different thing, it's two independent mappers attributed to the same iNES mapper (this was likely done by error).

Since it's impossible for me to delete pages, maybe a moderator should go away, and delete all individual board pages that have no relevant info. (most of the info on those pages is already present elsewhere). All relevant info should then be moved either below the board list of the corresponding board list, or on the mapper page, depending if tihs info is more relevant in hardware or in software.

Of course if there is objections I'm fine for leaving it as-it too. I'd just like people to tell them what they find would be better.

[Bregalad]

Because there were no apparent opposition, I went away and did the appropriate modifications to reduce the # of pages with similar information on it. Now there is one page per board group, or per board if there is only one board in a group, one page per chip, and one page per iNES mapper.

Pages about specific boards are still present, as I don't have the ability to delete them. However I made sure all the info on them was moved somewhere else, and I guess I modified all wikilinks to them, so I request the following pages are deleted :

- SAROM
- SBROM
- SCROM
- SEROM
- SFROM
- SGROM
- SHROM
- SJROM
- SKROM
- SLROM
- SL1ROM
- SMROM
- SNROM
- SOROM
- SUROM
- SXROM
- TEROM
- TFROM
- TGROM
- TKROM
- TLROM
- TNROM
- TQROM
- TR1ROM
- TSROM
- TVROM
- EKROM
- ELROM
- ETROM
- EWROM
- UNROM
- AMROM
- ANROM
- AN1ROM
- AOROM

In addition the following changes should be made :
- BNROM deleted, BxROM renamed BNROM and BxROM redirects to BNROM (only member of the family)

- HxROM deleted and redirectly to HKROM (only member of the family)

I'd also like to add information about the ROM pinouts in the table at the start of the family pages, but I lack ideas how to do this.

EDIT :
- GNROM
- MHROM
- FJROM
- FKROM
- PNROM
- PEEOROM

should be deleted as well.

[tepples]

Thank you for the merge. I've finished the SxROM, UxROM, and GxROM series by changing them to redirects, so that one can still type SLROM into the search box and head straight to the merged page. AxROM, PxROM, TxROM, FxROM, and ExROM come later, once I have more time. (It's near bedtime in my time zone.)

As for BxROM, "flipping" a redirect between two pages if both pages have history can only be done by admin. Because the wiki uses role accounts, I'll do it next time I'm at the machine with saved admin credentials.

[Bregalad]

Great work, thank you.

[Bregalad]

This page should be deleted/redirected, as the so called "special" Konami pinouts are in fact totally normal JEDEC EPROMs pinout, therefore the article has no point exept to confuse people.

Is the article about the mask ROMs pinout satisfying the way I re-arranged it ? Also non-standard pinouts for the following boards should be added (I don't have carts of such boards to check them ) :
- SROM
- RROM
- SLxROM
- SMROM
- TLxROM

[tepples]

Moved because I agree that JEDEC pinout is anything but Konami-specific.

[Bregalad]

Great, but now we have 3 pages covering the same topic :
http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Eprom_pinout
http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/JEDEC_pinout
http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Mask_rom_pinout

Only one of them should be kept IMO. (the Mask_rom_pinout) the others should redirect to it. However, I agree that "my" version of Mask_rom_pinout is far from perfect.
I'd like to have more diagrams stands horizontally in a line but I'm unsusre how to do it in wiki syntax.

[tepples]

To take two things and put them in a line:

{|
|

something

|

something

|}

[Bregalad]

OK I've done more reworking on the mask ROM pinout page. Now it's pretty much like I wanted it to be.
Now it would be great if those :
http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Eprom_pinout
http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/JEDEC_pinout

would redirect to this :
http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Mask_rom_pinout