Questions About the PowerPak

[djcouchycouch]

I'm real interested in ordering a PowerPak, but from the product page, I saw:

"There may still be some sprite related graphics glitches on some NES systems."

In which cases do the glitches occur?
On which systems?


Also,
how often does the mappers file get updated?
Is it pretty stable so far for most games?

[qbradq]

All I know for sure is that it does not work on most clone systems, which is why I never got one. Well, that an the fact that Compact Flash is a major for inconvenience me.

[djcouchycouch]

I've got an original NES, so that shouldn't be a problem.

The description gives the impression that it might have glitches for even original hardware.

[tepples]

As I understand it, the sprite glitch comes from early units that had noise issues related to bus capacitance. Later units used resistors on certain data lines, which fixed OAM DMA.

But this notice caused me a lot of angst when I ran into a problem with sprite flicker a couple years ago when I was working on LJ65. I had someone try it with an EPROM programmer, and it turned out to be not the PowerPak's fault at all but a newly discovered glitch in the PPU's OAM refresh.

[tokumaru]

AFAIK, the sprite glitches were fixed for good. I bought one of the early carts and indeed there were sprite issues, but after modding it I have never seen such problems again. The current carts already come with the fix, and I have never heard of anyone complaining about sprite corruption.

[MottZilla]

Also,
how often does the mappers file get updated?
Is it pretty stable so far for most games?

Not very often. It's very stable for all games that work. It's not some unsound hardware, it works very well. But you need a real NES console.