Current status of Mario Adventure on PowerPak?

infiniteneslives · Post by **infiniteneslives** » Tue Aug 09, 2011 2:37 am

marvelus10 wrote: It would make senseif you wanted to take advantage of the save feature.

I'm not holding my breath for anything to make sense with this one based on what we've concluded thus far. But yeah i'd like to see if it works on the TKROM.

It's highly likely though that the WRAM timing wasn't exactly the same between the TKROM and TSROM boards you had before you went to slow RAM. So hopefully that's the only reason why.

If it doesn't work let me know. I've traced through, and have a full schematic for TSROM and could do the same for TKROM. I don't know of any actual differences except battery backing. But if there are differences I'll figure out how to convert the TKROM to a TSROM with battery back.

Post by **tepples** » Tue Aug 09, 2011 7:06 am

3gengames wrote:So is it possible the game shoves sound samples into the WRAM?

Very few mappers can map RAM into CPU $C000-$FFF1, the usable range that channel 5 can address. I've never seen the MMC3 do that.*

* Except in the case of a RAM-based copier that I own, which doesn't really count because the RAM used for PRG ROM data is write-protected by the time the game starts.

3gengames · Post by **3gengames** » Tue Aug 09, 2011 7:10 am

Oh, okay. I've never done sound, let alone DPCM or whatever it is, so I didn't know you had to use the last 16K [8K?] of space.

marvelus10 · Post by **marvelus10** » Fri Aug 12, 2011 6:41 pm

I can confirm that this will work on a NES-TKROM-01 board with MMC3B chip and transplanted faster WRAM.
Save progress works automatically and can be erased by Select+Up choose A or B.

infiniteneslives · Post by **infiniteneslives** » Fri Aug 12, 2011 8:09 pm

marvelus10 wrote:I can confirm that this will work on a NES-TKROM-01 board with MMC3B chip and transplanted faster WRAM.
Save progress works automatically and can be erased by Select+Up choose A or B.

Faster? Do you mean slower? the 10L chips already in the cart are 100nsec, and from what I understand it's the 15L sram you need to get it to work (150nsec)

3gengames · Post by **3gengames** » Fri Aug 12, 2011 8:24 pm

Did you try it with the RAM on cart? What were your "symptoms?"

marvelus10 · Post by **marvelus10** » Fri Aug 12, 2011 8:45 pm

3gengames wrote:Did you try it with the RAM on cart? What were your "symptoms?"

Black screen with accelerated messed up sound.

marvelus10 · Post by **marvelus10** » Mon Aug 15, 2011 10:35 am

Wouldn't this be just a simple mapper hack to adjust the timing for the WRAM, then changing the info in the header to match the mapper hack so the PowerPak would recognise it?

You could rename it MAD-ROM-01 in the header then name your hacked TK-ROM accordingly.

Edit second thought:
Why if this works on emulators does it not work on the PowerPak? I thought the PowerPak was the same in the fact its was just a mapper emulator running on real hardware.

I assume I'm obviously wrong here because we would have 100% compatibility, seen as most emulators can run all Mappers.

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Mon Aug 15, 2011 11:15 am

Pad the rom before testing it on the powerpak.

3gengames · Post by **3gengames** » Mon Aug 15, 2011 11:22 am

Well if somebody knew what timing problems it had somebody could fix it.

And iNES doesn't have mapper names inside the header, only the values, but I'm sure you could assign it your own mapper for testing.

And does the powerpak have the same black screen accelerated sound problem or does it not play at all? I dunno, I guess padding it would help though.

lordloss · Post by **lordloss** » Sun Oct 23, 2011 8:05 pm

So where might I find a sony 15L SRAM to modify TSROM board to play Mario Adventure?

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Sun Oct 23, 2011 8:11 pm

I don't think any modification is needed, you just need to make sure the initial content of the RAM isn't bad.

lordloss · Post by **lordloss** » Sun Oct 23, 2011 8:22 pm

How do you go about doing that?

thefox · Post by **thefox** » Mon Oct 24, 2011 2:37 am

1) You can get a different SRAM chip, which initializes the memory to 0 (which is probably what all these "faster" RAM chips did)
2) Or you can grab an IPS patch here that should fix the RAM initialization issue. Further on in the same thread there's another patch that can be directly applied to SMB3 ROM.