nesdev.org

To provide a another view from the support complaints:

I've only ever had two support questions (one email), but he (bunnyboy/retrousb) responded in three hours.

MottZilla wrote:The weakest link is the worksmanship then of the cartridge hacker. And sorry but anytime you are using a bunch of wires to hookup the rom chip that is never going to be as good as components that are properly soldered to the board.

Well nowadays you don't really use eproms which you need to connect one for one to the pcb anymore. You can't get more highquality

Tormenter wrote:Plus, you are using a circuit board that was designed in some dudes house

And when you're playing a homebrew NES game, you're playing a game that was "designed in some dudes house". You're starting to sound like Nintendo with its "home offices are not considered secure locations" spiel on WarioWorld.com. However:

MottZilla wrote:Quality of the built matters

My Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril cart occasionally has wavy interference lines across the screen that no Nintendo-licensed game has, and I have to move cables around to get them to go away.

I emailed him a bit ago and he responded same day with 2 questions about the powerpak. I ran out of money for it so I couldn't buy it but I know he answers emails.

Hias wrote:

MottZilla wrote:The weakest link is the worksmanship then of the cartridge hacker. And sorry but anytime you are using a bunch of wires to hookup the rom chip that is never going to be as good as components that are properly soldered to the board.

Well nowadays you don't really use eproms which you need to connect one for one to the pcb anymore. You can't get more highquality

What do you mean nowdays you don't have to? All I can think you are referring to is the 32bit flash to SNES DIP36 adapters. While those are a vast improvement over the mess of wires with EPROMs, it could still be better.

If you know how to solder, the wires are not going to fall or break off. So there is nothing to worry about. Most electronics have some sort of wires in it anyways.

Tormenter wrote:If you know how to solder, the wires are not going to fall or break off. So there is nothing to worry about. Most electronics have some sort of wires in it anyways.

The tension on the wire being bent not 100% right will break off a lot more of the time than any chip actually soldered to the board. Any wired up by hand product when you can have a chip on the board is a bad decision. And that 2nd sentence is just....wrong. Nobody uses wires stand-alone because they have a high rate of failure because 1 wire will probably fail before 32 pins on a PCB soldered right.

Right, if you wire and solder properly it should be pretty secure. However personally since I clean cartridges which involves taking them apart, it's not good if there is a big mess of wires connected to components. It's nicer if they are all soldered to the board.

All electronics have some sort of wires. To be honest Nintendo's boards aren't exceptionally well engineered, and a floating ROM chip on them puts them into the category of very poorly engineered. Not only is a floating ROM unsightly but you run into poor VDD decoupling, transmission line issues and signal delay. It might "work" for SNES, but these practices will not work in more critical or high-speed applications.

Now i'm being offered the cart for $77 shipped with my save on it from ziggy, Should I take that up? Its $1 more than the total of retrousb and it has my save on it... Should I forget my save?

Retrousb's version IMO will hold more value than a repro from a random guy. Plus it has a clear case and uses new parts. IMO it's a no brainer, retrousb version for sure.

I was thinking along those lines.

mgalekgolo wrote:Now i'm being offered the cart for $77 shipped with my save on it from ziggy, Should I take that up? Its $1 more than the total of retrousb and it has my save on it... Should I forget my save?

Question is, do you want a cart that looks authentic and good in your collection, or do you want a cart that is in a super fami shaped shell that is not like the other snes games?

Ziggy's game is famicom, but I broke my tabs long ago. He offered me ntsc for 15 more.

Let me guess, he sacrifices original Star Oceans the repro? What is the matter with everyone???