NROM larger than 32K?

Kasumi · Post by **Kasumi** » Sun May 27, 2012 7:29 pm

Bregalad wrote:OK so a wiki page about something that doesn't even exist other than in the imagination of a few people has been made ?

Doesn't someone typically have to think up (or... imagine) hardware before it can exist?

MottZilla · Post by **MottZilla** » Sun May 27, 2012 7:59 pm

No one should get upset over it. If it proves its worth it will survive, if it doesn't it won't. Pretty simple.

3gengames · Post by **3gengames** » Sun May 27, 2012 8:11 pm

MottZilla wrote:No one should get upset over it. If it proves its worth it will survive, if it doesn't it won't. Pretty simple.

Either way a submapper number may or may not be wasted though, weather it fails or not.

MottZilla · Post by **MottZilla** » Sun May 27, 2012 8:40 pm

Why does it need a sub mapper? Seems pretty straight forward to detect a NROM iNES file that has 3 PRG pages as being whatever we want to call this.

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Sun May 27, 2012 8:43 pm

Nice bonus: Some FDS games can be converted to 48k NROM very easily, instead of hacking them to copy code to 6000-7FFF.

infiniteneslives · Post by **infiniteneslives** » Sun May 27, 2012 8:56 pm

3gengames wrote:
MottZilla wrote:No one should get upset over it. If it proves its worth it will survive, if it doesn't it won't. Pretty simple.
Either way a submapper number may or may not be wasted though, weather it fails or not.

Yes in fact it seems we've been wasting odd bank numbers all along! It's terrible that we're now wasting them by making use of them.

Shiru · Post by **Shiru** » Sun May 27, 2012 9:16 pm

I already mentioned it somewhere in the thread, there is yet another use for extended NROM besides homebrews and FDS hacks - hacks of popular NROM games such as Battle City. In fact, author of the Binary City optimized some code to get extra room for new features, and stopped to add stuff into the game when he ran out of room completely. With extended NROM such project would have a chance to be made faster and be even larger.

infiniteneslives · Post by **infiniteneslives** » Sun May 27, 2012 9:38 pm

You're right Shiru. This thing is too powerful. We should DESTROY it before it takes over the world.

80sFREAK · Post by **80sFREAK** » Sun May 27, 2012 9:41 pm

MottZilla wrote:No one should get upset over it. If it proves its worth it will survive, if it doesn't it won't. Pretty simple.

+1

What was the first purpose - get more room for code or get some sort emulator-protection?

infiniteneslives · Post by **infiniteneslives** » Sun May 27, 2012 9:48 pm

80sFREAK wrote:What was the first purpose - get more room for code or get some sort emulator-protection?

If you can't find the answer to that question in this thread I would imagine your question is impossible to answer.

Post by **Memblers** » Sun May 27, 2012 9:53 pm

I don't want to complain too much, but using a sub mapper makes sense to me. I thought that was part of the point of them, to prevent these cases where multiple mappers are lumped together as a single "mapper number", then you have to do hacky things to detect which type it is.

Not that it wouldn't work, or be any less usable, just seems like an unnecessary hack to use the ROM size instead of the mapper descriptor to describe the mapper.

infiniteneslives · Post by **infiniteneslives** » Sun May 27, 2012 10:33 pm

Well if nothing else at least your argument is valid Memblers. I kind of agree with you. Well if we can't make up our mind here we could always go back to Kevtris and just to with his decision. If we are going to consider changing it the time is now.

Bregalad · Post by **Bregalad** » Mon May 28, 2012 1:14 am

Well I don't think it's a "hack" to rely on the PRG size, is it ? At least that's how the distinction between NROM-128 and NROM-256 is currently done.

(oh and I haven't really given up for some reason...)

PS : And of course I'm not AGAINST the concept of extended NROM. It's just I think people make things a little bit silly, including myself, probably because people are way too much exited about mappers and crazy hardware quirks than about actual games.

Post by **Memblers** » Mon May 28, 2012 1:51 am

Bregalad wrote:Well I don't think it's a "hack" to rely on the PRG size, is it ? At least that's how the distinction between NROM-128 and NROM-256 is currently done.

That's true, but I would think that emulators would always treat a ROM as being mirrored (up to the max size supported by the board, which may be larger than the ROM used). Because it will do that anyways, I would think emulators wouldn't need to know the difference betwen NROM-128 and NROM-256.

Post by **tepples** » Mon May 28, 2012 4:37 am

Emulators SHOULD have been printing a diagnostic for ROM images with an invalid PRG ROM size. This change just makes a new PRG ROM size valid.