Midnight Nintendo Hackery

[thesaxmachine]

Tim found his old Nintendo, and we spent the night trying to get it to work.

[SolTurboLove]

lol...

what was wrong with it?

[thesaxmachine]

The cartridge slot was really loose. Had to open it up to make the contacts grab the cart better.

[Bergo]

Hooray Nintendo!

[JamesCooper]

Yeah, that's a common problem. If you want, you can buy new edge connectors for them for very cheap. I've replaced them for a friend (a NES collector) and they work amazingly well; you don't even have to push the game down to get it to work! The best way to make sure they keep working is to use contact cleaner on the cartridges before inserting them; you'd be amazed at what comes off of 25 year old game cartridges.

[Odemia]

James: yup I was looking at getting some new pins only about $10.

Duck hunt almost makes me not want to get rid of the CRT (NES gun doesn't work on LCD, no raster to pick up).

Now I want to get some Ciclone chips and make a sd and/or usb equipped cartridges. We should do a retro gaming night or some time. Steal Brians MAME machine (it is even on wheels) and setup some consoles (nothing above 16 bits).

[JamesCooper]

I considered making an SD-based NES cart at one time, but upon further research, I found out it's incredibly hard because of the mappers. The game expects a mapper to exist -- it even writes to the thing. You can make your own mapper with something like a microcontroller or FPGA, but some mappers are fiendishly difficult to emulate and they can require tapping into every pin on the connector. RetroZone makes the PowerPak, which uses CompactFlash with an FPGA, but it's kind of expensive at $135 USD. I read a story from the guy who designed it and he had many things to say about the difficulty of building one.

However, it's much simpler to make a single game. You can hack up an old game (reusing the mappers) and replace the ROMs with EEPROMs, if you have access to a programmer. I was hoping to do this and use a microcontroller on-board to reprogram the cartridge over USB, but I found it ridiculously difficult to get info about how to program the EEPROMs; apparently every manufacturer has their own proprietary protocols which the programmer manufacturers have to pay for.

At the end of the day, I'd recommend putting a socket on an existing board and using a real EEPROM programmer if you just want to get a game up and running. For anything else, the PowerPak is probably the way to go; even for the price, it looks to be cheaper than doing it yourself.