Zig's SNES Repros

[Ziggy]

That's true, but I don't believe you would NEED a battery for each SRAM chip. Although using one battery for every chip, if possible, would definitely drain the battery faster. All that being said, you could put only one game that uses SRAM on the cart. For example, NHL94, 95 (uses SRAM), Zombies Ate My Neighbors, etc.

The multi-cart idea is more useful when you're not trying to make use of your spare mask ROMs lol. For example, instead of using a donor cart to make a repro of the "Oh No! More Zombies At My Neighbors" hack you could just put it on a Zombies Ate My Neighbors cart. Piggyback the EPROM with the mask ROM (only on the backside of the board so it fits in the game case).

[bartre]

just gonna say ziggy, your work helped me get motivated to make a couple repros of my own.
fortunately for me, my skills didn't fail me, so i was able to make em with out scrapping a thing.
i do have a question for you though.
when it comes to genesis repros, what do i need to do to prepare the rom image for burning?

[16 Bitz]

Just to the guy above me. I assume that from your avatar your the guy trying to make that ff3 for nes right?

Kogami(or whatever his name is) plans are wrong regarding how to wire the chr ram.
So dont worry if you get a blue screen of scrambled graphics

[bartre]

yeah, that's me.
and if they're wrong, what do you say?

we're talking about this, right?

[16 Bitz]

Yeah, its all good except for pins 19 and 21. Its supposed to be pins 20 and 22

[Blasingame]

Truth be told, I HATE removing labels. It's such a pain in the ass. It's not even like it takes a long time, or is that hard, I just don't like doing it. Anyways, I usually use a box cutter blade at an almost 0 degree angle to start getting it off. I'll dunk a Q-Tip in some Goo-Gone and apply it to the label, then again use the blade to remove more of the label. Be careful using Goo-Gone though. I was using Goo-Gone Extreme which will actually eat away at the plastic, it's alright if you use just a little carefully. I'm not sure if just regular Goo-Gone (not Extreme) will eat up the plastic or not, I've never used it.

Chiming in a few posts to late. Ever think of try steam from a tea kettle? I use it to take off really tough stickers from PS2 game cases. It works great at heating up the adhesive and makes taking it off a sinch.

[Ziggy]

I haven't posted in this thread in a while. I've been keeping pretty busy. Anyway, I figured I'd show off a few things.

First off, something small. I'm getting sick of seeing the same old Star Ocean label on every NTSC-U repro cart. Not that it doesn't look good, but it's what every one uses. So, I decided to make a new one for myself.



Yeah, I know, it's nothing special. Just a crop of the manual. At least it's different though. I made another with a space background, but it was kinda boring. I'll use this one until I can come up with a better looking one.

So I've made a couple of Tales of Phantasia repros. Normally, when you're using two TSOP chips, you would need to get a ToP SFC cart to make the repro. Why? Cause it's pretty much the only cart that has two 36-pin mask ROMs on a HiROM cart with 64Kb of SRAM, which is what you need. As far as I can tell, no game that was released oustide of Japan has such a board inside. So, posted a page or two back, here's what two TSOP's looks like on the ToP SFC cart...



That above picture is not mine, that's Kogami's. Using the ToP SFC cart, everything work out great. But where the fun in that? I made a repro using the above method, so I had the two mask ROMs on hand. I decided, I wanted to see if I could get those mask ROMs working on another board.

I was able to find a NTSC-U game that was HiROM, 64Kb SRAM, and had two mask ROM sockets, but they were only 32-pin (and not 36-pin like what you need for the TSOPs). I wanted to get the mask ROMs from my ToP SFC to work on this cart, and I did!



Basically, all I really had to do was add the missing lines for the extra address pins of the mask ROM, and reroute a trace to the MAD-1 decoder, and it works. So, I decided to get two TSOPs on this board so I could have the English translation on the cart.

First obstacle was that the board was not designed for the larger 36-pin chips, so they don't want to fit. I had to cut the last two pins off the top adapter so it would clear the grove in the cart that holds the PCB in place, as seen below...



Of those last two pins, one was 5v and the other wasn't used. So it wasn't that big of a problem. The 5v pin ran to a via, so I was able to jump the 5v to it. Simple.



And there they are. I was able to get most of the wires hidden for a nice appearance (not that it matters much). Now after I put the two TSOPs on, I realized there was even less space than I though. One adapter has to overlap the other in order to fit. Took a little work, but I was able to get everything to fit nice. Even that little grove I had to cut out.







And the finished product...



Not that it's anything too special, but I'm kinda proud of this one. I'm going to be keeping it for myself.

Some other random repros I've made in the past months. Just figured I'd show them off...

[Hobie-wan]

Could you maybe shave a little off the meeting edges of the tsops? Carefully ride them on a file for a bit till you get right to the trace that runs the edge?

Looks good though.

[electrochip]

You can use a regular Hirom 36 pin cart as well. I split my ToP into 2 files, the first part of the rom I make 4MB and the second part 2MB. I solder all the pins on my TSOP adapter except the OE on both boards, leave that pin out or break it off (see the last pic to better understand what I mean). Solder the 4MB on top and the 2MB on bottom, then wire as shown. You have to lift pin 13 of the MAD-1 and solder A22 from the TSOP. You have to solder OE from the top board (4MB) to pin 1 on the MAD-1 and the OE from the bottom board (2MB) to pin 16 on the MAD-1. You can see in the last picture that the OE's are not soldered to the SNES PCB only the OE points on the TSOP adapters are soldered to the MAD-1.

[Ziggy]

Yes, I've thought about doing that as well. Good job. Curious though, why do you have A22 going to MAD-1 pin 13? I left A22 unconnected on mine. On my ToP SFC cart, A22 was actually connected to 5v.

On my donor cart above, I had to run cart connector 48 to MAD-1 pin 13 (just copying what my ToP cart had). Originally on the donor cart, cart connector 45 was going to MAD-1 13, but I needed that for A20.

Have you tried it without the A22 connection to see if it would work with out it?

Could you maybe shave a little off the meeting edges of the tsops? Carefully ride them on a file for a bit till you get right to the trace that runs the edge?

I was thinking about it, but I wouldn't want to. That one trace on the lower side isn't too close to the edge, but there's a trace on the upper half that's even closer to the edge. It's hard to see because it runs on the white line. It fits in the case fine though, so it's alright. I mainly just wanted to see if I could add the extra address lines with this repro.

Looks good though.

Thanks!