NES CART BURNER HELP!!!

[quick quick the bomb]

does anyone know where i can get an nes cart burner and blank carts? i'm working on turning me nintendo into a full on synthesizer and i need a cart burner, any help would be great.

[MarioAllStar2600]

Im not sure. I have heard that it's a VERY difficult process. SOmeone said most people will only burn you a cart for alot of money. Good luck with finding your equipment, and more luck for getting everythign working right. ;)

[Raccoon Lad]

WHat you need is an EPROM burner, and enough research to figure out which carts you could use for your project, seeing as there were so many different board types for the NES.

[AlanD]

A 'cart burner and blank carts' as far as I know do not exist. If you want to burn carts you must determine what mapper you need to have on the cart. You then find a donor cart that has that mapper and pull the chips off it. Burn new chips in an eprom burner then solder in the new chips making whatever adjustments need to be made to the wiring with jumpers and such. I have made about 50 carts like that including a few Drac's Night Out and test carts. Got out of doing it is because a) it is time-consuming and a pain at times and b) people think I should give them away for cheap when it takes a minimum of 3-4 hours and $30 per cart in materials.

So the long and short of it is you can make Nintendo carts but you need an eprom burner and a little technical knowledge of the eproms and cartridge format. Hope that helps but feel free to PM me if you have more questions.
Alan

[Goblin]

To expand on what Alan said, before some else brings it up: The process cannot be equated to making a 2600 cartridge, because in addition to a board with the correct mapper chip the NES boards also contain the lockout chip. This is why you can't simply make new boards as was done for other systems, and be off and running. This is one reason why I think the NES homebrew development is not as far along as that for other systems.

I've also made a few carts, and I agree on the difficulty of it, it's not too fun. Of the last 2 I made, the first worked instantly. The second gave me some jumbled characters, and I spent about 4 hours reworking it and trying to debug it. I finally gave up figuring I just damaged the donor initially and no matter what I try now it's gone.

If there is something you want on cartridge I recommend you ask one of the dozen or so on the boards with the knowledge and be prepared to trade or pay big.

[Xipe]

I have wondered this for a good while, i dont have the knowledge to figure it out yet.
Would it be possible to "emulate" a NES cart, using a flesh memory to store data, and emulate the rest of the cart using a microcontroller?

[Goblin]

Would it be possible to "emulate" a NES cart, using a flesh memory to store data, and emulate the rest of the cart using a pic processor?

It should be possible, but I don't know that you would want a PIC, AVR, or other microcontroller for the job. I think the mapper is just a logic device, so a CPLD could replace it rather easily. The CPLD would then be reprogrammed from the upload program for the correct mapper configuration, at the same time you upload the program image (both PRG and CHR) into either the flash or eeprom. The largest unknown to the whole project is probably documenting and reverse engineering each mapper chip.

[TRM]

Can anyone recommend a good Eprom/Eeprom programmer which one could use for the job?

Thanks.

[DogP]

I've used a few, and my favorite (and cheapest) is the Willem. It seems to support the most chips out of any, and the technical support is great (a public message board that the creator actually posts on, along with other users). The site is www.willem.org .

DogP

[MrKitt]

Would it be possible to "emulate" a NES cart, using a flesh memory to store data, and emulate the rest of the cart using a pic processor?

the bigger problem is not the rom itself but the process of emulating the MMC chips (memory management chip) since the NES is originaly designed for maximum 48k roms but thanks to mmc chips games exist up to 1 mb.
in short the bigger memory needed the larger microprocessor is needed (pins speaking) hence the mmc chips are patented they are kinda hard to get datasheets for only open information is spekulations from people who wrote nes emulators and hacked the mmc chips using software.

other notes on this subject ive been working on a universal cartidge project for the nes since summer 2002 (got discontinued due to budget issues, and space) but im going back on it once i get some more time.. most of the stuff are alpha prototypes still. (working on a static cart with a proto lowlevel mmc emulator atm, with some smaller mappers)