Secret of Mana Board Varient

[MichaeltheGreat]

I had lost my gamebit screwdrivers. When I finally got new bits, it had been quite a while since I had had any. I kinda went cart opening crazy. One odditied I noticed was that I have two secret of mana boards. Take a look:

http://img122.imageshack.us/img122/9158/smana9dn.jpg

I'm sure the one board has a chip with twice the capacity of the two smaller chips on the other board. I just found it interesting because I also remember people saying that mana is very buggy but other people saying it's not buggy. They had to make new chips to move to the new board. I wonder if they updated the code also? Does anyone know anything about different versions of secret of mana?

[phreak97]

suprisingly, it looks like the one with the two ic's is the second revision. maybe it didnt run happily on one? if you look at the model numbers on the boards, one has a 1 at the beginning, and the other has a 2, i'll bet that's the revision number.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Wow, I am surprised. I didn't notice that, but I'm noticing that the back imprint is higher on the two chip board also (35 verses 01 for the other one). I know in NES the imprint is the what printing the label comes from. Maybe the smaller chips dropped significantly. I wish I had a way to dump snes games other than taking the roms off and putting them in my eprom programmer. Not knowing much about the snes world, how hard are dumpers to come by?

[phreak97]

theyre relatively common.. i have two and been offered a third. the third was very cheap cos it didnt work, but probably needs a new floppy drive or other component.
youre looking for a game doctor sf# (# = whatever number) or something. the game doctor sf7 is the best, since it links directly to a pc and you dont have to bother with floppy disks, it is also compatable with a cd-rom drive. i have an sf3 and some other one by a different company which isnt actually mine. make sure whatever you get has 64Mbit internal memory. otherwise you wont be able to dump anything higher than what it supports. (i think 64Mbit is the highest, research it).
also if you get one which doesnt link to a pc, like mine doesnt, youll end up with a rom spanning multiple floppy disks (up to four), and the joining program is dos based (it may or may not work under xp, i was lucky and it did). the rom will work fine as multiple parts though.. it's just impractical in my opinion unless youre planning to play it again on the copier.
also things like the superfx games wont work on the copiers made before they were released, but you may be able to dump them still, i dont know, i can try if you want, it's no problem:)

If you get one, PM me, they suck to use for a first timer, theres little documentation on the net, i didnt even get into the menu for about a week after i got it. (once you know that though theyre easy enough), also theres no file extension so to speak on the sf series, it's all in SF##### format, which is what the majority of the roms our there are in anyway, just renamed to .smc

problem is, you wont find them on ebay cos theyre "used for illegal activities" though one still pops up every now and again.
post on buy/sell here, someones bound to have one for sale.. most people dont realize theyre dumpers though. their main purpose is to play roms on a real snes.

damnit, ok, i'm late for tafe and i blame you:P

[ZidanaX]

Actually, I think those are the same revisions. See the "SNS-K2-0" code? The last number tells you what the ROM revision is. 0 means first ROM revision, 1 means second revision, and so on. Another way to tell the revision number is to look at the imprint on the back label of the cartridge. If there is a letter after the two-digit number, it is a revision other than the first one. For example, "23B" would be a second revision.

Michaelthegreat, you can go to http://www.tototek.com for an SNES copier. If you need help after getting the copier, you can go to the forums at Cherryroms (http://forums.cherryroms.com/) -- they have a dedicated copier forum.

[MichaeltheGreat]

So snes carts have the imprinted a's just like the nes carts! That's really cool to know. I apreciate the dumper link. Do any of you have or use the tototek stuff? Are they compatable with everything?

I will research more, but digitpress is certainly part of my research! I have tried to search this forum for snes dumper stuff. I will look at cherryroms. Havent' been there in a while. Thank you for info!

Does anyone know if board varients like this are somewhat common in the snes world? I know they're pretty rare in the nes world...

[blackpanther]

Yep tototek have good copiers at good prices, the one to
get is the game doctor sf7 and if theres any in stock
get the Blue cart adaptor (DSP).

I've bought 10-20 items off tototek and never had a problem.

Also im a big fan of wild cards which maybe you should look into.

As zidanax stated cherryroms is a great place to find out
about copiers and what they can do.

You should look at these aswell

http://www.robwebb.clara.co.uk/backup/

and

http://www.emucamp.com/red/SNES/index.shtml