Question about SNES and NES game reproductions.

[VACRMH]

I know for alot of them you need a similar board, but when it comes to import games that are just translated... would the board from the import work?

I wouldn't mind have the translated game in the original cart myself

[InsaneDavid]

I'm guessing it would vary by repro group, I'd ask them directly. Even if you're doing to do it yourself they'd probably at least provide you with that information.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Hopefully the translation will still work on a real system. Not always the case.

If it's on a non nintendo board (more often happens in famicom than nes) then you're probably do need the import game to build the reproduction.

For most nintendo famicom/nes circuit boards, there are nes and famicom versions of the same boards. If you put your famicom translated on rom on the nes board it should work unless it needs famicom hardware that was different or not released in western world (no microphone on nes, 4score worked different, no extra sound support but i believe most if not all the extra sound boards were on non-nintendo circuit boads, etc). Especially if you don't want to ruin your expensive import, this is the way to go.

Of course, you still need to rewire the board since the rom pinouts and the eprom pinouts are different.

[noriaki_kakyouin]

Leon at nesreproductions.com has a decent list of (legal) ROMs and what boards they use.

[Terminusvitae]

Resurrecting an older topic here, since I have some questions.

I find reproductions fascinating for some reason, and this is coming from a semi-technophobe. One thing I've always wondered is why, if a ROM just nothing but nebulous information, radically different boards would be needed for the games. I can grasp the need for a different board when you're dealing with ROMs that were written for battery backup game saves, but I guess I'm not quite grasping why you'd need different buckets just to carry water.

Also, I've been reading the "required donor carts" lists at NESreproductions, and I'm curious as to why some boards seem to be capable of accepting so many more (and different) ROMs than others, and why still other boards hardly seem to be useful at all. What are the fundamentals that determine such things?

[Xander]

Alright, I'll give you an example for the NES:

We have:

Super Mario Bros. (release: 09/13/85)
Super Mario Bros. 3 (release: 10/23/88)
Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse (release: 12/22/89)

The years will help you understand it. Let's take SMB, in 85 they had a chip called MMC1 which was at a certain peak of technology and permitted to do a set kind of performance for the cart.

Then you jump to 88 and they had improved the MMC1 chip and created the MMC3, a more powerful chip capable of new things. In consequence you have SMB3, a definitely more powerful game than SMB1, the game is bigger, it looks better, the mechanics are more complex.

Then jump to 89 and you have a (rare) MMC5 in the Castlevania 3 game, for even more new possibilities and performance in your cart.

You see, you wouldn't be able to put a SMB3 on a SMB1 cart, because the SMB1 cart only have the MMC1 chip, it wouldn't be able to render SMB3. Same goes for not being able to put a Castlevania III on a SMB3.

On some cartridge based consoles (especially Nintendo brand), sometime the game creators will include more powerful chips on the cart's PCB to increase the performance of the game by handling a part of the processing that the console cannot do. A good example of this would be on the SNES with a game like Star Fox. Star Fox use the FX-chip, a chip specifically designed to do the semi-3D used in this game. If you wanted to do a repro of Star Fox, you would absolutely need a donor cart that includes the FX chip.

Now, as for why some games can have a whole bunch of donors in comparison to others is that some mappers/chips are more common than other. If we go back to the NES, the MMC3 chip was very widely used for a bunch of good games so the donors for this kind of game are not too hard to find.

There is obviously more differences between type of PCBs and their components than what I'm telling you right now, but I think that you can get the point with those examples.

[Terminusvitae]

Ahhh, okay. Now I understand. Thank you very much!