Hi Zach!
Here's everything you need in one handy file:
http://nesdev.parodius.com/fdsloadr.zip
It is a program and instructions for building the cable. As for diagrams, they aren't very good visually, imo (no pretty colored diagrams) but they are very complete.....just make sure you read the instructions very carefully. It seems apparent that Brad Taylor (the author) is a bit of a techie and almost talks right over the average dude's head, but just stays at eye level, heh heh. Lol, seriously, he did an excellent job though...no complaints here....the guy is a whiz.
What I did was take his "wiring diagram," which is really just a chart with pin numbers on it and drew on a seperate sheet some pictures of the plugs and connected the dots between them, ya know? I'm kind of a visual person, so I sorta needed that, but his text diagram is fine...you'll see what I mean when you read it. I had to read the whole doc like 10 times, but it all sank in just fine. Seroiously, any beginner in soldering can do it and the hardest part is just finding the components you need.
Here's what I needed:
-Solder
-Soldering iron
-Solder sucker---cuz you'll make a few mistakes, heh heh. Oh, and you'll need to aquire your connectors using one of these.
-SNES/GC/N64 female connecter (from a cable)
-SNES/GC/N64 Male connector (from an SNES/N64/GC)
-A "straight thru" DB25 Male to male parallel cable--cut this in half so you have one for each cable.
-A multimeter--use this to find what pin on the Parallel cable goes to what wire...can't not know that!
-A wire stripper...makes it easy to shave a bit of the plastic shield off of each wire.
-A wire clipper/snipper--well you don't need all the wires on the parallel cable! Snip them out of the way. May be necessary to snip away a bit of an unessecary mesh metal shielding in the parallel cable too.
-A hot glue gun--I used this to coat all the exposed fragile wires AFTER I tested the cable to be sure it worked.
-A non-WinXP/2000/Maybe NT machine to test it on. Yep, you have to boot your machine into pure dos mode....no way that I know around it.
-A drill--this will be used to sorta shave a couple inside corners of the SNES connector you'll take out of the SNES or GC or N64. Otherwise, you cold just shave a bit off the FDS RAM adapter cable, but that would be a shame to harm it, imo.
-An exacto knife or razor--Makes it easier to shave a couple inches of the big layer of plastic from the parallel cable. Also helps if the wires are too small in the parallel cable for the wire stripper to work with it. :-) In addition, you may use this to shave that nub off the top of the SNES connector to make it fit in the FDS unit.
Also, you will need these for the FDS-PC cable:
-Probably some superglue to put the two halves of the SNES connector back together (from that lik sang cable I was talking about). This might help to keep the AC port in place too...but hot glue might help for all this.
-An ac adapter that you can set to 5 volts (universal is probably fine)
-A connector to plug the ac adapter into that you can connect to the cable somehow.
These are needed because when using the FDS-PC cable, the FDS unit needs power it ususally receives from the RAM adapter (in addition to the batteries/ac adapter it also needs as usual), which receives its power from the Famicom. Since you can't have the RAM adapter AND the cable connected at the same time, its gotta get power from somewhere. Check out how this guy worked his power port right into his cable connector on this japanese doc to dub disks:
http://nesdev.parodius.com/fdscopy.zip
If you end up doing that (embedding the AC port into the plug), then I suppose you'd need the drill again, but you can really connect the power port anywhere (have it hanging off the connector or whatever). I personally don't recommend Brad Taylor's technique of using a power cable from inside your PC to supply this power...sounds like a pain in the ass to me.
Oooh, look, a new doc I can't read for another disk dubbing system:
http://nesdev.parodius.com/fds-copytool2.zip
Make a chart of what color wire on the parallel cable goes to which pin on the parallel cable. Cross reference this with the "wiring diagram" in the docs. to figure out which color wires will go to your snes connector(s).
BTW, I found a white label FDS unit on Ebay today! Now I will be able to write to disks, I hope!
It's actually not totally the label color that determines it. You have to open your system, open the actual disk drive component and look at what chip set you have. If the chip is labelled with a 3206 then you have one that won't write (probably a pink label machine). If it is labelled with a 7201, you are good to go. Generally, the white label machines have the 7201. However, I heard that some in Hong Kong have actually switched the labels...whatever...maybe they just switched the bottoms of the unit, but isn't that weird?
Um, I guess that's it. Let me know if you have any more questions!
Yours,
Rob