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- Dec 17, 2017
Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster
- Thread starter trueandhonestfan
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- Joined
- Apr 14, 2019
Related, does anyone here know why NES flashcarts are so expensive? It’s actually cheaper to buy a Famicom flashcart and a converter.
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2019
Ok got my bullshit chinesium NES to Famicom converter, it's either going to be red or orange or reddish orange.
I also bought a very very cheap NES clone system that's colored turquoise, black, and hot pink, it apparently takes carts. For 9 dollars I'll risk it and if all else fails I have a very cool looking shell I can stick an emulator board in.
I also bought a very very cheap NES clone system that's colored turquoise, black, and hot pink, it apparently takes carts. For 9 dollars I'll risk it and if all else fails I have a very cool looking shell I can stick an emulator board in.
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2021
NES carts have more pins, designed to work with what's called the CIC, NES10, whatever, basically, the "fuck up" chip to stop piracy or bootlegging, as well as out of region play (And also the plan was to standardize things like improved audio that famicom carts bundled onto the board, as a standalone expansion that you'd mount your NES onto, and have other expansion accessories too. As you might have guessed, none ever launched.) The attached picture is the exact pin you can snip to stop the fucking incessant bootlooping when it has an NES10 failure (that you may know as the constant flashing when you turn it on with no game inside), changing it instead to a flat color screen lock. It will also let you run PAL games on an NTSC-U NES, or vice versa, though that comes with the issues of playing incorrect region formatted games, like PAL stuff running super fast on an NTSC-U system. (It's also just a good excuse to open up your NES and give the 72 pin connector a good ol toothbrush scrub)
That all, with the availability of modern clone systems being based off toploader design, means that really the proper 72 pin carts just aren't necessary.
tl;dr, basically no demand, and the ability to hit a larger potential market means fc boards get produced more often. Toploaders and clone systems are usually compatible with both 72 and 60 pin carts and have no NES10/CIC, so it's cheaper and more efficient to make a 60 pin cart to hit the famicom and global markets.
If you want to learn more about the difference between NES and Famicom carts, that link explains the layouts, and what the pins are all for. Notably, pins EXP3,4,7,8 are dedicated to NES10 keying.
Fun fact and anti-housefire tip: Lots of unlicensed (NTSC-U/PAL) games worked by sending voltage to the CIC to disable it so long as the system was on (this was why they had weird instructions like "power the system on, then press reset after 10seconds"). If you disable the CIC by snipping the pin, or play on a toploader/clone system and pop in an unlicensed game, you're liable to have it melt the case or catch fire. This happened pretty notably in the AVGN episode where he's playing action 52 in a toploader which has no CIC, so it's just pumping out power, heating up the cart.
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2019
I was thinking it had something to do with the FPGA and all the work getting it to be compatible with a couple of hundred mappers across like a thousand games. Good point on the NES10 though.
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2021
I mean, cheap chinese carts are usually using some bought/stolen OS, Bung's Game Master 2.0 is really common, and the matrix for it's mapper support is as follows, total dogshit.
Naturally, the money you spend on more expensive carts is going towards better support for games (and the ability to play FDS games). That's why carts can cost a lot, absolutely. Cause stuff like the Analogue NT Mini Noir has a hell of a lot more support.
I don't think your average person is going to know about mappers, or the differences in OS in NES flash carts. Maybe I sound like a cunt for saying that but it's easier to explain the more macro level economics of the chinese wanting to be greedy and reach for a larger potential market than try to explain how Krikzz has great mapper support and charges an appropriate amount of money for getting a better experience. You get what you pay for, but there are other reasons too. You're not wrong though!
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2019
I only learned what a mapper was last year when I was reading a lot of Nesdev's wiki and eventually checked Mesen's source code to try and figure out what they are and why they're important. I'm still not 100% confident on what exactly a mapper is, and if you asked me, I'd say it's the layout of how each cartridge's components are wired up, how those components deal with on-cart stuff like bank switching to get more out of what the NES could handle by itself, things like that. Like, actual hardware emulation of each kind of NES/FC cartridge, since they weren't standardized back in '83.
Does that sound right? Did I misunderstand anything?
Anyway, that's why I'd think the NES needs such a complex solution just to run roms, as opposed to the DS and its flashcarts being very simple. Very few DS games used nonstandard carts, like the smattering with the IR sensor, but that's about it.
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2021
You're on the money! Mappers are indeed configurations of settings/adjustments that specific boards use and emulation tricks we use to recreate them and make the games playable. Each mapper can be used by one game, or a billion (theoretically). because it denotes a specific configuration, but not necessarily anything super unique (those get their own new mapper usually). mapper 000 for iNes is "no mapper", the bog standard NES cart, used by most of your black box games, SMB, duck hunt, balloon fight, etc. The point of the mapper support is so the program/cart can switch to the necessary configuration in the course of emulation to more accurately emulate and not crash if it's something specifically required to load. You can theoretically emulate a game that runs on mapper 5, even with low/incomplete support, like Bung's Game Master. An example of a game that runs on mapper 5 is Castlevania 3. It runs on Game Master flashcarts, but has some issues with slowdown, and more than usual audio fuckery, as well as crashes if there are too many sprites on screen at once, or used to. So it's not necessarily a requirement, but a properly formatted/adjusted mapper will get you closer to full accuracy on a flashcart, which people tend to forget, is still emulating the game, in some ways.
To put it in more modern emulation terms, imagine trying to emulate a PS2 game on PCSX2 but you don't do any settings adjustments. It's probably gonna look like and maybe even perform like shit until you do, even if it runs out of the box.
To go off on a semi-related tangent:
In modern times the issue is the same as it was 10 years ago, chinese people write homebrew games (Some are even really good [please use the patch if you play it], but treat it like it's some sort of special case, and release it with their own modified version of usually an open source emulator to make it work, or it gets dumped by someone who doesn't care, and they assign it it's own mapper number (that's wrong/doesn't fit in with the standardized sheet we've been using for over a decade because they either don't care or don't know what it is) and it's just a pain in the ass. That said, it's difficult because a lot of these chinese bootlegs hack the NES to hell and back to make their games work so they don't fit in traditional mapper numbers, which was a very large reason in the move from iNes to a multiplane NES2.0 formatting for mapping, as you may notice looking at the NESdev page for mappers, there's still a shit ton of unused mappers, because there's such an anticipation for chinese/russian bootlegs and hacks, though they've slowed down of late. Mesen is a fantastic emulator and you can go in and see exactly what each mapper adjusts as defined by the writer of that particular mapper. We're also still arguing amongst ourselves whether we should just drop the idea of mappers altogether and move to specific board names instead, but there are more fringe cases where those boards have very slight adjustments, so that's why some mappers are numbered as they would be in the iNes/NES2.0 format, and then others are named for the board. It's a clusterfuck and not worth getting too worked up over unless you're planning on writing an NES emulator yourself. I can't recommend you should unless you want to practice I guess.
Here, have a zip with a good amount of the most popular iNes mappers, what their use cases are, and some example games as compiled by the original dude himself, Disch, with adjustments by the NESdev community. Though if you were looking this stuff up you've probably already come across this .zip. You can also use the NESdev wiki page, but it might be a bit more jarring. You can also get a good look at games by the mapper they use and board they have, then compare on the NESdev wiki, through bootgod's DB.
To tie it back into the original question, pricing can partially be because of mapper accuracy in the carts, now that it's been explained a bit more. But, I still stand by the belief that it's largely just an economic decision. No reason to make carts only part of the world can use, when you can make some that all of the world can use, especially in china itself since they never had 72 pin systems to my knowledge, only whatever famicom imports they got, and clones they made. I'm sure there's some deeper reasoning to it all, but why attribute to deeper thought what you can instead attribute to the people wanting a quick buck?
But yeah, if you want a good quality NES cart, splurge on the everdrive. I'll happily shill for Krikzz. For NES he's the gold standard, no doubt. You might find you have trouble running games outside of the most common, normally played ones with your average $25 cart, but probably not enough to justify $100 when you can emulate on your PC instead for nothing.
- Joined
- Sep 11, 2014
You think a NES Everdrive is pricey, getting a SNES one with all the chip compatibly was over $200 last time I check.
Grey Donovan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 17, 2021
I’m surprised some of these PS1 games I didn’t take care of still work. They’re loaded with scratches but nothing deep enough to corrupt the data I guess.
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2019
Looks like the Kaybees revival is dead in the water
Alas future generations shall never know what it's like to purchase games from stores that are precariously stocked with over abundant merchandise
Toys R Us also closed their two trial stores but they're still rumored to be coming back, they just got a new corporate owner a few months ago and they want physical stores back in the US.
Alas future generations shall never know what it's like to purchase games from stores that are precariously stocked with over abundant merchandise
Toys R Us also closed their two trial stores but they're still rumored to be coming back, they just got a new corporate owner a few months ago and they want physical stores back in the US.
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2019
PCem's now brown bread because the troon dev behind it got mad.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
Do you know if the FDS hardware had any special hardware* built in that the NES lacked and required chips to be added to the cartridge?
I figured out a long time ago that games that required a certain functionality, like big sprites in Punch-Out or two-way scrolling(diagonal) like Mario 3, were not available as Famicom Disk System games. If a game could only scroll one way(like Metroid's horizontal or vertical corridors, Zelda 1&2 same thing, Kid Icarus, Mario 2, same thing and so on) it was very likely that it was a FDS game(with some exceptions like Battletoads) because chips that extended functionality can't be added to a re-writable diskette.
*The FDS certainly seems like it could address more memory by itself than a regular NES so it had to have built in hardware for that that would be a chip/mapper for the cartridge version.
I never really looked into it other than confirming that the games that worked like this were available on the FDS.
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2019
Unless they've come a long way in the last four or five years, the sound is going to be terrible.
Mr. Duck
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 9, 2013
Thank god i downloaded the latest version with roms somewhat recently.
Why is it that most emulation/source port developers tend to be crazy trannies?
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
They're really, really into things a platform isn't designed for.
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2021
The trickery you talk about with large sprites in punch-out delves a bit deeper into programming so I'll just leave these links for you to take a gander at to explain that. But yes, you're right on those two games! To answer your question succinctly, not really, but yes. It used RAM instead of MASK ROM/chip storage, but outside of features that were more due to the storage format of diskettes (like rewritable data/saving, which was replicated later with SRAM chips), the most unique part about the FDS RAM adapter otherwise (Which is what houses pretty much all the actual hardware outside of the reader, if you didn't know!) Is the musical differences in the titles of Metroid and others. One of my favorite comparisons to show is the Game Over sound (JP) for Kid Icarus (US). It's such a wild difference and impossible to handwave as unheard.
The memory allocation of the FDS wasn't actually higher, they just had larger stores to draw from than early famicom/NES titles. Basically each FDS disk was 128k of data when accounting for both sides, and that was no slouch when original black box carts were 32k. But the RAM adaptor still only allowed for 32k PRG RAM (compared to the 32K PRG ROM you have on, say, the SMB cart), and 8k CHR RAM (compared to the 8K CHR ROM on an SMB cart), and then it had 8K PRG ROM which was 100% allocated to BIOS which was loading instructions, FDS specific mapping, etc. It allowed for a lot of things to happen because you could rewrite 'on the fly', but it was bypassed quickly, technologically. Compare the launch of the FDS, 86, to punch-out, 87, where you have a 128/128 PRG/CHR cart. That shit never would have flown on FDS. You wouldn't be able to get through a single fight without having to load or flip.
Outside of that, not really. It's difficult to clarify because if you look at just NES vs FDS on hardware and base media, FDS knocks it out of the park, no question. The thing is, no one used the black box nrom boards after, what, 3 months? Not even Nintendo, and that's what the FDS was designed to make use of, just with more storage. There were chips on the market that blasted the FDS to bits very shortly after it came out. But the ease of acquisition for FDS quickdisks due to chip shortages and semiconductor price hikes made it very appealing for the 2 years it was active on the market (besides nintendo wanting ridiculous shit from third parties). If you've ever wondered why 5screw games had a famicom to NES converter by the way, that's why! Shortages meant they just shipped out stuff that was already made for famicom, with a converter.
Anyway I'm just rambling at this point. This is a link to a full writeup from 2004 on the FDS and it's specs and tech if you're interested +a whole ass BIOS disassembly! To summarize, sound is the only tangible difference, and that's just a single 2C33 chip.
Radical Cadre
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2020
This might be unrelated to your specific question, but certain older FDS models with the FD7201P driver chip could be manipulated into acting as Disk Writer kiosks, effectively allowing the user to write FDS games for free if they had the data available to be stored in RAM. And there is a workaround for later model FD3206 driver chips (they added copy protection) that will allow you to do much the same.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
The PS2 has to be the saddest thing in long term gaming upkeep
Every system around it is getting an ODE which is encouraging a new burst of homebrewing activity, and here's the PS2 thinking it's hot shit for being able to finally easily run DVD backups in a day and age when most people can't be fucked to use a DVD burner or even own one. Worst part is the laser opening in the slim's drive tray is the perfect width for a SD card and yet the default advice anyone gives you for PS2 modding is still "fat w/ hard drive" or even more embarassingly "load it over the ethernet port" because the PS2 community has some allergy to solid state.
Every system around it is getting an ODE which is encouraging a new burst of homebrewing activity, and here's the PS2 thinking it's hot shit for being able to finally easily run DVD backups in a day and age when most people can't be fucked to use a DVD burner or even own one. Worst part is the laser opening in the slim's drive tray is the perfect width for a SD card and yet the default advice anyone gives you for PS2 modding is still "fat w/ hard drive" or even more embarassingly "load it over the ethernet port" because the PS2 community has some allergy to solid state.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
Running it over ethernet is still super-easy and enables as much storage as you want. Download a new game to the shared folder and that's it, no need to use an SD card to transport it.