FDSStick appreciation thread :)

[toadhall]

Loopy, that diagram of the twin famicom port C on your site, is it facing the end of the adapter cable or is it facing the port on the twin fami?
Post Merge: October 04, 2016, 03:52:03 am
What manner of ritual should I perform to summon the great and wise Loopy?

[Tyrantulas]

Got excited about the FDSStick after I heard about it on the RetroRGB podcast... so I ordered one.  Then I set about trying to track down an inexpensive RAM adaptor... found one... it just arrived today.

Here's the trouble.  Even without the FDSStick plugged in, it does it very strange things:

https://youtu.be/YfDJzHpJGGE

Mario and Luigi seem to disappear without a trace.

Things get ever crazier with the FDSStick plugged in... with all sorts of video corruption and random characters showing up.

Is my RAM adaptor bad?  Are bad caps a common issue?

Thanks!

[loopy]

Loopy, that diagram of the twin famicom port C on your site, is it facing the end of the adapter cable or is it facing the port on the twin fami?

That's looking at the back side of the twin fami (pin 12 is next to port D)

Got excited about the FDSStick after I heard about it on the RetroRGB podcast... so I ordered one.  Then I set about trying to track down an inexpensive RAM adaptor... found one... it just arrived today.

Here's the trouble.  Even without the FDSStick plugged in, it does it very strange things:

https://youtu.be/YfDJzHpJGGE

Mario and Luigi seem to disappear without a trace.

Things get ever crazier with the FDSStick plugged in... with all sorts of video corruption and random characters showing up.

Is my RAM adaptor bad?  Are bad caps a common issue?

Thanks!

Looks like a problem with your ram adapter.

Related? http://www.famicomworld.com/forum/index.php?topic=10607.0

[toadhall]

That's looking at the back side of the twin fami (pin 12 is next to port D)

Thanks! I'm still having problems though. Now I'm getting a battery error 02.

[Syco54645]

Can anyone please explain how to write a disk with this? Info seems very sparse. I have a few disks with corruption so I would like to rewrite those.

Thanks

[Tomy]

Can anyone please explain how to write a disk with this? Info seems very sparse. I have a few disks with corruption so I would like to rewrite those.

Thanks

You need 3 things, fdsstick + adapter cable + modded fds drive or 7201 drive.
Follow the info from here http://3dscapture.com/fdsstick/ to make the cable.
Download the latest software http://3dscapture.com/fdsstick/FDSStick_20160926.exe

It is not so difficult.

[Syco54645]

Can anyone please explain how to write a disk with this? Info seems very sparse. I have a few disks with corruption so I would like to rewrite those.

Thanks

You need 3 things, fdsstick + adapter cable + modded fds drive or 7201 drive.
Follow the info from here http://3dscapture.com/fdsstick/ to make the cable.
Download the latest software http://3dscapture.com/fdsstick/FDSStick_20160926.exe

It is not so difficult.

Just opened the software and looked. Well now I feel pretty dumb...

[Jaek_3]

Is there any place to buy an FDSStick other than Tototek? I don't want to wait a month for it to come from Hong Kong

[P]

If you are in USA it's probably better to buy directly from Loopy than buying from Tototek.

[Elrinth]

I think the FDSstick is brilliant. I bought one for myself, and one for a friend. I'm unsure if he's even tried it yet tho.
I really like how the menu looks like you're still in the FDS. Just amazing.
Did however not try to backup/rewrite diskettes with it. Don't really have the cable for it, but it would be cool to own one of those cables.

[Plep]

I just got mine in the mail today.  I think I may be missing something, but if you're using just the FDSStick with a Famicom (AV Famicom in my case) can you save your game?

I just tested it with Castlevania and Vs. Excitebike and my saves didn't seem to stick after a console reboot

[P]

What kind of Famicom you use shouldn't matter. Unless something was changed in an update, the FDSStick write to the disk image like a real drive writes on a real disk. If you copy the image to a PC, all changes will be on the disk image (so you may want to keep a copy of the untouched disk image on your PC as well).

Just make sure you save in the game though. In Castlevania I believe you have to die and then choose save on the Game Over screen. Wait until it has finnished writting (a LED will be blinking when writing) before you turn it off.

[Plep]

I can only guess I was somehow doing something wrong.  Zelda II saved fine.  Castlevania didn't save my file but it did delete the saves that were still on the ROM, so once again I probably didn't save it correctly.  Not sure about Vs. Excitebike though, will look into it

Edit:
I know what I saw but I'm honestly at a loss for words.  I just double checked each of the games just to be sure and what do you know, each game had their respective saves on the ROMs without issue.  Everything is as it should be.  Strange

[darcoza]

So I'm having trouble with my FDS Stick I'm wondering if any of you might be able to help me figure out what is going on.

I just received a twin famicom in the mail and had previously ordered an FDS Stick with the twin famicom adapter to go with it assuming that the belt would be broken on the disk system and I probably wouldn't get around to fixing it any time soon. I didn't have a ram adapter cable to make the cable out of though so I ended up soldering some ribbon cable directly to the pads on the fds stick and then the other end directly to the twin famicom adapter that loopy makes.

When I turn on the twin famicom in disk mode the little title screen pops up and I can see Mario running around, the image looks great the sound is great. When I plug in the FDS Stick nothing happens. But I discovered that if I pulled it out of the port slightly I could occasionally get the LED on the FDS stick to light up momentarily. After about an hour of messing with it I as able to get it to load the game select screen twice if I held it just right for long enough. One of those times I was then able to select a game and it loaded up the game to the games title screen.

I figured this must mean a bad connection so I opened up the twin famicom and disconnected the expansion port from the inside to look at it. It seems fine and a multi-meter shows it has continuity to the main board. Turning it on with it open yielded the same results as before, nothing when plugged in regularly and the LED briefly flashing when pulled out slightly and I was again able to get it to boot to the menu then title screen of a game once but only once.

I removed the female pins from inside the connector one at a time and bent them down further so they would make easier contact and sanded them a little in case of corrosion but that didn't help. Then I removed the connector entirely and soldered all the wires directly to the pins on loopy's twin famicom connector just to be sure it wasn't a connection issue and even soldered directly it doesn't light up at all or even detect it's connected.

If i take the FDS stick and plug it into my computer the computer still recognizes it and it pulls up all the games that are stored on it. I even put it into a separate computer just to make sure it wasn't just remembering which games where on there or something.

I'm at a bit of a loss. If anyone has any insight into what might be the problem it would be very helpful.
Thank you.

[loopy]

I'm at a bit of a loss. If anyone has any insight into what might be the problem it would be very helpful.
Thank you.

Sorry, I haven't been checking the forum lately.
It sounds like something isn't wired up correctly, but it's hard to say without seeing it.