How to make Famicom reproduction cartridges?

[HummerTeam1001]

Hi,

I was thinking it might be fun to make Famicom repros to play of ROM hacks and stuff.

So, how difficult is that to do? Is it expensive? How do you do it? Do you need a lot of previous electronics-modification experience?

Thanks.

[xIceMan]

That depends on the game you're trying to make.
It can be normal cost to expensive.

Soldering skills and electronics-modification experience should be given.

[jpx72]

Well when you get hold of an eprom programmer (writer), you are nearly there. That's probably the hardest part, and the most expensive, when you want a reliable device.
What soldering concerns, you need to know how to remove big rom chips with 28+ pins each without damaging the board.
And the modification itself is relatively easy. There are tons of detailed instructions online.

Or you can get a proxy, to supply you with already written eproms.

[famifan]

Hm. I don't think I will do it then because I don't know how to solder.

don't worry so much, the soldering is actually a bit easier than hand writing  just some amount practice and you will be good at soldering.

you can purchase small DIY kits over ebay to start soldering 

[xIceMan]

I started with a basic soldering station. Ruined some games on beginning, got better and now I can even solder TSOP, SOP, TQFP with my advanced station. It's only a matter of practice.

You can start practising with old mainboards or other defective boards.

[HVC-Man]

For things like ROM hacks, you'd honestly be better off with an Everdrive FC. The main reason being some hacks will only work on emulators and the Everdrive, but not a dedicated cartridge. I'm not sure why either. Donkey Kong Pie Factory and Rockman CX are two such hacks I've found so far.

Another reason is making reproduction cartridges takes a lot of dedication, time and money to get started.

[Arkanix38]

Seconded, an Everdrive is probably a much better investment than the soldering gear you need unless you are either going to use it a lot or just enjoy tinkering with electronics.

[famifan]

I'm just curious though, why would a hack work on everdrive but not on cartridge? That seems very odd to me.

more precise question would be:
why a hack work on the emulator but not on real hardware?

just b/c emulation isn't perfectly accurate. real hardware behaves slightly different. even it's slightly but still highly enough for not working.

i believe the most of hacks which won't working with real h/w just lack proper mapper initialization routine. why? because any emulator will do that for you automatically while real hardware will never do that.

frankly speaking, my first hack was perfectly working.. on the emulator only  Once i put in onto a cartridge, it surprisingly refused to work. I've fixed it to work on real h/w and that wasn't so hard as you might think 

[P]

Yes flashcarts are also running on real hardware. But still there are other differences in playing a game on a flashcart from playing it on a normal cartridge.

One thing is the fact that the games are loaded from a menu on flashcarts, while on normal carts they load directly when you turn on power. In a Famicom/NES, the PPU (the graphic drawing chip) must "warm up" before it can draw anything on the screen (this warm-up time is only a few milliseconds). Commercial games waits two frames (not noticeable for humans) at start-up to make sure that the PPU is ready before they start drawing the title screen or splash screen or whatever on the TV. Earlier homebrew developers wasn't aware of this warm-up, and made homebrew games without waiting two frames at start-up. So those homebrew only works correctly on emulators (that doesn't require the warm-up).
But on a flashcart, the flashcart menu is doing this two-frame wait when you turn the power on. And then when you load a game from the flashcart menu, the warm-up is no longer necessary (since the PPU is already ready ages ago), so for this reason those old homebrew that doesn't do the two-frame wait, will work correctly on a flashcart, but not on a repro cart, because of the flashcart menu.

So if, say Donkey Kong Pie Factory, had the two-frame wait removed for some reason when Nintendo hacked it, it will break on a repro cart, but not on a flashcart. Since it was made for the Wii Virtual Console emulator it's possible they didn't care about preserving the two-frame wait.


Another reason the game doesn't work, might be mapper related I guess. I don't think the Everdrive menu does things like mapper initialization though. Maybe you made a mistake with the board, or maybe there is some limitation with the iNES format that makes it unclear on what board-setup the game needs.