Hey guys, i'm new to the hardware modding scene and want to try my hand at some repros/translations. I've been making rom hacks for a number of years and even done some graphical overhauls of a few games. Never thought about putting them on hardware but now i'd really like to! I also really want to make an english translation cart of Star Ocean which is one of my favorite SNES/SFC games. I've compiled a lot of things that i need to purchase, but was wondering what i might be missing in case i run into a brick wall.
what's i've already picked up/ordered
Willem GQ-3X rom programmer
TSOP to Willem adapter boards
29F032 TSOP chips and adapter boards from buyicnow (AMD AM29F032B-90EC -TSOP Adapter III)
I understand this will be usable for some of my translations and maybe others, and it's easier than piggybacking the larger eproms despite not needing an adapter to program them >_>
anyhow any other input would be appreciated before i dive in and get stuck which i know will happen haha
Have you considered SNES PowerPak, Super EverDrive, or sd2snes?
i'm a collector and i have close to 400 snes carts. i don't need a flash cart to play on original hardware, as i have most games i want. but i'm interested in making translations and some personal hacks for myself and friends.
edit: and i realize the price of making reproductions, etc for myself and not to sell seems counter-cost intuitive, but i already had the gq-3x from a previous employer and all the soldering/desoldering etc tools needed, so my cost of entry isn't as high as starting fresh
A "reproduction" has absolutely zero collectible value, the cart isn't "rare" and every body can make some easily given they have the tools.
For very little money you could get the Kazzo and a INL SNES flash cartridge to make any translation or hack you want. Also the subject title is misleading. SNES Dev suggests you intend to program or create some new software or maybe a hardware device. You're just talking about making repros/bootlegs.
Alot of people have issues trying to make reproductions with the surface mount chips and adapters. There is no gain to doing that over using brand new reflashable boards like INL's. It's just alot of work for nothing. Also because of how many people got involved the chip you need is more expensive and harder to obtain than before. Alternatively the flash carts like the PowerPAK, SD2SNES, and EverDrive are very handy for any gamer.
http://www.infiniteneslives.com/products.php
Bregalad wrote:
A "reproduction" has absolutely zero collectible value, the cart isn't "rare" and every body can make some easily given they have the tools.
? what did this post have to do with anything?
MottZilla wrote:
For very little money you could get the Kazzo and a INL SNES flash cartridge to make any translation or hack you want. Also the subject title is misleading. SNES Dev suggests you intend to program or create some new software or maybe a hardware device. You're just talking about making repros/bootlegs.
Alot of people have issues trying to make reproductions with the surface mount chips and adapters. There is no gain to doing that over using brand new reflashable boards like INL's. It's just alot of work for nothing. Also because of how many people got involved the chip you need is more expensive and harder to obtain than before. Alternatively the flash carts like the PowerPAK, SD2SNES, and EverDrive are very handy for any gamer.
http://www.infiniteneslives.com/products.phpi want to make these for myself and as a hobby. i already stated i'm not interested in a flash cart.
yeah i plan to make a few translations, but i also plan on putting my own rom-hacks on the carts. i'm just asking for advice on the hardware end of it as i know how to do the hacking and prepping as well as padding the file to move it to a chip.
and those INL boards are $20 a piece while i can pick up the EPROMs for $2-3 each, so i don't see how that would be a viable option. I already have a stack of usable games to use as donors so i'm only needing the eprom chips and i can just program whatever i want and do some chip swapping.
I just came to see if there were any obvious things i would need before i order the rest of my parts in bulk.
Max Vador wrote:
Bregalad wrote:
A "reproduction" has absolutely zero collectible value, the cart isn't "rare" and every body can make some easily given they have the tools.
? what did this post have to do with anything?
Quoting your initial post:
Quote:
Never thought about putting them on hardware but now i'd really like to! I also really want to make an english translation cart of Star Ocean which is one of my favorite SNES/SFC games.
If all you want to do is play romhacks of games (regardless of what the romhack is, e.g. English translations, Mario replaced with an animated dildo spurting poop, whatever), then making "reproductions" (read: writing games to EEPROM, making carts that use EEPROMs, etc.) is a bit overkill. You can accomplish the same thing with a lot less effort/pain by simply getting a flash cart. The post from MottZilla about the INL cart is similar advice; it saves you a lot of pain.
TL;DR -- Bregalad is trying to save you lots of pain given what your interests/desires are -- unless your desire really
is to make reproductions on real carts and sell them (or maybe not even sell them).
You have to understand that there's a long-established history of people showing up on this forum (for NES or SNES stuff) who have little-to-no hardware familiarity and who all have ulterior motives (specifically burning romhacks or English translations to EPROM or EEPROMs and then putting them on carts and then selling those carts for jacked up prices (hundreds of USD) on eBay). People are free to do whatever they want, all here will agree with that sentiment, but you have to understand the years of history folks here have seen when it comes to these type of requests. Nobody is blaming you or accusing you of anything, trust me -- it's just a very common topic that comes up, and the term "reproduction" is used repeatedly instead of the person actually saying "I just want to make carts and sell them for insane amounts of money and that's my {hilarious} get-rich-quick scheme". :-)
oh yeah i understand that there's people out making those megaman and bass or fake earthbounds and trying to sell for $70-100, but i'm not interested in making money off it. i want to make the carts as a personal satisfaction, and maybe give a few to my friends, (one friend really wants a terranigma, and owner of a local retro store said he'd give me store credit if i made him a clock tower translation lol)
but yeah i'm not looking to monetize this, it's a hobby more than anything and it's cool when the hobby has a functional outcome. I like the idea of the INL board and programmer, but since i already have most of the expensive hardware out of the way(programmer, soldering tools, adapters) then it seems that just programming and chip swapping would be a better way for me to do it. and there's an abundance of usable donors at my discretion.
I'm not sure the INL board can take Star Ocean because it uses the S-DD1 chip (maybe it can take the patched version though?). SD2SNES it supposedly the only Flashcart that can run it, but only if patched first (since there's no S-DD1 support yet).
yeah i heard star ocean is a bitch to repro, but easily done with an original SFC cart. this one i'll use the sfc and apply a patch to the rom on the board. the rest i would use donor's and fresh character and program roms for.
I believe the INL can run Star Ocean. I have one.
Markfrizb wrote:
I believe the INL can run Star Ocean. I have one.
If you figure it out, come to that thread and explain, because afaik nobody has gotten it to work yet.
skot85 wrote:
Markfrizb wrote:
I believe the INL can run Star Ocean. I have one.
If you figure it out, come to that thread and explain, because afaik nobody has gotten it to work yet.
You need a rearranged rom to get Star Ocean to work on INL boards. Contact him for more info on how to rearrange the rom data, I believe he said it needs to be de-interleaved for it to work...
INL's carts can run Star Ocean. ROM data must be programmed in the correct memory map for it to function which isn't the same way people's ROM files are organized. There is no need to use an original cartridge. Also I believe it uses surface mount so if you do mess with it you better be good at handling that.
What do you mean EPROMs for $2-$3? That's pretty vague so I'm not sure what memories you mean. The 29F032 that is commonly used costs more than that now. The smaller 8-bit 27C801 definitely cost more than that and you'd need up to 4 for some of those games. If you're not using the 27C801 then you need to also factor in the cost of an adapter for each game. You could also factor in your time spent doing the whole process. And ofcourse the donor games you are throwing away the original chip for.
I think INL's boards are quite competitive to the method you are interested in. The best part about it too is let's say your friend or yourself gets tired of whatever hack or translated game you put together. If you made it with the method you favor, you're stuck with it unless you want to disassemble the cartridge and desolder the memory for the board to reprogram it.
But if you used INL's board you could just pop the cartridge in the programmer and change it to a different game and only need to change the label on the cartridge if you so desired.
Oh and believe me, the appeal of the satisfaction of making these things disappears quickly. Yes doing a couple might be satisfying if you've never done anything like it before. But after that it's just work. Just because you have an EPROM programmer is no reason to go that direction.
So before you go either direction you might want to seriously consider the costs to doing it. I think you underestimate the cost of using original game cartridges and hacking them up with adapters and flash memory. A big cost is your time.
the 29F032 chips are 32MBit chips and can be had for $6 each or less. the adapters are 60 cents a piece, so say i'm in $7 per 32mbit. seems a lot cheaper than $20 per flashable board. time isn't an issue as this is more a hobby for myself, and with a $7 investment it's easier to pass one off to a friend to play with rather than a $20 board that he might want reflashed sometime down the road.
and with 32mbit chips i'm free to make most of the games i want at the moment(clock tower, terranigma, star ocean, etc) and can still piggyback these chips the same as others. The only glaring issue with these cheaper but larger chips is that they're surface mounts so they're a bit tougher to solder.
getafixx wrote:
skot85 wrote:
Markfrizb wrote:
I believe the INL can run Star Ocean. I have one.
If you figure it out, come to that thread and explain, because afaik nobody has gotten it to work yet.
You need a rearranged rom to get Star Ocean to work on INL boards. Contact him for more info on how to rearrange the rom data, I believe he said it needs to be de-interleaved for it to work...
Thanks for the info, have tried this NUMEROUS times with a de-interleaved rom with the sd-dds1 patch applied to no avail. Works in bsnes, but not my 12mbit board. I'll try contacting him about it.
If it worked in Bsnes then it wasn't 'deinterleaved'. I think you're thinking 'decompressed', which is what the Non-SDD1 patch does. A properly de-interleaved rom won't work in Bsnes for some reason, probably just lack for that specific mapper type.
Why is a $20 board that can be reflashed a bad thing?
You didn't mention the cost of original cartridges or shipping. Did you factor that in as well?
One suggestion you might consider before buying in bulk adapters and flash memory would be to buy a small number and see how it goes. You might find surface mount soldering too troublesome. Or you might not. It's just a suggestion. I personally don't think it's worth it to do it that way when there is an alternative. Plus rewrite-ability is very appealing.
MottZilla wrote:
You didn't mention the cost of original cartridges or shipping. Did you factor that in as well?
That depends on finding a source other than donors for SFC or SNES cartridge shells.
i ended up only buying 10 adapters and 10 chips. didn't break the bank but it will be the test run.
i think the reflashable board is very cool, but it's also pricey, and i'd have to buy the programmer for that board as well, and with an entry fee per cart that high, i'd be less likely to pass a game or two off to friends. I admin a collector's site on facebook and we send eachother mystery boxes occasionally, and i'd love to toss repros or translations in the boxes for people as well since many of them like them but won't pay for them.
and as of now i'm sitting on about 40 usable donor carts, and the local retro store has a couple boxes of sports games at a buck a piece i can dig through if i ever run out.
getafixx wrote:
If it worked in Bsnes then it wasn't 'deinterleaved'. I think you're thinking 'decompressed', which is what the Non-SDD1 patch does. A properly de-interleaved rom won't work in Bsnes for some reason, probably just lack for that specific mapper type.
I don't know what you're all talking about.
Interleaving is shuffling of data, which is usually done by copiers in their image dumps. I don't entirely know why copiers did this, but it was likely to optimize loading games from floppy disks in some way. bsnes won't run anything interleaved at all, you'll need to use a tool like NSRT to deinterleave it first. Star Ocean being interleaved would be really silly, since no copier would be able to fully dump it (due to the MMC), let alone play it. It does however use the S-DD1 both as an MMC and as a decompression chip. neviksti made a hack that removes the usage of the S-DD1 chip and expands it to 96mbit to run on certain copiers and flash carts which lack S-DD1 support. bsnes can run both: it emulates the S-DD1 natively, and you can specify custom mapping files to support larger ROM sizes. It's not an official mapper (in fact it's actually a really weird mapping), hence neviksti's version won't run out of the box. But get the right manifest (board mapping) and it'll run just fine. Certain copiers and flash carts can run the latter, but none of them yet emulate the actual S-DD1.
I know they are relatively pricey, compared to the prices you are talking about for the INL cart or flash chips, but I would recommend getting a flash cart anyway. I am trying to get a super everdrive with a usb port for dev stuff that I am doing, but I have found that some hacks don't perform as expected/or as they do in an emulator.
I don't use BSNES for actually playing ROM files, so if you use that to test ROMs it seems pretty close to 100% accurate (there are some rare times with IRQ or VBlank code that don't emulate exactly the same, but that's mostly stuff having to do with bad SNES assembly I've written, not BSNES/higan).
I was first doing ROM hacking in 2007/2008 when I was in college (
https://vimeo.com/85569648), and my soldering skills were not the best even with regular DIP chips, so I ended up going through a few carts to get it to work. It's good to make sure that actual ROM works on the real hardware.
Another option is to have a few different carts and put ZIF sockets in them
and then use them to test on real hardware.
It seems like you (Max Vador) have some experience with this kind of stuff so maybe some of it is redundant.
any and all help is much appreciated!
i don't have zif sockets, but i do have 2 boards with 40 pin sockets that i cut down on them, one hirom and one lorom board. i plan to use these as a quick test before soldering into a final board.
though a zif test board would be pretty sweet as i could cut the plastic and keep the cart assembled rather than testing in my caseless fc twin i have now
ha If you've got a lot of time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMFptx4OYMAI am much more careful now, and I have one of these "tweezer"-type deals to grip IC's for removing them from sockets and I find even then sometimes the pins get bent a little.
It's also good to have a cart you can test with that has the plastic, ie if you have just the PCB inevitably you build up dust, finger oils, not contacting the pins the right way, whatever. Could be my soldering but I find with just the PCB, hacked carts tend to operate erratically.
i've seen that video, insane haha. looks like the campus challenge's older brother.
best way i've found for removing chips from sockets is with thin needle nose pliers.
insert them between the chip and the pcb closed, and open slowly to lift the chip evenly
I have one of these, pretty sweet.
byuu wrote:
getafixx wrote:
If it worked in Bsnes then it wasn't 'deinterleaved'. I think you're thinking 'decompressed', which is what the Non-SDD1 patch does. A properly de-interleaved rom won't work in Bsnes for some reason, probably just lack for that specific mapper type.
I don't know what you're all talking about.
Interleaving is shuffling of data, which is usually done by copiers in their image dumps. I don't entirely know why copiers did this, but it was likely to optimize loading games from floppy disks in some way. bsnes won't run anything interleaved at all, you'll need to use a tool like NSRT to deinterleave it first. Star Ocean being interleaved would be really silly, since no copier would be able to fully dump it (due to the MMC), let alone play it. It does however use the S-DD1 both as an MMC and as a decompression chip. neviksti made a hack that removes the usage of the S-DD1 chip and expands it to 96mbit to run on certain copiers and flash carts which lack S-DD1 support. bsnes can run both: it emulates the S-DD1 natively, and you can specify custom mapping files to support larger ROM sizes. It's not an official mapper (in fact it's actually a really weird mapping), hence neviksti's version won't run out of the box. But get the right manifest (board mapping) and it'll run just fine. Certain copiers and flash carts can run the latter, but none of them yet emulate the actual S-DD1.
Just to be clear, the rom file I had needed to be deinterleaved with nsrt before bsnes would play it, s-dd1'ed or not. I then applied the s-dd1 hack from neviksti. bsnes still runs it, 12meg inl board on hardware won't.
byuu wrote:
getafixx wrote:
If it worked in Bsnes then it wasn't 'deinterleaved'. I think you're thinking 'decompressed', which is what the Non-SDD1 patch does. A properly de-interleaved rom won't work in Bsnes for some reason, probably just lack for that specific mapper type.
I don't know what you're all talking about.
Interleaving is shuffling of data, which is usually done by copiers in their image dumps. I don't entirely know why copiers did this, but it was likely to optimize loading games from floppy disks in some way. bsnes won't run anything interleaved at all, you'll need to use a tool like NSRT to deinterleave it first. Star Ocean being interleaved would be really silly, since no copier would be able to fully dump it (due to the MMC), let alone play it. It does however use the S-DD1 both as an MMC and as a decompression chip. neviksti made a hack that removes the usage of the S-DD1 chip and expands it to 96mbit to run on certain copiers and flash carts which lack S-DD1 support. bsnes can run both: it emulates the S-DD1 natively, and you can specify custom mapping files to support larger ROM sizes. It's not an official mapper (in fact it's actually a really weird mapping), hence neviksti's version won't run out of the box. But get the right manifest (board mapping) and it'll run just fine. Certain copiers and flash carts can run the latter, but none of them yet emulate the actual S-DD1.
My terminology was probably wrong, but I was just going by what INL told me. He mentioned that the file had to be rearranged to work on his boards, and that he would set up "de-interleaving" to achieve this, unless I misread it. Regardless, the rearranged rom file that works on his boards does
not work on Bsnes last time I tried. But yes, the untouched Nevitski patched version does work fine.
getafixx wrote:
My terminology was probably wrong, but I was just going by what INL told me. He mentioned that the file had to be rearranged to work on his boards, and that he would set up "de-interleaving" to achieve this, unless I misread it. Regardless, the rearranged rom file that works on his boards does not work on Bsnes last time I tried. But yes, the untouched Nevitski patched version does work fine.
Do you have an md5 of this rom?