hey Everyone,
I have a game doctor sf7 jumpered to be a professor sf2 plugged into a north american snes. Everything has worked great on the thing so far, plays games off disk and plays games off of the non enhancement chip carts i have.
I just bought a Japanese version of super mario kart. the game doctor wont let me play or copy the cart and it wont use the game's dsp chip to play super mario kart off a floppy. When i do a self test without that cart or with another cart plugged in, the tests pass. When i plug the cart in and do the tests, around 90% of the time the test fails with a bram 32k err.
Maybe someone can help me answer the following questions;
-Can an american or japanese dsp chip cart be used to play dsp roms with the PSF2? i dont have blue dsp, just reg pass through adaptor thingie.
-or do you think its not a compatibility issue and just a bad cart?
**edit figured out answers to some of my questions
Well... i cleaned the connectors on the cart and unit and now i can play the game but it still wont play any of my dsp roms with the game plugged in. i see the initial screen and then it craps out where its supposed to use the chip.
i tried supermario kart, dungeon master and pilot wings.
are the different versions of the dsp chips inter-compatible? i was under the impression that you can use a enhancement chip cart to play roms thats require the chips without buying a blue dsp adaptor, am i correct?
any info or trouble shooting tips would be appreciated.
I had believed that the DSP adapter was required, otherwise it's existence wouldn't make much sense.
And no, the different DSP chips aren't compatible. They're really CPUs with a built-in ROM, running a specific program. IIRC, Mario Kart and Pilotwings use the same DSP, but Dungeon Master uses something different. If it's the same DSP with a different ROM, maybe the chip on the adapter could be swapped with another?
I have an SF7, but it's the "Gamestation" unit, so carts have never been an option for me, I'm just going by what I remember reading about it long ago. I could be wrong.
the images of the inside of the "blue dsp adapter" actually show chips on the board in the adapter. which leads me to believe there is actually a dsp chip in the adapter. someone please correct me if im wrong.
my grey adapter just has a board that is a pass through so the game doctor can connect to the snes.
vs mine.
You must have the DSP adapter to play the games on the GDSF. People get confused because certain copiers like I believe the Super Wild Card DX allow for plugging in a DSP1 cartridge to use while loading DSP1 rom files. You can't do that with the GDSF. You must get the DSP adapter. Some copiers that didn't support DSP through a plug-in would actually have a DSP1 chip installed in the unit itself.
MottZilla wrote:
People get confused because certain copiers like I believe the Super Wild Card DX allow for plugging in a DSP1 cartridge to use while loading DSP1 rom files. You can't do that with the GDSF. You must get the DSP adapter.
I just got the Super Mario Kart rom to work!!!!
I didnt realise i had to split the rom if its a "fast rom". I split the rom and and it worked with the cart. I pop the cart out and it wonks out after the nintendo logo again.
So the game doctor CAN use the dsp1 though the cart slot! the blue dsp must be dsp1 built in to the adapter and mine is a pass through adaptor and you have to plug a dsp game in to the slot.
I guess initially the problem was a dirty cart. Thats why i had bram errors. Then the problem was the rom not being converted properly.
I still couldnt get pilot wings to run though. Im going to screw with the rom again and see. Im going to try a few other dsp games report back.
Well there we have it, Michael Andretti's Indy Car Challenge worked!!
Its a 8mbit fastrom dsp1 game, it didnt work as one file but it worked after i used ucon64 to split it in to two 4mbit files. Super Mario Kart, a 4mbit fastrom dsp1 game, worked after it was split in to two 2mbit files.
Pilot Wings and Dungeon Master, bot slow rom games didnt work at all. Yeah i know dungeon master is dsp2 thats probably why it didnt work. I going to do a few more slow rom vs fast rom tests. Maybe they have to be the same type as the cartridge.
I dont really know anything about this slow rom, fast rom, high rom, low rom stuff but i'll do some research.
Does anyone know if you can covert a slowrom in to a fastrom?
You have to split HiROM games on the Game Doctor. It's not related to FastROM.
Even though the DSP1 worked via the cartridge slot you might notice it using the SRAM in the cartridge as well as the DSP1.
Pilot Wings isn't working because you need a hacked version that will work as a HiROM game. Pilot Wings is the only LoROM configured DSP1 game. Look for Pilotwings (U) [f1] or something like that.
The Dungeon Master game (I think that's the one) is not DSP1. It's DSP2. It will never work without the actual cartridge.
So basically what you need to know:
It may use the SRAM in the cartridge while using the DSP1 chip in the cartridge.
All DSP1 ROMs need to be HiROM, Pilotwings (U) [f1] should work.
Single file HiROM games usually need to be split before loading.
Thank you for that information. I got all of the dsp1, dsp1a, dsp1b games that i tried working. I guess i'll stop messing with the dsp2-4.
Does anyone know the technical reason behind why superfx and other chips dont work? Is it security in the chips or limitations of the gdsf7? The information regarding the gdsf7 and other copier devices is so difficult to find and most of it is inaccurate. Ive read on other forums where people said you had to have the blue dsp adapter to play dsp games, which obviously we now know is false. Im glad i only spent $8 on a Jap version of Super Mario Kart rather than a $35 blue dsp. Unfortunately ive also picked up a Jap Wildtrax cart for the Superfx chip and a Jap Kirby Superstar for the SA1 before I knew you couldnt use those chips on the GDSF7. Oh well, I guess they'll just lead to cart mod project in future.
Unlike most Super NES Game Pak PCBs, PCBs with Super FX and SA-1 do not directly connect the PRG ROM to the S-CPU bus. Instead, the entire CPU bus runs into the coprocessor, which has control of the ROM's address and data bus and accesses the ROM on the S-CPU's behalf. The coprocessor does this because it also needs to run a program in the ROM. Both the S-CPU and the coprocessor can run at the same time, but each coprocessor has its own way of divvying up ROM access privileges, as I understand it.
- When the Super FX is running its program, the S-CPU loses access to the PRG ROM. Instead, it runs in the built-in RAM on the Control Deck ($7E0000-$7FFFFF) until the Super FX raises a signal that it has finished processing the display list. If the S-CPU attempts to read from ROM at this time, it'll instead read from a tiny ROM inside the Super FX that contains an interrupt vector table.
- The SA-1 is more sophisticated about this. When it is running its program, it pauses for a wait state during reads by the S-CPU. This slows down the SA-1 program somewhat.
In order for a copier to replace the PRG ROM in such an architecture, it would have to sit behind the coprocessor on the Game Pak PCB.
Thanks tepples, that clears things up.
tepples wrote:
In order for a copier to replace the PRG ROM in such an architecture, it would have to sit behind the coprocessor on the Game Pak PCB.
This is a little beyond my capabilities and knowledge, and i doubt anyone would have answers to this but couldnt this be done if you made a an adapter like the dsp adapter to sit between the copier and the SNES?
I guess it all depends on how the copier sends the rom to the snes. I dont think the SNES reads the data from the copier like it would from a rom on a cartridge. So I doubt the adapter could read the data from the copier like it would from a rom. Right?
I wounder if anyone out there has schematics for the pinouts and technical info on enhancement chips, copiers and game carts.
In theory you could make a copier that could run these games, but no one publicly has shown any such creation. It would not be a simple project. And it'd probably be better to create your own copier than to try to shoehorn such a feature into an existing one. And ofcourse the reason no one has made available such a copier is just cost vs benefit. The number of games that people wish to play that use chips like these are very small in number. Over 90% of the SNES game library does not need any additional processing chips.