If someone want build english Star Ocean SNES cartridge:
If you ever decide to build a cartridge of the translated version of the star ocean, don't follow any guides on the net, really...
They're plain wrong, I'm not exactly sure why, but it certainly looks like none has ever actually compared chunks of the translated version, with the original. That way people assume, that it needs a TWO 27C322 or 27C322+27C160 memories...while truth is that only first 4MB differ from the original image, remaining 2MB are the same in both versions...
So you're saying the cartridge contained two MaskROMs, one 4Mbytes, one 2MBytes? And you only need to replace the 4Mbyte/32Mbit with your EPROM? Just trying to clarify.
yes. Second Mask ROM leave on cart. Use only one 4MB eprom.
I didn't know that 4MB EPROMs exists at all, the largest I've ever seen was 1MB if I remember right.
I think 32Mbit eproms do exist, but I'm not certain as it's been awhile. Obviously you could always use Flash.
There are two standard 32M EPROMs: 27320 (8/16-bit) and the far more common 27322 (16-bit only).
both good for SO
27C320 is better, because its full pin and socket (SOIC44) compatible with SO mask ROM (:)
27C320/SO MASK ROM:
27C322:
Anyone have a tutorial for this? Or perhaps someone can make me one of these with the translated Star Ocean on it?
Follow this one, just replace the 1st (left) rom. You still have to split it, you just burn the larger first section.
http://www.militantgamer.com/Star%20Oce ... slated.doc
No clue who the militant gamer is or if he's crazy. I would link to the tutorial on
www.ultimate-console.fr but it's in french.
It's weird that this info seems to get found and then lost again for some reason. I seem to remember seeing this info (2nd rom is the same) a few years back and it was discussed and then it's like everybody forgot it.
Thanks for posting this. So let me get this straight what he is saying on the wiring. Solder it all directly except for pin 1 and pin 33, just leave those blank, and its good to go?
Also, would 120ns work on this one?
And do you know what donor would be required, other than a japaneese star ocean cart? Thanks!
IF someone could make this for me, I would pay good. I don't have the time nor equipment to do this.
thanks!
eastbayarb@gmail.com
I found a 27C322 on Ebay from some company in Hong Kong. You can also find Star Ocean carts there. Looks like an interesting project.
Now the only problem is my programmer is only 40 pins!!! I have to make a ghetto adapter and control some of the address bits manually
Also replace the battery while you are at it, its 12 years old already!
Tormenter wrote:
Thanks for posting this. So let me get this straight what he is saying on the wiring. Solder it all directly except for pin 1 and pin 33, just leave those blank, and its good to go?
Also, would 120ns work on this one?
And do you know what donor would be required, other than a japaneese star ocean cart? Thanks!
I can't remember what speed I used, but I think it will work fine.
32 on the 27c322 has to go to 44 on the mask rom (be careful about the 42 eprom vs the 44 on the mask rom!). Everything else lines up if you pretend that pin 2 on the 44 pin rom is pin 1 on the 42 pin eprom.
No donor worth mentioning other than star ocean itself.
I don't see the point in continuously destroying increasingly rare Star Ocean carts just to make incomplete fan translation boards, especially when you consider than a vastly upgraded, official English translation for SO will be out next month on the PSP.
Yes, I know the usual arguments: a PSP costs more money, the remake isn't exactly the same, fan translated carts are "cool", etc. All of this destruction is just going to keep raising the prices for those who would actually collect and preserve the original.
Yeah, wasting my time here. Nobody's going to care / listen. Whatever. I was hesitant before, because I need to expand FEoEZ for a very important optimization, which would make sticking it on a cart impossible. This is yet another justification for doing so. And then I won't have to worry about it
ending up on eBay, either.
byuu wrote:
I don't see the point in continuously destroying increasingly rare Star Ocean carts just to make incomplete fan translation boards, especially when you consider than a vastly upgraded, official English translation for SO will be out next month on the PSP.
Yes, I know the usual arguments: a PSP costs more money, the remake isn't exactly the same, fan translated carts are "cool", etc. All of this destruction is just going to keep raising the prices for those who would actually collect and preserve the original.
Yeah, wasting my time here. Nobody's going to care / listen. Whatever. I was hesitant before, because I need to expand FEoEZ for a very important optimization, which would make sticking it on a cart impossible. This is yet another justification for doing so. And then I won't have to worry about it
ending up on eBay, either.
Actually I do agree with you because if you want to play Star Ocean on the real system you are better off getting a Game Doctor SF7 with 96mbits of DRAM to use neviksti's hack that removes the need for the SDD-1. It would probably be better if people would make their own hacked cartridge by making a 96mbit one than destroying Star Ocean cartridges. And I had no idea it was coming out on PSP, that's cool. I'll have to check it out.
But you are right, no one is likely to listen. People don't believe you when you tell them there is a finite amount of copies of each game. And they seem to have the illusion that they are the only one smart enough to hack up cartridges/destroy cartridges.
byuu wrote:
I don't see the point in continuously destroying increasingly rare Star Ocean carts just to make incomplete fan translation boards, especially when you consider than a vastly upgraded, official English translation for SO will be out next month on the PSP.[
Yes, I know the usual arguments: a PSP costs more money, the remake isn't exactly the same, fan translated carts are "cool", etc. All of this destruction is just going to keep raising the prices for those who would actually collect and preserve the original.
Yeah, wasting my time here. Nobody's going to care / listen. Whatever. I was hesitant before, because I need to expand FEoEZ for a very important optimization, which would make sticking it on a cart impossible. This is yet another justification for doing so. And then I won't have to worry about it
ending up on eBay, either.
Sorry for copying the text completely again like MottZilla but in this case, I totally agree.
If it was for doing development and for some strange reason that cart would have some kind of ultra rare hardware that you really want to use, it could still be acceptable but I would be still not that comfortable with the idea (I'm still not comfortable with destroying famicom carts). If I remember well, I saw a complete cart for 2000 yen, don't know if it's a good price since I didn't collect snes for a while.
But for the Snes, you can get some copier and do your dev job, which is a lot easier than the nes so I don't see the points of destroying carts.
When I see that the only reason they do that is for using fan based rom of the same game to put it back on it... My comment would be "ふざけんな" (you're kidding!?). Destroying a cart for a translation... That's pure bootlegging from my point of view. And selling it on ebay.. That's even lower.
But like you said, nobody will listen. They will continue to do it anyway.
Hmm I didn't expect this sort of reaction.
'Collectors' don't have exclusive right to buy anything. If it costs them more, nuts to them.
I don't speak Japanese. Being able to play something makes it valuable to me. And it looks and plays the same, so nothing is 'destroyed'.
In other terms we are not talking about buying a vintage Dodge Charger and smashing it (like Fast and the Furious
), we are talking about giving it a new paint job.
Selling on ebay for big money, however, is lame.
cybertron wrote:
Hmm I didn't expect this sort of reaction.
'Collectors' don't have exclusive right to buy anything. If it costs them more, nuts to them.
I don't speak Japanese. Being able to play something makes it valuable to me. And it looks and plays the same, so nothing is 'destroyed'.
In other terms we are not talking about buying a vintage Dodge Charger and smashing it (like Fast and the Furious
), we are talking about giving it a new paint job.
Selling on ebay for big money, however, is lame.
I see your point. If you want to create one, nobody will stop you. You bought the cart so you have the right to do anything you want with it, it's yours after all
I just feel uneasy about the subject because I started a similar thread about trashing a cart for dev purpose. I got similar comments on the subject. I see the points on both side and agree to some degree about both of them so that make things harder
I guess everybody have a difference stance on what we consider "valuable" and we cannot change that.
True, a copier is good for 99% of SNES homebrew stuff; but we had to modify an old sports title to turn into a RAM cart to run proper power-on tests. Those copier BIOS programs (also used by flash carts) ruin the start-up state.
It's also the only safe way to perform stop-and-swap, which I expect to be quite dangerous for much bulkier copiers with lots more going on inside. And that should hopefully be helping with some BS-X work shortly.
So yeah, I agree it's necessary sometimes from a dev perspective. Still sucks though.
Speaking of which, we haven't figured out the SNES CIC format to make clones yet? That sucks ...
Rare? Maybe for people who don't really understand what it should cost and will buy it on ebay for $30 loose, but not in the Japanese market. I think got a good deal, but I've paid $15 CIB. According to VGA charts, it sold 235,000 copies (yeah, I know VGA charts isn't the bastion of accuracy).
It's nothing about being smarter than anyone else. It's a hobby that I enjoy. And I feel that it's the same hobby many of you enjoy just in a different form. Many on this forum like taking apart a game's code, exploring it, playing with it, and changing it. Just because I enjoy exploring a game's hardware instead of software, please don't look down on me.
Its interesting how rare SNES games are. I think a lot of people want to play them again, so that creates a demand. All the good SNES games are wayyy to much money even at flea markets. These games were all popular and everyone had them.
Maybe people play them till they break (like the NES), or they get thrown out when kids grow up
Crappy sports games are the way to go, no one will miss them. There isn't any prospect of a CIC clone chip yet, it seems like too much effort to RE the circuit.
cybertron wrote:
Crappy sports games are the way to go, no one will miss them. There isn't any prospect of a CIC clone chip yet, it seems like too much effort to RE the circuit.
For personal use maybe, but it would be illegal to distribute the case and/or CIC.
Because the SNES is still under patent? I know the NES ones expired and were not renewed.
I don't think it matters whether or not it's under patent. The code contained in the CIC is copyrighted, and unlike a chip made for people to put into their products, Nintendo never licensed the CIC (or the case) for the public to use. The case also has copyrighted text on the back sticker, and both the case and CIC have the trademark "Nintendo" on them..
Well I would rather think positively and creatively like "how can we do this" even if it is only theoretical.
'copyright' hasn't stopped anyone, and its what the homebrew scene is based on. Thats how you can run your own code on your DS, PSP, Xbox, Wii and your PowerPak.
You just can't link to the files here! I have no intention on breaking any policy.
Anyways this is getting slightly OT
???
How does homebrew on any of the platforms you've listed have to violate copyright?
Copyright stops tons of people by getting them into huge trouble... especially entrepreneurs! If you sell Nintendo's items, you'll be taking a risk. The odds are especially bad when you're using their parts for a product they really disapprove of!
Also from my experience, homebrew scenes are all about respecting copyrights... Except I guess in the case of modchip "homebrew" scenes, where the few actual coders illegally distribute programs linked with official libraries they aren't authorized to distribute.
"How we can do this" legally is easy to answer--make your own case and either force people to install CICs themselves, find pirate CICs, wait for the CIC to be reverse engineered, move to a country where Nintendo can't sue you (whether this is legal is ambiguous), or add a SNES connector to pass CIC signals from a plugin cart.
------------------
Back on topic, I think Star Ocean can be ported to my 96M board described in the 128M game thread whose only mapping hardware is a '139. It could also be turned into the cheapest complete-library-running flash cart ever if you replace the '139 with a small PAL or a few more TTL for complete SRAM mapping and limiting (set by DIP switches).
kyuusaku wrote:
it would be illegal to distribute the case
Under what law?
Quote:
and/or CIC.
How? It's certainly not copyright: you're not reproducing because you're using existing CICs, and copyright statutes such as those of the United States explicitly allow for redistribution of a particular copy that the copyright owner has already distributed to the public.
Quote:
The code contained in the CIC is copyrighted, and unlike a chip made for people to put into their products, Nintendo never licensed the CIC (or the case) for the public to use.
It isn't as though we're going to use their exact program code, completely unmodified. I'd be kind of surprised if it even had one, rather than being pure dedicated logic. We'd reverse the algorithm, implement it in C, then port that to VLSI / whatever, and go. So long as any patents are expired, I can't find any reason why that would be illegal.
And before anyone brings up the Tengen Rabbit chip case (Atari Games v. Nintendo), that case involved "unclean hands" on Tengen's part. Other U.S. court decisions in favor of interoperability include IBM v. Compaq, Sega v. Accolade, Chamberlain v. Skylink, and Lexmark v. Static Control.
tepples wrote:
Under what law?
Nintendo law?
Quote:
How? It's certainly not copyright: you're not reproducing because you're using existing CICs, and copyright statutes such as those of the United States explicitly allow for redistribution of a particular copy that the copyright owner has already distributed to the public.
I didn't mean anything to do with replication, just redistribution in a detrimental way to the copyright owner. By altering the product and reselling it, does it not become your own product, one that infringes upon the actual copyright owner's rights if they only authorize use in a specific way?
byuu wrote:
It isn't as though we're going to use their exact program code, completely unmodified. I'd be kind of surprised if it even had one, rather than being pure dedicated logic. We'd reverse the algorithm, implement it in C, then port that to VLSI / whatever, and go. So long as any patents are expired, I can't find any reason why that would be illegal.
Even if the ROM is in logic gates, it could still be considered software that gets executed. Anyways, I wasn't talking about a reverse engineered CIC algorithm at all, I know that would be completely legal.
kyuusaku wrote:
tepples wrote:
Under what law?
Nintendo law?
Only Congress can make U.S. law, not a private corporation based in Redmond[1] unless Congress specifically devolves that authority. The use of the blanket term "intellectual property" in mass media has
fooled the public into thinking that exclusive rights in reproduction extend beyond 1. copyright, 2. patent, 3. trademark, and 4. trade secret.
Quote:
Quote:
How? It's certainly not copyright: you're not reproducing because you're using existing CICs, and copyright statutes such as those of the United States explicitly allow for redistribution of a particular copy that the copyright owner has already distributed to the public.
I didn't mean anything to do with replication, just redistribution in a detrimental way to the copyright owner. By altering the product and reselling it, does it not become your own product, one that infringes upon the actual copyright owner's rights if they only authorize use in a specific way?
The owner of a lawfully made copy of a work, such as the CIC containing the Super NES key program, is allowed to do anything he wants with that particular copy short of reproduction. This includes prying it out of a cartridge, soldering it into another, and selling that cartridge, so long as it doesn't infringe the exclusive rights described in
chapter 1 of the U.S. copyright statute (or foreign counterpart). Even reproduction can be made to not infringe copyright in a work with negligible expressive value, such as the header of a Game Boy or Sega Genesis cart (
Sega v. Accolade) or the authentication in a printer cartridge's microcontroller (
Lexmark v. Static Control). Here, the benefits of competition outweigh copyright, and the use is deemed fair.
[1] Redmond, Washington, home of NOA and Microsoft.
byuu wrote:
I don't see the point in continuously destroying increasingly rare Star Ocean carts
What would be nice is a reprogrammable base cart that acts like a patch allowing you to play a modified version of the game through an unmodified cart. Like one of the pass-through pirate carts or how Sonic & Knuckles works.
Which US donor should be used on this?
A pass-thru cart would be a neat idea, and it would not require a donor cart. It could simply leech the CIC signal from the real game.
And you could make it programmable -- stick a bunch of patches on there. Have the cart send back a dummy reset vector, while you figure out what game cart it is ... and then have it switch to the real game. The cart itself would just work like a Game Genie with ~1,000,000 active codes. Though I bet it would be really hard to get it fast enough.
So in the end, it'd look like one of those old-school "Japanese to English converters", only it really would translate inserted Japanese games to English. If the SNES weren't so old, I bet that'd impress the hell out of your friends, heh. May as well make it a flash cart for homebrew, too. Just require the extra game for the CIC signal.
Just don't put any patches on it yourself before distributing unless you want to / don't mind pissing off the ROM hacking scene.
Oh, and Star Ocean + FEoEZ would still likely be out of the question, as they have real-time streaming decompression. Not really feasible to patch that data. And their MMCs would present the same challenges as the NES Game Genie had. Check bytes may not be 100% compatible when we're talking 1MB patches, rather than 3-byte changes. It would probably need logic to capture MMC writes as well.
The cart I was thinking about when I wrote my post is
Riverse Kids [Undressing Othello]:
There is another cart like this, by the same porn game company but most often these are inside Zico Soccer carts or some other cart donor.
They quite cheaped out on that one. Didn't even include a full pass-through connector.
I've recently had a look at that cart aswell.
Although it reports as Riverse Kids, my guess would be that they the originally intended the game to be called Reverse Kids.
My money is on "Reversi Kids".
Reversi is the name for
Othello that isn't Pressman's trademark.
Oops, I guess you're right. Never heard of that one tbh.
which US released game is used to make Star Ocean cart? Thanks
Would Street Fighter Alpha 2 work?
I imagine you'd have to do extra work to accomplish that because SFA 2 is most likely a single 32mbit maskrom. Star Ocean is a 32mbit and 16mbit.
MottZilla wrote:
I imagine you'd have to do extra work to accomplish that because SFA 2 is most likely a single 32mbit maskrom. Star Ocean is a 32mbit and 16mbit.
Hi there,
It is, SFII Alpha is a single MROM game of 32Mb, I believe it should be possible to use 2 paralleled EPROMS on this PCB, it works on other boards as well, knowing that people use 4 801's parallel for a SoMII cart.
I'm also searching for a 64Mb Flash, a 29F064 or similar, to use for games like Star Ocean or Tales of Phantasia, anybody have any experience on this?
Long time ago i try make SO on SFA2 cart. But without success.
I see only black screen... I abandon project, because i cannot solve problem (but oryginal SFA2 works fine when running from 27c322 eprom)
My old SDD1 test cart:
Hey guys, sorry to dig such an old post! Does anyone have a clue as to what USA game we could use to make the star ocean (1 chip method)?? Thanks alot!
I know as there is none. Street Fighter Alpha 2 is the only SDD-1 game released outside Japan. There is a method to put the 96mbit Star Ocean hack that removes SDD1 functions on a regular type of cartridge but I don't know where the plans for it are. But that's a better option and you'll need 3 32mbit chips for it.
Anyone here own a needham's emp20 burner? I was wondering what my options are for trying to burn this big 32mb chips, 27c322 specifically.
I stumbled on this thread, and although it is pretty old, it had exactly what I needed to get my Star Ocean repro working. It's my first repro, so I'm super psyched that it worked.
I would like to go all the way and put this in an SNES case with a custom label - anybody know what cheap donor carts actually used all three parts of the cartridge connector - almost everything I have found uses only the middle part. I could carve out space for the rest of the connector from a standard cart, but I'd rather just have one that was made for it if I can get it reasonably cheap.
Just cut the original Star Ocean Japanese cartridge to have the slots that US cartridges have so it will go in a US system.
I'm just showing off the completed repro - thanks for all that posted info on how to do it.
I ended up buying a roached out Stunt Race FX cart to get the right U.S. case for Star Ocean, and here's how it turned out:
sevast wrote:
Follow this one, just replace the 1st (left) rom. You still have to split it, you just burn the larger first section.
http://www.militantgamer.com/Star%20Oce ... slated.docNo clue who the militant gamer is or if he's crazy. I would link to the tutorial on
http://www.ultimate-console.fr but it's in french.
It's weird that this info seems to get found and then lost again for some reason. I seem to remember seeing this info (2nd rom is the same) a few years back and it was discussed and then it's like everybody forgot it.
Does anyone still have the Star Ocean ENG translated.doc they could repost? The link seems to be dead and I'm looking for a guide illustrating 27c322 chips.
I know there's the new method, but I have some old chips to use up.
Thanks
EDIT/UPDATE:
This image answers my above question and shows how to wire up the 27c322
Is a pretty straight forward wiring job, almost pin for pin. The BYTE pine is not connected, neither is the NC, and the A20 is the only one that is the only one that needs to be re-ordered.
skaman wrote:
Thanks, much appreciated!
