Nes to SNES adapter - NESdev BBS

Nes to SNES adapter
by pichichi010 on 2012-05-23 (#94373)

May be this was mention here before but wussup with this?

Does anyone know how it works? does it have a separate AV cables like the one for Sega?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nintendo-NES-To ... 306wt_1164

by 3gengames on 2012-05-23 (#94376)

Another crap clone that just steals power from the other console. Nothing at all interesting.

by strat on 2012-05-25 (#94486)

How about an adapter to make the NES forward compatible with the SNES? It'll be called... the Ares 16-X.

I know, that wasn't clever.

by johannesmutlu on 2012-07-08 (#96621)

1 it,s possible to stick the nes hardware inside an large snes cartride and then send the nes digital video output to the snes frambuffer,will the nes audio once converted toanalogue just can be sent to the snes ext soundpins and then mixed with the dsp analogue output.
2 it,s possinle to put 2 convertor chips inside an large snes cartride to convert the nes audio and video format into a snes format,it should work because the type proccesor and languange of the nes and snes are the same except snes is 16bit duh,so there,s no emulator required.

by byuu on 2012-07-08 (#96623)

A "Super Nintendo" (ala Super Game Boy) would not be feasible.

There is not enough bandwidth to send the NES image to the SNES' PPU, unless you try doing it at 15FPS. The SGB can only do this with classic DMG games because the entire image is 160x144@2bpp -period-, and even then the SGB just -barely- pulls that off. NES is 256x224 with up to 64 colors (6bpp) or 512 colors with emphasis (9bpp). It may be effectively 2BPP on layers, but there are palette selections and such with tiles and sprites, so you would have to use 8bpp. That means 15FPS would be extreme, and even then would likely need to cut off ~16x16 border for extra time.

The audio can pass through trivially thanks to line in mixing, and the SNES controllers are a natural fit sans FC microphone.

About your only chance would be getting into unbelievably stupid territory. Something like a crazy fast FPGA that dynamically translates the NES code to output SNES instructions that the SNES then executes to simulate the NES behavior, abandoning things like color emphasis. It'd be an engineering masterpiece, and take an eternity to make. You may as well just use an NES at that point :P

by Bregalad on 2012-07-11 (#96694)

What about cutting some of the top/bottom borders to have :
- Less data to transfer to the SNES
- Extended VBlank on the SNES's side, so more bandwith

?

by Shiru on 2012-07-11 (#96695)

SNES can normally trasfer a bit less than 6K of data into VRAM in a normal VBlank via DMA. When rendering is turned off, SNES can transfer about 45K per frame. Since 8bpp seems to be a must for the 'Super NES', 256*200 would be ~51K, i.e. more than SNES is capable to do with disabled rendering.

by Bregalad on 2012-07-11 (#96696)

Oh I see then there is no hope...

Even if one could miraculously do it in 4BP by simulating NES sprites using SNES sprites, there would still be ~26k to transfer which would still be way too much