Hi-Def NES HDMI Adapter for the NES

Well I have been inactive for awhile on the forum, but I have not been inactive on development. I have been working on an HDMI adapter that connects to the NES CPU and PPU and extracts the video data from the EXP pins on the PPU, and turns it into HDMI.

So far I have gotten PAL and NTSC chips to work in it, and I can emit up to 1080p video, too.

There is a full on screen menu and a bunch of other things also.

I wanted to solicit people's ideas on what the defaults should be and what kind of palettes I should use.

Also, would built in copynes be useful?

Should the aspect ratio default to 4:3 or should it stretch to fit?

Here's a video of it in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9s_Lkl2mAY

And an introduction video with more info:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnQuBN3iYVA

This is great. I am assuming you are pulling data in the same way the NESRGB board is.

Defaults are going to be hard to figure out for the palettes, but I would very much favor the following picture scaling / dimensions:

-1080p output resolution
-4:3 letterboxing with the image centered
-The internal 256x240 image is scaled to an integer multiple with nearest-neighbor, then scaled with interpolation to the full target size (this maintains pixel clarity while eliminating "fat pixels"

If the palette can look like the NESRGB palette for what is intended to resemble a "normal" NES, I would be happy with that color palette.

A few questions:

-How many frames' worth of latency do you have from the input to the output?
-Is the output refresh rate locked to the vertical sync of the captured image, so that there is no tearing nor the need to drop frames to compensate for drift (my biggest gripe with the XRGB mini / XPC4)?
-Do you have plans on digitizing the analogue audio and encoding it in the HDMI output?

In my opinion, pixel aspect ratio should match the PAR of the original TV system: 8:7 for NTSC or roughly 11:8 for PAL. Is there a way to add a zoom control? Or (wishful thinking) to even overlay the top or bottom status bar onto the playfield somehow so that it remains visible when zoomed in?

The second video appears to imply that the audio is emulated separately, including the expansions, so that it's entirely digital. No ADC for cart audio is planned.

There's no frames of latency; the NES and HDMI are locked together in synchrony so I only need to buffer a couple scanlines. The HDMI is emitted a couple scanlines after the NES' PPU generated it.

Since the two are interlocked, there's no tearing or frame duplication or removal. Anything that gets dropped or modified after this point will solidly be your TV/monitor's fault. The HDMI generated by the board is fully standard complaint 60.00fps video and does not have its timing modified in any way. The NES is very very slightly underclocked to do this, around 0.15%. This is small enough that it isn't humanly detectible.

There is no analog input capability, but this is not a problem. I plan on having ALL the expansion chip audio implemented on here too. The verilog for all of those is written (yes even VRC7) so I can in theory drop this in.

Right now I have implemented the usual 5 NES audio channels. These are written in verilog and dupilcate the NES APU's audio functionality. This netted me a noise free digital version of the audio. DPCM was an interesting case because I have to generate it from the data the NES CPU fetches! I cannot just play DPCM samples; I must fetch the data off the bus as the CPU is reading it for playback, and generate my copy of the DPCM in synchrony with the CPU's.



yeah I want to match the aspect ratio of the original. There's no way to add zoom, I do not have a frame buffer so I'm greatly constrained in the Y direction. I have full free control of the X direction though- I can easily stretch and shrink in this dimension.

Seems like it would be easy to add, and the space inside the NES looks like it would probably be difficult to fit both in at the same time without explicitly combining them... on the other hand, AFAIK the spacing differs between every major revision of the NES/FC.
I'd personally prefer it to default to 5:4 (NTSC) or 3:2 (PAL). (same as Tepples)
Does 1080p emitted look any better/worse than 720p? Are televisions more or less likely to screw one up?
(Also 240×3 = 720, and 1080÷5 = 216; 225×4 = (1440x)900, and 262×4=1050(1280x1024) )
Is it supposed to be 60 Hz? Or 59.94?

Other thoughts: maybe provide extra cropping options, to control the amount of visible pop-on and artifact clash? In the original announcement from TheFox, I brainstormed up a few ideas, most of which are just cosmetic (although some are fairly pipe-dream-ly)

Also, maybe add cheat slowdown by skipping NMIs? Obviously some games won't like it, but others might be ok with it...

EDIT: Now that I'm watching the video, how do/can you compensate DPCM pitch for under/overclocking the CPU?

I only suggested 1080p because yeah, TVs that have to do less scaling will screw it up less.

If it's not too hard, a direct line doubling mode at <whatever> x 480 lines would be great, as would YPbPr outputs. I have an EDTV with 480 lines, so this would look perfect.

A 1080p TV will probably be scaling 1080-line video anyway because it assumes video is still authored for early adopter 1080-line CRT HDTVs that have overscan. A TV that assumes overscan will chop about 3% off each side and blow the rest up. A computer monitor won't assume overscan. But computer monitors often won't have audio output, so you may have to provide a separate headphone jack with analog audio on it.

How do you plan on making this available to the public? (Wishful thinking) Could you buy dead NES Control Decks, scavenge parts, refurbish them into working consoles, install fresh caps as needed, and install this mod?

I plan on developing a ROM that tests exactly how much an NES has been overclocked, by assuming that the line rate is ~15.7 kHz and counting the cycles that the PPU takes to render 240 lines. Will I have testers?

Even many mediocre televisions let you turn off such a design defect feature, letting it do a 1:1 pixel mapping. I think best results would come from optimizing output for properly configured sets.

This would be great, and a CopyNES built in would be a bonus, for me anyways...

Any chance you can add simulated scanlines? Something like how emulators have scanline video filters.

Some people are opposed to scanline spacing simulation on a philosophical level. I'm not entirely sure to what extent kev is among them.

EDIT: In #nesdev a couple nights ago, I proposed a more physically-motivated interpretation where gamma represents beam spreading, and kev didn't shoot it down.

Looks very nice!

So, it replaces both the PPU and APU with an FPGA? Would it be worthwhile to replace the CPU as well and build it on a new board, instead of modding an NES?

It doesn't replace the PPU, it is still required. It is spied on like the NESRGB before it. Without the NES PPU you won't have any video.

Posted two more vids:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYWGAS7s3Vw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPPgwh6nLeI

Ah, I see. Well, I really like the idea of clean and modern output from the NES. Especially being able to get 60 fps output instead of interlaced 30 fps without an expensive converter would be great. I suppose it depends on how much this costs, as well. Do you have to desolder both the PPU and CPU to install?

I`d actually like to see the whole package, new and clean though. My old NES is a bit temperamental, and of course there`s the ZIF connector hassle. I'd love an all-new replacement.

Here's a few more random brainstorming ideas, mostly things that might help game development:
* Detect bad cartridge insertion ... whatever that means...
* Display raw PPU fetches (producing a 336x240 image instead of 256x240)
* Visually overlay when /IRQ fires

Yes you have to desolder both the PPU and CPU, because it spies on the CPU bus too for getting the audio register writes and DPCM DMA contents and to read the controller.


Small update:

Working on adding HQX scaling (2x, 3x, and 4x). I have the guts of the code written for it, just need to calculate the tables and then I get to test it out.

Last of the 3 part series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2y7LIcybfc

I'm looking forward to this being ready awesome work. I will be offering installation service's for this kit
once its ready.

Be sure to visit my website. http://www.retrogaming-mods.com/

I got the HQ2X/3X/4X scaling working now and made an example video of the HQ3X at 720p. I cannot record 1080p unfortunately so I can't capture the 4X one in video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_v5vvh2h0A

There's no audio because I needed the room for the scaler. Because space constraints have been hit, I am going to stuff another board with a bigger part that fortunately has the same pinout, hopefully alleviating my space issues.

With this bigger part, I should be able to get VRC7 in there too. (VRC7 is around 1300 LEs, while the HQX scaler is 2230 and the 65C02 core is 1320).

Impressive work, however I'd like to see picture-degrading filters (the way emulators do it) to actually get worse picture quality to get that old-tv look. Is it possible?

Even though I'd never use a HQ filter like that (pixels forever!!!), I am still salivating at the idea of getting clean 60 fps picture out of my NES...

Any potential problems there with unofficial instructions?

no, this is my "hypervisor" CPU that sits on the FPGA. it does not run the game code, it only runs my code that sits on the FPGA itself. this CPU runs the menu and hardware initialization and such. The NES CPU still is running the actual game code.

Very interesting! Does under clocking cause any games to break? Also, do you think this will break sync with TAS videos, if the inputs were to be played back on an HDMI modded NES?

nope, both CPU and PPU are clocked the same so no games should break, and TAS videos should play back too without desynch if it works on an unmodified NES without desynching.

If you have "HQ3X", why not a simple scanline filter?

I never understood the appeal of these smoothing filters like in ZSNES the "eagle engine" or "super sai engine". It looks terrible. The only filter I've found that makes games look a bit nicer is a scanline filter. Either 100% dark lines or something like 50% or 25% darkening lines.

Kev told #nesdev that he's already going to have to move up to a bigger FPGA for hq3x/hq4x. I don't know whether a good scanlines filter will fit.

Yes, I am working on getting scanlines in there. I just have to finish scalers first, so I can get to the next thing. Contrary to popular belief, yes indeed there will be scanlines. hehe.

Tonight so far, I got the three HQX scalers working, and implemented scale2x and scale3x using the HQX "engine" so those take up literally no resources now. the HQX scaler also performs nearest neighbor and I am going to coax it into doing some interpolation.

While working on HQX, I found a cute little thing, where I can plug the HQX mask into the video directly. it ended up looking really cool so I think I will leave it in as "x-ray mode" or something.

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/hdmi/ ... mario1.JPG

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/hdmi/ ... mario2.JPG

Hopefully tonight the scalers will be done and I will get scanlines working.

PLEASE include copynes. The usefulness of this kit would go off the scale.

I just posted my first update video evar on this project using my new camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCpwpgRTxcI

Hawt!!

Here's some example scanline tests from the scanline generator I was working on tonight. I have finished scalers 100% and that is done, so I started on the scanline generators.

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/hdmi/ ... es/latest/

I ran into a problem which I knew I'd have on 1080p (and PAL modes). That is, each NES scanline requires a non-integer number of scanlines on the HDMI display. Namely at 1080p, each NES scanline needs 4.5 HDMI scanlines.

This means that the height of each subsequent NES scanline alternates 4/5/4/5/4/5 HDMI lines.

To counter this (you can see an example of what this type looks like, see below) I came up with a scan line generator that "free runs" in relation to the NES video, instead of trying to "scanline" each NES line on the HDMI display. The results of this method are in the above /latest/ directory.

There's also a scanline generator that is tied to the actual NES scanlines, but it can look bad (especially on PAL) due to the afore-mentioned problem. Those are here:

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/hdmi/scanlines/

the filename describes how "Deep" the scanline effect is. 0 = no scanlines at all, FF = maximum.

Very nice. Glad to see lots of options.

If it was a USB CopyNES and not a parallel port thing, I'd get one for sure.

I see artifacts in the free running pattern. Can you make the free running pattern 9 output lines tall, containing two cycles in 1080p or three cycles in 720p?

How tall are the PAL scanlines in the output?

Scanlines that don't correspond to actual NES lines don't really make a whole lot of sense. It would be best to be sure they are aligned if possible...

Considering the high resolution of the upscaled image, having black lines the size of the upscaled line would probably look bad compared to thinner lines that don't fall exactly between NES scanlines. Plus wouldn't it simulate an older display better that way as the lines you'd see in a CRT aren't going to match up with every NES line of pixels.

Either way, I think kevtris made it clear it'll be full of options for everyone's tastes.

Where did you hear that piece of misinformation?

The lines on (most) CRT TVs correspond exactly to the lines of the input video signal. A typical 480i signal is interlaced, so the lines alternate between two patterns. Some TVs will narrow the beam enough that there is blank space between scanlines, since a typical interlaced signal will fill in those blank spaces 1/60th of a second later. Since the NES produces a progressive video signal, those spaces never get filled in, which makes them much more apparent than they'd normally be.

In #nesdev on EFnet, direct from kevtris. Scanlines look fine at 720p. But the NES's 240p picture height doesn't divide evenly into 1080p. Our attempts to make a 4.5-pixel-tall scanline pattern have looked like Venetian blinds, where the 2-line repeating pattern sticks out like a sore thumb. Kev would love to be proven wrong about this.

PAL is even hairier to scale. The PAL NES and Dendy PPUs generate a 288p picture with 240 lines of background and sprites plus 48 pixels of combined top and bottom border. Each NES line corresponds to 2.5 720p lines, 3.75 1080p lines, or 4.167 1200p lines.

Perhaps a better way of saying it is, when you blow up the image like is being done here, if you have black lines the same size as the NES scanlines in the image it doesn't look so great. I'm not going to go into how CRTs look. We all know how it looks on a CRT. This is just about putting filters on to make it more your taste. I didn't spend a lot of time studying the pictures shown.

The lines that don't exactly match up that I may have been thinking of may have been the aperture grille or shadow mask.

A lot of people have misconceptions about scanlines and why they are there - they are just gaps between the areas the beam normally strikes that would normally be hit on every other field. To have scanlines superimposed on a generated image is pointless if the spacing of the scanlines does not equal the spacing of the output image's pixels vertically. How wide they should be, how soft / strong, etc. is a matter of taste, but if they don't match the number of lines then you might as well superimpose any horizontal lines and call it a day.

It's not that the lines should be the same size, it's the spacing and number of lines that matters. To fit it properly into 1080 lines, an integer scaling of 5 might not be inappropriate. At first this seems too strong, as 240 * 5 == 1200 which is too tall for 1080. However, most standard NTSC TVs only saw ~224 of these lines, and many backdrop mappings and HUD placements are made for an even safer zoning. Chopping off a few lines on the top and bottom wouldn't be so bad. If you take 224 and scale it by 5, the resulting height is 1120, which almost fits into 1080. Definitely not the ideal solution, but it would allow clean scaling at the expensive of one row of tiles (when compared to a 224-height image). Perhaps something like that could be an option.

EDIT: I'm a bumbling moron when I explain stuff, here are some images I made.

This image is a rough approximation of a scanline filter I whipped together over Super Mario Bros. The important detail is that the dark regions, simulating the gaps between the CRT beam trails, is on the transition point between the pixels. The intended appearance is that the line, the lighter part, looks more like a slightly fuzzy beam going from one side to the other. The dark areas separate the rows.


This second image is the same source image, but the scanlines being overlaid are spaced a little further off of the pixel spacing, giving an interesing moire pattern. The scanlines no longer emphasize the vertical spacing of the pixels, and it just looks like a goof put window blinds over the image. This is what a lot of people do with the Gonbes RGB adapter paired with a scanline generator PCB:



In my opinion the first looks a lot more like what a CRT is doing. I hope that clears up what I'm trying to say.

According to kevtris, a lot of TVs actually take the 1080 line picture and scale it up, assuming that the content was authored for early 1080i overscanned CRT HDTVs. So we need to in effect scale 240 minus a few percent to 1080 minus a few percent. Besides, the scaling options are limited because it doesn't have a frame buffer but only a circular buffer a few lines tall. This limits to what extent can be expanded or contracted.


True. But we need a 9-pixel-tall pattern that encompasses 2 input lines.

Kev has implemented a "free running" scanlines filter that draws three "scanlines" over every two NES output lines. It looks, frankly, like aliased cr*p.

A lot of TVs will make this assumption, but if the image is cut off as a result of the TV doing overscan correction then I think it should be up to them to fix their settings if it bothers them, chuck their cheap television in the garbage, or simply not care. Designing around people with poorly configured televisions degrades the experience for other people who have them set up properly.



Based on the pictures posted above, the free running solution doesn't look so great. Is the scanline filter restricted to blacking out a line entirely, or can there be variation in intensity?

Maybe something like this, repeating?



I'm not at a machine with appropriate tools right now so I can't test it, but a pattern like that which lines up might look okay.

This may be a reason to get a 2160p (UHD) TV, because 2160/9 = 240.

I have finished the FPGA side pretty much of this project now. In the last few days I have added:

* scanline generators (two kinds- NES locked and free run)

* menu! menu now lets you set up all of the video parameters from the controller.

* MMC5 audio (totally new core)
* VRC6 audio (heavily rewrote)
* FDS audio (totally new core)
* N106 audio (some rewriting)
* sunsoft5B audio (some rewriting)
* VRC7 (some rewriting)

* Audio FIR filter (2 stage)

The audio stuff is ported from the FPGA NES project and have been gone over again to fix bugs, update old code and all that. Some of it was early verilog I had written and it was ugly so it got rewritten.

The FPGA resources are now totally used up:

* logic elements: 98%
* pins: 100%
* PLLs: 100%
* multipliers: 2 left
* blockrams: 100%

This means that the scanline generators are going to have to stay as they are but I think it should be fairly usable. I tried a bunch of "NES locked" scanline generator ideas people mentioned in here and on the IRC channel but they all looked pretty bad and noticeable, unfortunately.

Setting the 1080p mode to 3x scanlines (a "scanline" every 3 HDMI lines) which is higher resolution than the NES and then using one of the scalers looks fairly passable. If you want "real" scanlines, then 720p or 480p modes will need to be used. PAL systems will have to use the free run mode most likely since the scaling on them is non-integer due to hardware restrictions between the PPU frame and the HDMI frame.

All expansion audio is implemented and works now. The VRC7 needs some slight tweaking but seems to be pretty close. At the time I implemented this I didn't know about the ADSR control bit so I will add that.

I have each source separate, and relative volumes of all channels are adjustable against each other. I still need to write a boatload of menu code to allow you to adjust all the parameters though (relative volumes) but the hardware side is all done at least.

Each chip and in some cases sub channels are all individually pannable. This includes the original NES channels (all are pannable individually), VRC6 (individually pannable), MMC5 (same), and the others are pannable as a unit. VRC7 has 2 outputs that can be panned individually left/right, each being a set of 3 channels.

There's a FIR filter to cut out most of the aliasing from the audio and works quite decent. Looped noise sounds pretty decent. There's still a tiny bit of aliasing on very very very high frequency squares but this is unavoidable. The only time I could hear it was when I used a program that let me manually poke the sound registers.

I will release another update video soon outlining some of the new features I added in the last week.

So, the 2C07 is active for 240/312 = 77% of the frame, while the 2C02 is active for (224 to 240)/262 = 85% to 92%, and 720p and 1080p are active for 96% of the frame... how many scanlines tall is your circular buffer? It looks like you would need 63 for 2C07→720p@50... oy.

Would it be better to offer windowboxed output instead of nonuniform scanlines? I assume PAL-market HDTVs support the same de-windowboxing scalers that I've seen in NTSC-land.

Why not IIR? A Butterworth or Chebyshev-I lowpass should be more efficient in terms of multiplications per sample per sharpness, assuming that the group delay doesn't get too large.

it's 32 scanlines high and I cannot make it bigger. This already was bigger than I was hoping I'd need, but 50fps 720/1080p is kinda dumb. they simply lengthen the hblank on each scanline, instead of increasing vblank. This means as you surmised, that I need a larger buffer, and this is indeed the case. I letterbox PAL slightly to fit and not run out of buffer. It's literally as tall as I can make it before the buffer starts to wrap, within 5-8 HDMI scanlines (I chose a height that looked best when vertically scrolling).

I thought about an IIR and I might give it a try before release.

Video of Kevin putting together the 1st prototype board using stencil and solder paste, his vacuum tool, and his reflow oven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ3WJ_eCNTU

I have put up a video outlining all of the features of the Hi Def NES adapter's video functionality now it's here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlb0E_jkYts

I show off the scanlines, stretching, interpolation and scalers.

Outputting and upscaling a hi-def picture of a retro console is becomming more popular. Here is a similar idea for the Gameboy : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/50 ... -boy-class. However, the hdmyboy project is much less ambitious because it is converting the digital data that would go to the LCD, it does not monitor palette entries nor does it emulate the APU.

Hmmm... that timeline is missing a lot between 1990 and 2013, namely Brian Provinciano's digital VGA capture of the GB & GBA, etc.

http://web.archive.org/web/200611131557 ... /index.php
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/sh ... GA-Adapter

Well the audio update video has been posted showing off all of the expansion audio capabilities, along with cropping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNBVzGaworw


Enjoy! (yeah the sunsoft 5B was a lot quieter than it should'a been. that's why there is a gain control!)

Going to work on palettes next and flesh out the rest of the menu next.

Those sound chips are found on the cart, correct? But since you are spying the CPU and PPU you don't get any of the sound info when it comes from the cart, right? I am just a little confused why you need to have the chip support enabled. Also, can you just leave all the chips enabled all the time? Or does that just mess everything up?

yes the chips are on the carts but since I need the sound in digital format I am generating it myself (and then you can use a powerpak or similar to play games with extra chips without needing the cart)

you can leave the chips on but you might get random noises if the games use the same register addresses as the sound chips.

I see. Thanks.

And then the 16 line cropping is just to take off what is normally not seen on an NTSC TV?

Also, what are the palettes you are talking about? Border palletes or are they for the menu?

This project is really cool and innovative. It looks like this is an approach that can be applied to other consoles. I will definitely be getting in line when production begins.

yes, the cropping removes the stuff that normally is in overscan. many games have lots of "junk" at the edges and top of the screen so this would hide that.

the palettes are the RGB palettes used to render the NES graphics.

thanks for the words of encouragement

Kevtris and I check out the Hi-Def NES on my 19" lcd tv.
We also test the zapper out and talk about what's going on with the project.

http://youtu.be/aZ4i-hHkPBQ

This is my first real attempt at putting the pcbs of the Hi-Def NES HDMI kit in to a Nintendo Top Loader.
http://youtu.be/PS8SZirjtoQ

Here's the 4th update!

Things added since last time:

* DVI Mode
* Screen is centered
* Pixel masking fixed
* Set the relative audio volumes
* Fixed extraneous pixels
* Hot keys were added
* Overclocking
* Palettes!
* Menu info is now correct
* Fixed the powerpak NSF player

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9gUVcU ... e=youtu.be

Enjoy!

Absolutely outstanding! Fixed sound pitch with an over clock and DVI mode are killer features!

Literally, that lays to rest all the concerns I had about this vs RGB. RGB will be essentially obsolete unless you want to play lightgun games..

I may have found a good solution to getting the hdmi connector to come out the back of the top loader and av famicom!!!

http://youtu.be/DEDWrQzdsWM

Update #5 has been posted. The brightness on the HDMI output is a bit blown out but this is because of the capture card. I didn't spot it until it was rendered and posted. bleh. Every time I capture something it seems to screw it up in a different way.

Anyways, I show a couple games (Duck Maze, Orb 3D, and Micromachines) which apparently gave the nesRGB fits. Also, the flowing palette demo apparently doesn't work either. All four of these are shown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNkbuQx ... e=youtu.be

Enjoy!

Glad to see another update! I'm very excited to get one of these. Still hoping copynes gets included.

Here, here, I look forward to this as well, especially if the CopyNES gets included.

Update #6 is now posted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fwdTdg ... e=youtu.be


Looks like I'm about done on the software side. The things left:

* copynes
* updating via cart
* audio register viewer
* PCB redesign to fit in the toploader under the main PCB

One request on the CopyNES: the Everdrive is incompatible with it and won't boot because the BIOS reading fails. Would it be possible to have some sort of disable switch so that the CopyNES would be completely disabled instead of having to disable itself via BIOS code on boot?

I was going to have it disabled by default. Since the FPGA is controlling it, I don't have to run code first to turn it off and run the cart. The everdrive works with the unit as it is, I tested it. However the everdrive does not like overclocking at all. If you go past 2.1MHz the everdrive crashes and locks up so bad it requires a hard power cycle to make it work again. I absolutely hated the stupidly bright green LED on the everdrive, too. It appears to be connected to the lockout chip, and since the toploader has no lockout chip, the LED turns on and off randomly during game play which is distracting. I ended up putting a piece of black tape over the LED.

I am waiting in anticipation for sure!

Now I just need someone to help me install it in the DFW area and also help me deck out my NES (it is very beat up and missing its front door). In anticipation I will go out and buy an Everdrive N8!

Here's update #7. This time I totally redo the board layout, and I took a time lapse video of me doing this. You can watch the board "grow" from nothing to completion!

CopyNES USB was added, a 5V buck regulator on-board, and a form-factor re-do so it will properly fit the toploader.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7IpLnc ... e=youtu.be

Enjoy!

With your adapter, could it be made possible to display 960 lines in the 1080 HD mode? This would give top and bottom borders but eliminate stretching artifacts and uneven scanlines. Also, while you cannot obtain an 8/7 pixel aspect ratio with integer scaling, is it possible to do a pixel-perfect 1/1 and a 5/4 pixel aspect ratio within the screen resolution with the adapter?

The PPU puts out 262-scanline fields at a steady rate, and the TV likewise expects fields at a steady rate. These rates differ slightly. To make up the difference, the adapter stores a couple dozen lines of pixels in a circular buffer. But in order not to overrun this buffer, the percentage of the signal occupied by picture has to be within a few percent of each other. NTSC NES has 240 picture lines out of 262 signal lines, and HDMI 1080p has 1080 picture lines out of 1125 bitstream lines.

960/1125 = 85.3 percent
240/262 = 91.6 percent
1080/1125 = 96.0 percent

(.960 - .916)*262 = 12 lines of buffer
(.916 - .853)*262 = 17 lines of buffer

Is 17 already too much?

I asked about the size of the scanline circular buffer in post 137112:

Then I'll have to show my math to kevtris in #nesdev and ask what doesn't add up.

Update #8 is now posted. This time I show how I place the parts and reflow solder it in a modified toaster oven.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7r6zkKvJrU


After a few more minor additions, I think it will be ready for the world.

this is just beyond awesomness! do you have any idea of what it will cost us mortals to buy it from you if you would go full production?
I would love to buy one or a couple. I only have a japanese toploader but it might work with that one to? Or ill just buy a US toploader also

Thanks for doing this Kevtris!

The only trouble with a Famicom AV over a NES Top Loader would be the placement of the standoffs on the bottom side of the shell, I would not be surprised if they were identical as for this purpose.

Based on what I have seen and read, I would suggest a mod like this would go for probably $300 US. While that is a lot of money, you are getting a ton of value. Input as lag free as technology will allow, digital internal and expansion audio, future-proof video, video scalers, adjustable scanlines, palette choices, cropping the upper and lower lines, CopyNES etc. A good deal of the 2A03 and a decent portion of the 2C02 are being recreated in hardware by one of the most knowledgeable experts of the NES.

Is it only suitable for a top-loader or could it go in a front-loader?

I have both of the aforementioned systems (and unmodded); I can check if someone asks me to. :-)

I am not sure what the cost will be exactly, but I hope to sell the board for 100 bucks or less.

That is not much more expensive than a NESRGB board, and this does not need an extra adapter board. I had assumed this was going to be an exclusive kevtris/game-tech collaboration, but I may have missed something in the past six pages. This mod does not require any skills or tools above those for a NESRGB, but will be somewhat more difficult because you have to remove both main chips. If kevtris charges $100 for a populated board and game-tech charges $100 to install, then that would be extremely reasonable. I might even consider getting my pride and joy taken care of.



Please, that would be extremely helpful.

The NES has lots of space to put this board, so finding a solution to keep it in place should not be too difficult.

This may be a stupid question, but will the original AV outputs still work as if the board was never installed? I cannot think of any reason why they should not.

Audio certainly could work, but the video can't:
1- the system clock is slowed down so that the entire game runs at 60Hz instead of the NES-standard 60.1Hz, and that (probably) means it's no longer using the correct frequency for color decoding
2- the 2C02's video output has to be used to distinguish between sprites and background tiles.
3- it could independently re-generate composite video over the video jack, but to what end?

To facilitate recording. Some capture devices have composite and S-Video inputs but not HDMI inputs, possibly because their manufacturers assume that "most" HDMI signals will have HDCP (even though this product does not).

anything made within the last 2-3 years that's analog only? I'd be kinda surprised unless it's super duper cheap.

As for making the composite still work, yes and no. the composite output will NOT be usable when in HDMI mode. I was thinking of effectively passing the system clock when the HDMI plug is removed, and stop lying to the PPU so that the composite output will work again properly.

in HDMI mode though of course composite video will no longer work. the digital audio will always run though, and will be present on the 5 digital audio pads at all times (even in DVI mode).

anyways if you want to record analog video from an NES, why are you using this adapter you'd want to record at 720p or 1080p probably instead, digitally to get any kind of use out of it.

Because it's installed, and I don't want to uninstall it all the time to record. The "stop lying" mode might help in that case.

Oh, and my capture equipment is more than 3 years old.

Last time I checked, devices that capture digital video were pretty expensive, while the ones that capture analog video were dirty cheap.

That depends on your definition of expensive, and your requirements. Most people are probably using ones that cost around $140-150, but you can find bargain basement ones for $75.

They'll all mostly accept 1080p60 input, but the cheaper ones will record the 60p input at 30p.

The price has likely come down a lot due to the popularity of Twitch and similar sites: people use HDMI capture boxes to stream/record their games.

The HDMI NES determines the pixel colors like the NESRGB by obtaining the palette entry for each pixel by monitoring PPU pins EXT0-3 and turning all the true PPU palette colors to black for background and white for sprites. This allows them to be easily distinguished in the analog composite video output so the HDMI NES hardware can distinguish between a sprite palette entry and a background palette entry.

Because the HDMI NES is connected to the CPU as well as the PPU, could the distinction between sprite and background palettes be made by monitoring writes to $4014 and $2003/2004? $4014 allows you to update all 64 sprites at one time simply and most games use it over the far less reliable PPU $2003/2004, but I presume you need to be monitoring the CPU to tell when it is being accessed. NESRGB only monitors the PPU, but HDMI NES monitors both.

However, even if this was feasible, would there be much of an advantage over the current method? I suppose it could assist in games that get really hackish with their OAM like Micro Machines and it would allow the native PPU signal to be preserved and give a more digital capture of the video, but on the other hand the current method works for just about everything and this method might be much more complex to implement.

Micro Machines works fine as far as I know. Kevtris showed it working in a previous demonstration video. The only trouble was a small black line where there shouldn't be one. This was quite a while ago so maybe he has already fixed it? He also showed some other games and demos working correctly that doesn't work right on NESRGB, i.e. Blarrg's flowing palette demo.

Doing this requires re-implementing and emulating the PPU's sprite engine. The point behind using the PPU's digital output is to avoid having to emulate any significant portion of the PPU...

(obviously it still has to emulate the composite video generation, including emphasis bits)

My thought was that you use the $4014 write to identify the 256 bytes that are going to be transferred to OAM via DMA and read the first and last byte of each four bytes to determine the location of every sprite. Would that require a full re-implementation of the sprite engine or only just being aware of what is being written and when and what it means?

It'd still need to snoop pattern table reads in order to tell which pixels of each sprite are transparent and, if a sprite has the behind background set, which background pixels are transparent.

Yeah, that's a significant part of the rendering proccess that would have to be replicated. The black/white trick sounds like a much more sensible way to tell background and sprite pixels apart.

In other news, those who purchased the Analogue Nt will get a first taste of kevtris' HDMI Adapter :



Source : http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/26/88503 ... do-console

Finally, some real video of the Analogue Nt with the HDMI NES mod :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXsZ3LvdfCs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN6qtbWRC5Y

Is there a reason why values of settings are in hex? Is space in the menu program really too tight for a hex-to-decimal converter?

Yup. It was thrown in at the end. I have around 20-30 bytes free in the ROM now, and I have "repacked the suitcase" (optimized for space) the code several times already. I'm done and ready to ship it. A future update might convert some entries into decimal.

All features are now in and I'm finishing up the loose ends; CopyNES is in and working (though there's not much of a client yet) and a lot of other fun stuff.

I will post another update video in a day or two most likely.

Woot, I finally sent the stuff off so the HiDefNES boards are in production! I have also posted the final "pre production" update. I don't know how long it will be until I get boards in hand but I will probably post another update video when that happens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R5PZQ78NJ0

kevtris, since the Analogue Nt uses your HDMI mod then perhaps you can answer this. The Analogue Nt talks about outputting RGB video and has an optional upgrade to HDMI with your creation, is it possible for them to have both RGB and HDMI functioning at the same time? Or is it a one or the other situation? I tried contacting them and never got a response.

I think it'd be nice to have a RGB capable system that also has the HDMI for whenever you are stuck with a digital TV.

Toward the end of the latest video Kevin says it should be possible for both to work together, but he needed to test further.

Don't expect Analogue Interactive to give information when the answers are uncertain and therefore inconvenient.

Well they sell the thing, so how hard would it be to test if it works with both? I don't think you can sell a $500 system and not be able to answer a simple question about the use of it. To be clear I don't want to know that RGB and HDMI work at the same time, just that the same system can be used with either a RGB monitor or HDMI TV. Meaning if you buy the HDMI upgrade, are you forfeiting RGB and forced to use HDMI? Or is it actually just adding another option?

That answer is important to me as well, as I'd ideally like to have it still be able to do RGB. If an NESRGB kit and the HDMI adapter are both used together, I guess one would have to be in a "slave" configuration where it is also snooping the palette writes and EXT pin data, but it isn't writing the modified palette since the other is already doing it. I suppose, though, if they both did the write in parallel, it would be the same write, so there wouldn't be much of a conflict aside from minor differences in rise/fall times...

By RGB, do you mean 15.7 kHz RGB of a standard definition arcade or IIGS monitor or the 31.5 kHz enhanced definition RGB of a VGA monitor?

This console is such a bargain, just buy 2 of them!

By 15.7KHz RGB, do you mean a 15.7kHz horizontal scan rate, or the overall scan rate / vertical sync rate?

When most people say RGB, it is a shorthand for the former, since typing out "~15Khz Hsync RGB with Composite Sync" is frustrating to write every time.

It using Tim's nesrgb kit, so 15khz rgb etc etc.

So then the question is can Tim's NESRGB kit would in parallel with Kevtris's HDMI kit? As tokumaru pointed out, having to buy two systems would be unpleasant.

That's the plan, but not yet tested. Kevin made it sound like the hdmi cord would have to be unplugged to let the nesrgb work, but I could be wrong about that too.

That's good to hear, but I'm hoping you or someone else can get us a concrete answer about how using the RGB and HDMI in the same system would work.

Here's how it works:

Plugging in the HDMI cable sets the system to emit HDMI video. it changes the CPU/PPU over to use the FPGA-generated special clock signals. The analog video output(s) will produce video but it will not be good video. sprites will show up white and tiles show up as black. The video will also be slightly jittery (due to how the clock generation works).

Unplugging HDMI switches the PPU/CPU over to use the NES mobo generated clock, and makes the PPU work in "passthrough" mode, so that the PPU works like it always did, generating composite video. In this mode, the FPGA's audio hardware still works, and is switched over to using the NES mobo clock too. In this mode, overclocking, menus, and everything else DO NOT WORK (except the audio as specified). If you want to turn audio chips on/off you must do this through HDMI.

When you plug/unplug the HDMI cable, it resets the NES. This is because the CPU would crash anyways during clock switchover. (And it makes the logistics of things impossible otherwise)

How it should work with the nesRGB:

(Not tested... and the nesRGB needs some slight mods I will explain below)

There's a solderable jumper on the Hidef NES board that must be soldered. When this is done, the PPU passthrough mode is disabled, and it goes back to "lying" to the PPU again. However, the nesRGB uses a slightly different set of palette entries from the HidefNES does... so that jumper will make it whisper the sweet nothings to the PPU that the nesRGB needs to operate properly.

As before, in HDMI mode, the nesRGB won't work right and have lots of jitter in the video (and due to the different palette entries might not work at all).

The modifications needed to make the board compatible are as follows:

* The nesRGB board will sit on the NES mobo, and the HidefNES board will sit on top of the nesRGB.
* The bidirectional buffer between the CPLD and PPU on the nesRGB board has to be removed.
* The D0-D7 pins of the PPU must be connected to D0-D7 on the nesRGB socket (this gets the NES data bus to the HidefNES board).
* The code in the nesRGB must be modified, or an inverter added to make the nesRGB's NES data bus buffers incapable of driving the
NES bus.
* The EXT pins on the PPU must be passed through to the nesRGB board.
* The afore-mentioned solder jumper must be soldered on the HidefNES board.

This is all untested, but it should work. I might've screwed it up a bit too. I will give it a test eventually when everything else is done and I have some time to do it.


Another note:

The Everdrive is having a lot of problems with the HidefNES due to the clocking required to make it work. The early versions of the mapper (version 3) seem to mostly work, but anything later DOES NOT WORK. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do to fix this, and on examination of the "Example mapper code" for the Everdrive, the reason is the way it interfaces to the NES bus. It can be fixed, but it must be done on the Everdrive end. If someone wants to pay me for my time I can fix at least some of the mappers. The Powerpak works fine as does every release cartridge I have tested.

I checked out the Everdrive forum and it seems the Everdrive doesn't work on every system; there's a thread showing it failing on some Famicoms and it fails on the HidefNES in the exact same manner.

Is it this thread? : http://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic ... 98#msg9998 I have a Famicom on the way with an HVC-CPU-07 and rev. E chips, I hope my Everdrive will not fail in this machine.

Yep that's the thread. It CAN be fixed, but it must be fixed in the FPGA side of the Everdrive. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do on the hdmi end to fix it. The problem is the mappers are coded in a fairly IMO poor way with regards to how it uses M2 directly to clock things in, and any tiny amount of noise will cause false clocking; nothing is synchronized either. All the NES side signals should've been synchronized to the 50MHz oscillator on the Everdrive before being worked on. It would solve all of the compatibility issues.

I had quite a few problems getting reliable operation myself. It's fairly non-trivial to latch data off the NES bus without having it fail, due to the noise on M2 and the somewhat "variable" timing of where things occur relative to it. I had major problems with the DPCM not properly reading data off the bus because DPCM (and sprite) DMA's have different timing than the 6502 accesses. It was a huge headache. The various revisions of the CPU only made it worse. The blank rev CPUs have a much different timing than the E and up ones.

So at this point I have to say that the Everdrive is mostly incompatible with the Hidef NES unfortunately. Again, it can be fixed but it will take some HDL doing to get it going on the Everdrive end.

That is unfortunate. Maybe, though, this can be a drive for him to update the firmware with some missing features added as well as fixing this issue. (Sunsoft 5B...)

The Famicom I described above came and the Everdrive did not fail in it. My Everdrive works with rev. E CPU/PPU, a rev. G CPU/PPU and a rev. H CPU/PPU.

Maybe this will be a good drive for many mappers to be updated, not only for the HDMI project's compatibility, but maybe also some other problems with various titles (and missing Sunsoft 5B support! What's the deal there?!)

Ooooh yeah. PCBs have arrived!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFbGa7fdcVY

It won't be long now!

Woot, super excited! Can't wait.

Hey Kevin, when will you be taking orders on these? I don't want to miss out

Ok the first 6 Hi-Def NES modded US top loaders are up for auction on ebay, just search nes hdmi.
They were a bit late as I had a hell of a time uploading them because ebay wouldn't let me upload them and they weren't specific enough about why so I had to try several times. Turns out you can use the word 'mod' in the title, but if you say kit they think it has bundled accessories and if you are listing in the consoles category and don't have the bundled accs option listed then it won't upload. I was doing this from misterlister or whatever that shitty prog is named now. Then they marked them as duplicates even though I used different pics for top and bottom shots on each auction and some different txt in description. I had to add the 3 numbers of the serial number to the title to get them to release all the auctions as not dupes, FK!!!

I came up with this myself, aften experimenting a bit with GIMP.



Example 1 (click picture to see full resolution):

Example 2 (my favourite):

I think the second one looks very good. Both are a big improvement over the current ones because the lines are lined up with NES lines. The free-running solution looks very strange.

There were some neat scanline filters out there that try to mimic the way that the apparent width of the scanline varied depending on the intensity of the pixel, they look pretty neat. (EDIT: called scanline bleed, I believe) Basically, with a 4x scaling, you might see something like this for a middle intensity pixel:

0%
50%
100%
50%
0%

But for a pure white pixel you might see this:

25%
75%
100%
75%
25%

Obviously I just picked the actual numbers out of thin air just to illustrate the idea.

EDIT: It looks like the UltraHDMI N64 kit is doing exactly this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlq1AaxngEU

He went a bit overboard, though, and it looks like he's scaling the entire screen in and out slightly based on the overall intensity of the whole screen (like it zooms in and out slightly). I guess that's technically accurate (I remember old CRT TVs doing that) but it seems exaggerated here, and probably isn't compatible with the sort of line-by-line approach that kevtris is doing.

This can be faked by using different gamma correction curves for output scanlines closer to and farther from the center of the input scanline, as I mentioned back on page 1. Somewhere I made a mockup of what it'd look like, but I can't find it at the moment.

It's too bad all of the ebay auctions start and end at the same time. I don't want to bid on multiple systems and end up with more than one. It would also drive the price up for no reason.

Yeah that was my mistake, but I was having such a difficult time with uploading them I was losing time and wanted them up asap.
If it had went smooth initially they would be ten minutes apart at least.
I'll be listing more this sunday, but no more 106's and only a couple will be as nice of condition as the first 6.
I'll also list maybe 4 av fami's as well. Not sure if i'll get any front loaders done, I don't think I have any good 72 pin zifs only 2 BLW's so not sure what to do yet.

Do you still plan of doing "buy it now" for that second wave of console?

Front loader with HDMI and the BLW kit would be really a nice console, you should ebay those also

No, but mostly because second set will be posted same time as first set will be ending and i'll have no clue what to set them for and we still need all the capital we can get to order a big batch of kits to sell to all.

I really wish the US / CAN exchange rate wasn't in the crapper right now...

Likewise, it is really a pain especially for big purchase like this. ;-(

It could be worse... Here in Brazil, the US$ hasn't been so expensive since 2003. Buying anything from abroad these days is absolutely unfeasible.

You could do preorders to raise the money, right?

Is the turnaround period too long to make that s feasible option? Or is the deman so high that the price point is hard to set?

I understand the need to get capital back, you and Kevtris invested alot in this it seems.

Though I'm a bit troubled by the fact that your consoles on ebay are getting near the price of Analogue NT already... I'm pretty sure they will exceed the NT price by the end on Sunday.

Are people clueless or they just want to get it first no matter the price?

That happens even with the NES RGB kits. I think this sort of thing will be most affordable to those willing to do it themselves, and those who are willing to speak directly to hire people to do it for their console instead of buying a pre-modded system.

Limited supply, high demand. It's simple. It's pretty direct, too, because it's an auction, so it represents the actual price that people are willing to pay for them.

The prices will eventually drop to "normal" levels as those who want them the most get their hands on them, and the supply will increase once game-tech.us and Kevtris can get boards out to other installers. They probably want to try to at least break even before they start selling the boards by themselves on the cheap, they've probably already invested tens of thousands of dollars in both time and actual money to get to this point.

For reference about where their $300 USD starting point came from, game-tech.us mentioned that decent toploaders tend to sell for $100, the pricepoint of the HDMI board was $120 (which probably includes some markup to cover the R&D costs), and $80 worth of labour to prepare/install/test/process/ship orders. So I would guess that the starting price for the pre-built systems will stay at $300 USD in the future.

Well, Jason (gametech) came over tonight and we did a bunch of everdrive testing. Turns out his everdrive works fine on my HDMI modified toploader. We ran SMB3, Zelda, Double Dragon, Faxanadu, SMB, SMB2, and a bunch of other games and all of them seem to work fine. Overall I tested NROM, UNROM, MMC1, and MMC3 games.

The only minor issue I had was reset. sometimes I had to mash reset a few times before the menu would come back up. Once (out of 15-20 games run) I had to cycle the power.

This confirms what I said earlier about the ED working back in november. It seemed to work then and still seems to work now.

Turns out his ED is one of the very first made, and as such it has really old firmware on it. Rev 3 firmware.


I also have a "modern" ED that uses the latest firmware. This ED does NOT work on the Hidef nes. The menu sometimes comes up and the graphics are always corrupt- looks like uninitialized VRAM. You can tell the menu is there, but you can't start a game, it just resets. Sometimes it's showing an error screen I think, but you can't read it. I did not get this version to run a game.

So I took the rev 3 firmware off Jason's ED and put it on the "modern" ED, and guess what it worked just as well as his ED did! So whatever change happened between rev 3 and 4 of the ED firmware seems to be the reason. I put the latest version of firmware on Jason's ED and it failed in the same way the "modern" ED failed.

These are good data points on tracking down the problem I think.

I was thinking of making a video showing this happening.

Regarding the HDMI connector fit, I test fitted my toploader with the cable I have here and it worked OK so I thought it was going to be fine. The connector is recessed as far as it is so I could use the same board on the NES and the nt both. I tested so I thought it was OK, but turns out it isn't. Various cables seem to have different "tongue" lengths. I modified one by cutting some of the plastic off with an xacto knife and it only took me about a minute to do this. I was surprised how easy it was actually.

This board would work fine on a front loader I think. the plastic is much thinner on the back so the fit should not be an issue there.

On the next run I will move the connector out on a little PCB "flag" to fix this issue.

Like any other brand new high complexity product, there's going to be some things to fix. There's literally hundreds or even thousands of little things that could go wrong, so it's not unlikely one or two of these things will slip through. I tried to do extremely thorough testing here. This included 20 sets of CPU/PPU's, 4 different NES main boards (front loaders and top loaders), 12 or 13 Hidef NES proto boards I hand stuffed and reflowed, and 10 different monitors. There is also the HDMI Analyzer that I paid quite a lot of money for just specifically so I could debug the HDMI link on this project. Overall I am in fairly deep on this project financially so I hope it will eventually pay off, and that I will make a bit more than minimum wage for the hours I put in and the cash I spent for tools and prototypes. Overall 5 or 6 people were helping me test/debug it (it wasn't just 2 people as someone claimed).

Not a whine or anything, just stating what the facts are. Hope this clears up some of the loose ends people have about the project. I hope to be able to supply as many boards as the modding community can use. There's not going to be any limit. So long as people buy them I will sell them, barring any parts availability issues.

It will never be said enough, good work again Kev!

+1
Amazing work Kevin, I never doubted it would be anything else but great.

Maybe, if possible, you could put double solder pads and through holes so that the HDMI-connector could be mounted in two different places and "the flag" could be cut or sawed off.

Thanks for the update. Looking forward to ordering several kits!

Do you still have plans to share the SPDIF transmitter PCB design on OSHPark?

With the amount of work that went into this(development,testing, assembling,etc) they definitely deserve to get whatever the buying public is willing to pay.

Amazing job kevtris!

Everdrive or not, i dont care, im gonna buy 3 kits either way!! Yeeehaaaw!

I think its so freaking amazing that a wizkid like Kevtris found interest, time and economic backibg for such a huge project as this.
Thank you for existing and making all of our dreams come true!

All the best!

Hi Kevin,

I've read that from another forum thread and verified that is was in FAQ of Analogue NT web page.

"When you upgrade your Analogue Nt to HDMI it will output HDMI only. The internal functionality of analog & digital are two different systems that are not compatible with each other. Though, RGB and HDMI can be switched at any time (we'll even install it for you for free!). Moreover, any future advancements in NES technology should be compatible with the Nt too.

In other words: your Analogue Nt is modular and can be modified at any time to suite your desires."

Are you aware if Analogue found a problem when installing both kit? Or maybe they decided to simply include one, or the other only, to save on production cost?

I think they were not going to include both because their "lead video engineer" had not fully tested the combination yet. So if anyone has the guts to open their HDMI Analogue Nt, I bet they will find the NESRGB board absent.

Source of the "lead video engineer" quote : http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread. ... 624&page=6, post #260.

The problem is the NESRGB has to be a "bus master" for the PPU, and the HiDefNES has to be a "bus master" too. You can't just "chain" the two adapters together. The HDN (HiDefNES) must have full control of the PPU, including generation of the clock for it to work at all. The analog outputs wouldn't like the clock I generate for the HDMI. This is why when you unplug the HDMI, it redirects the clock from the system to the chips, so the analog output works OK.

The RGBNES tries to "lie" to the PPU by adjusting the data written to the PPU when 2000 or 2007 are written to, just like my adapter. The method it does it is incompatible with the way I do it. To make both play nice together, the NESRGB board must be modified to directly pass D0-D7 through, and to chain the EXP pins from the PPU from the HDN to NESRGB board, and the code on the NESRGB board needs to be modified, and a chip must be removed.

Long story short is it IS possible, but not without doing major modifications. The modifications basically are to stop the NESRGB from doing the PPU data "lying", and to pass the data through from D0-D7 to the CPLD on the NESRGB board. The HDN board has a jumper you can solder to make it "lie" to the PPU in the same way the NESRGB does it. None of this has ever been tested, though.

Unfortunately it isn't as simple as just plugging one into the other and hoping for the best.

Thanks for your answer.

Hi Jason,

Your auctions are going well it seems, I'm eager to see how far those will go tonight.

Are you already planning to have more "wave" of consoles for sell after the second one?

Congratulations to Jason and Kevin, the first batch sold very well :

106 - 504.98
105 - 615.00
104 - 490.00
103 - 635.00
100 - 610.00
101 - 720.00

There are now eight more NES top loaders listed and five AV Famicoms listed.

Too rich for my blood...

I'd much rather just the kit so I can do the mod myself. Any idea when those will be available?

This is also what I'd like to know.

We're getting ready to sell the boards. Making all the install instructions/videos and stuff right now. Going to be a week or two yet simply because of all the work that has to be done to ensure people can install these without problems.

I also have to buy some of the things like ribbon cables, foam, and headers for the kits too.

I just noticed, by checing the bids history, that 5 of those 6 console has been bought by the same ebay account (1**1 (1128))... that is kind of weird no?

Jason, could there be something fishy behind this? Like someone buying most of them to resell at higher price when there is no more available?

I was worried about this at first too, but it was a result of all the auctions ending so close together. One guy puts snipes on them and then didn't check them when it got close to end time. I emailed him and he said he only wanted one and was sorry he screwed up. I said i'd send second chances to 4 of the 5 he won and all sold within 8 hours of the offers being sent.
In the end they all went to 6 different ppl.
There's really no chance of no more being available, 8 more are up now and I plan to start selling them at a BIN I can live with once they are sold and we have the new batch of boards here that have the flush mount hdmi connector. Plus once kits hit the market i'm sure more ppl will mod and sell consoles too.

Thanks Jason, good to know then.

What's the size/dimensions/etc of the screw and nut that holds the Hi-Def NES board in a toaster style NES? Saw that it was probably going to be a button head type screw but I was wondering if a laptop style wafer head machine screw and nut would work better. Would look nicer, be more flush, and you wouldn't have to worry about countersinking at all. You'd maybe even be able to drill a little bit into the case so that the head does not stick out at all.

In the vid i'm not totally sure what size that was, i'm guessing 10-32, but I went to ace hardware today and got some 4mm flat countersink type and as soon as I put it in I was like, few ppl are gonna have a countersink tools, what was I thinking?
So yeah a pancake style would be good, but I was also thinking as long as the button head was a hex type it would less sharp edges on it and then I look around and the bottom of the controller port trim has two phillips button head screws sticking down already anyway.... lol
I don't remember seeing pancake screws there, but we can order whatever when we get to that point.

Hmm don't see wafer head in M4, though as long as it goes through and the nut can be tightened it'd work out great. Hard to tell how much the minimum length needed is with nothing in hand.

http://www.metricscrews.us/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=13_122

Good to know! Looking forward to them

For the love of God, Yes!!!

It would be great if there was a limit per person when the initial sale of boards went up.

Already on it, thinking one per person for the first batch which will be 200 ish kits.
Will prolly remove limit on second batch which will hopefully be like 500 kits.

Sweet! Cant wait to give you my money.

How about other consoles on ebay, will you have more to sell soon Jason?

I will, mostly front loaders as the kits I have will flush mount in them, but not top loaders and the new kits will flush mount in top loaders so I want to wait to sell more top loaders. I might even offer semi-free board trade to top loaders and av famis i've already done so they can have flush mount hdmi connector.
I was also debating on waiting for more BLWs to become available, but thought may as well hi-def mod and new zif them and offer to BLW them later.
Then my 808 broke, again. I dropped it, broke the body and a heater wire broke off the element.
So parts are on order and I won't have any up this week.

I would suggest that if you have no BLW's available, to find a couple of decent Nintendo-zifs and use those. Non-BLW third party connectors have a bad reputation. Perhaps your customers will have a BLW already available.

Recently I've been preaching the wonders of the Denon SC-7000Z for desoldering. Its a fair bit more expensive than the 808 was when available (and certainly than the FR-300 which replaced the 808) but it is extremely solidly built and hasn't given me any trouble with my admittedly limited use so far.

LN

Jason et Kevin, about Castlevania 3 not working with HDN, here's a thing I saw on NeoGaf forum about the NT. It seems it works when using a game genie.

"I cleaned Rockman and it no longer is doing that same issue. But for Castlevania 3 I can't get it to run unless I use a Game Genie. Its the weirdest damn thing.

https://youtu.be/Lfji4OI_9W4"

yeah, I think it has to do with how I am detecting PAL/NTSC. I let the CPU run a little while and check M2. Then I reset it again. Traced through CV3's startup on the NES while it booted and I can see why it crashes.

It's setting some things up, then CLI'ing and immediately jumping into the IRQ routine. But the problem is the IRQ routine's pointer has not been set up yet so the CPU jumps off in the weeds.

Using a game genie fixes it because the MMC5 isn't enabled on this first exploratory reset. Only when you start the game does it enable the MMC5, so it works fine.

The fix will be to detect PAL/NTSC via the PPU instead, since that continues to run even in reset. (the CPU does not output anything in reset, which is why it must be taken out of reset to detect PAL vs. NTSC).

I had some more games not work beyond just Castlevania 3. Demon Sword and Wrath of the Black Manta both aren't playable at all. Demon Sword Crashes when the first level begins, and Wrath of the Black Manta can only get to the title screen. I also noticed that Blaster Master has weird characters (rows of 0's) on the title screen. These games are all clean and work fine on an original nes front loader.

Somebody on another message board also reported that Paperboy doesn't work, but I don't have that game to test.

I'm a little concerned about compatibility since these games use a different mapper than Castlevania 3. Kevin, will the fix for Castlevania 3 also fix these games?

A couple other weird things. When playing the game Gun.Smoke, the HDMI menu can't be called up with the hotkey at all.

I wasn't sure where to report these, so I hope it is ok to post them here. Thanks!
Also, scanline settings always default to NES when saved.

Add these games to the list of not working:

Bases Loaded 2 (crashes at the beginning of the game)
Rad Racer (Grey Screen)
The Last Starfighter (Stuck on title screen-can't press start)

What rev cpu and ppu do you have?

If Paperboy is broken, that might be a problem with open bus handling, and other Mindscape games might be broken as well. Mindscape games expect exactly $41 on port $4016 when a button is pressed. There exists a patch to play the game with a PowerPak.

How do I check? I have the Analogue NT.

Open it up and look at the chips. The analogue guys might have that info recorded with your serial number though.

another problem that has been brought up on the NT NeoGaf thread is that if you shut down the TV, the console will reset. This can be a problem for those gamers who leave their game on pause and leave it until their next gaming session. (since many games doesn't have saves or password)

Not a good idea unless he is willing to void his warranty. The Analogue Nts should not be using revisions lower than E. If they are, then I would be very concerned for compatibility across the board.

Update! Analogue suggested that I go into the settings and change Despeckle. Mine came set on Phase 2. When I changed it to either Phase 0 or Phase 1, it fixed the following: Rad Racer, Bases Loaded 2, Demon Sword, Wrath of the Black Manta.

The only issues I still have:

The Last Starfighter is stuck in demo mode. Can't hit start. If anybody has this game, can you test your copy for me? It works fine in my front loader.
Gun.Smoke won't let you call up the menu
Scanline settings won't save properly (default to nes)
Still no Castlevania 3 of course!

Figured I'd give everyone a heads up on what's going on. Working on the firmware update for the HiDef NES.

These are the things I want to add:

* 4x 1080p mode (Might work on PAL, maybe not)
* 5x 1080p mode (NTSC only. PAL not possible)

I have been reading about people wanting to turn the TV off without it resetting the game. I didn't know anyone was going to do this.

Right now here's how it works: When the HDMI link is dropped (or not present on startup) it defaults to composite mode. This changes the clock rate from the internally generated clock to the NES board's clock. This change cannot happen without resetting the CPU because it will crash otherwise.

I was thinking of modifying it to work like this:

If the HDMI link does not establish within 2-3 seconds, the system will default to composite mode and stay there until the HDMI link comes up. If the HDMI link comes up, it will stay in HDMI mode and not change resolution unless power cycled (or you change resolutions in the menu). Each resolution change will require a reboot, but this is ideally something that only happens once.

Fixes to do:

* apparently scanline settings aren't being saved, so I will fix that
* fix the reset thing like previously discussed in a former post

The final issue I have heard of is a few games like paperboy running but not reading controller inputs. I am not sure why this would happen- the reason it happens is fairly well known; the game reads the controller and checks for 41h instead of the proper method of ANDing off all but bit 0. The adapter does not add pullups or pulldowns to the bus, so theoretically this should still work. I am unsure if the problem is the adapter itself or something in the nt doing it; I will try to get to the bottom of that after borrowing one of the carts that does this. (If anything, my adapter would add slightly more bus capacitance to the bus helping along open bus reads)

People were wondering how the update process works. Well it works like this:

if you have a powerpak (or your everdrive works):

* download the update.nes file
* load it onto your flash cart, or burn it to EPROMs and put it on an MMC3 cart (512K PRG, 256K CHR* see below)
* run the ROM
* go into the menu on the HiDef adapter (select + left for NES, select + down for the nt on controller 1 as default)
* select "save and update"
* select "update firmware"
* press A to start the process

DO NOT turn off the system or reset it during the updating process.

Re: MMC3 carts. You can burn PRG only and use the update tool; I reserved the 256K of CHR ROM (only 1K or so is used for the char set) in the 256K, leaving 255K for updates. The block counter is printed below the menu by the NES itself, and without CHR it will just show randomish graphics but the update should still work- unless I have to add more blocks into CHR in the future.

Hopefully I will be done with the update in a few days to a week. That's the goal. Then it will need to be tested well before releasing it into the wild. Fortunately we haven't sold many systems yet so this shouldn't be too tough to do. The existing boards we still have will be updated before shipping.

Thanks for the update! Two quick questions.

I know you mentioned that if the HDMI link doesn't establish it resorts to composite mode. However, composite out is disabled on the Analogue NT. Unfortunately, only the HDMI out works. Could this be causing problems. Sometimes when I am playing a game, the screen will momentarily go black. It's as if there is a temporary issue with the HDMI link.

Also, I have an issue with The Last Starfighter responding to controller input (can't press start). And, Gun.Smoke not allowing the HDMI menu to come up. Are these caused by the same issue with Paperboy?

Well, I've never heard of a video game console which switches off when you turn the TV off
Sometimes, I turn of my TV when playing a game, without switching off my console.

I don't think anyone would ever use composite again on his LCD TV if he has the hdmi board installed, so I don't understand why you thought it would be a good idea to have Hi-Def to behave like this :s

Many times in my life I've left a game running with the TV off while I go eat dinner or do something else (or someone else needed the TV). Especially important in long games that don't have a save.

As for supporting both HDMI and composite alternately, I'm sure a lot of people appreciate the ability to do both, even if Zonomi doesn't. I would, anyway, but I use my NES in a lot of different situations.

Try pausing a game, switching to The Weather Channel for two minutes, and resuming a game. Does that work?

Could be nice to have composite, to show people how massive of a difference this kit makes.

Thanks for the hard work Kevtris, looking forward to the update.

I was meaning at the same time
According to Kevtris, the NES would switch to composite after the TV is switched off. But why would you plug the NES on HDMI and Composite at the same time ? And what's the point of switching to composite if the TV is off ?
Btw, is it posseble to change the frequency of the PPU/CPU to have PAL or NTSC timings ?

I don't think the intention is that you'd connect them at the same time (though I suppose you could), it's just that you can't output both at the same time, and can't detect if composite is connected. So the condition for enabling composite is when there is no HDMI connection.

So the best behaviour would be to detect it when switching on the console :
- If no hdmi cable is detected, default to RCA.
- If a HDMI cable is connected later, warn the user if he was using composite, with a timer which will automatically reset the console and enable hdmi (or the opposite, only warn, and the user has to select hdmi to enable it).
Some hdmi multiplug may not send the hdmi signal immediately, so automatic switching would help when facing delay in hdmi initialisation.

Saving the preferred behaviour would be great.

Look up "HDMI-CEC"

Does exactly that on my ps3. (Although you can turn it off)

HDMI-CEC does the opposite : when I switch the PS3 on, the TV switches on. When I switch the PS3 off, the TV does the same, but the TV doesn't control the PS3 (same behaviour with Raspberry pi & Kodi).

No, CEC can do both. Not every device implements every possible behaviour though. (In this case your TV probably listens to orders but doesn't issue them?)

Example: it's in the PS3 user's manual that it can do it: http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/settings/ctrlhdmi.html

As rainwarrior stated above, its possible.

My ps3 turns off along with the tv if I turn cec-control on.

I don't support CEC because I didn't have the IOs left on the FPGA and it would've increased the BOM cost.

CEC behaviour is not needed (at least for me ), I'd just like to keep my NES on when I switch off the TV

According to GameTechUS, the PCB is not very friendly with front loader NES ? Is it made for top loader (location of the holes) ?
And does it work with the original Famicom ? I didn't see anything about it on the topic.

Kevtris, I think you misunderstood.

No one asked for CEC, I was simply pointing out that nowadays it IS pretty common for game consoles to turn off when you turn off the tv.

Would be amazing have this in original Famicom and also a better way to have it in a front loader, gametech did his best with the frontloader, but it wasn't super great imo, i would rather have a more refined install.
Don't get me wrong, i'll take what i get.
Just wanted add my thoughts

Has anyone else had problems calling up the HDMI menu in the following games?

Gun.Smoke
Time Lord
Mach Rider (Famicom Version)
Tetris (Famicom BPS Version)

Been working at the problem games on the adapter.

I have received a bunch of carts from people (thanks!) and here's what I figured out:

Megaman 3 - works fine on the adapter with an NES and analogue nt
Megaman 5 - same

gun.smoke seems to work fine on both systems, and I can get into the menu on the title screen and in game. I was using controller 1 for this. Note that many games do not read controller 2, so if the menu is set to come up from there, it might not work on all games. Wizards and Warriors is an example of a game like this.

Bandit Kings of Ancient China - works OK on nt and normal NES

Paperboy - works OK on an NES, but the controller does not work on the nt. Seems to be an nt issue; trying to trace that out to track down the problem. This isn't a problem with the adapter at least.

Castlevania 3 - I can get this to work by holding reset low for awhile on powerup, so I think I can get this working. I played through the first level no problem once it started. I tested this through a game genie and reproduced it working there as well.

Legend of link - (homebrew/hack/etc) This exhibits similar problems to CV3, where it worked through a game genie and with holding reset low. Turns out it's MMC5 as well so that explains part of it. Once the game starts, it seems OK until you're actually in the game, then the graphics are kinda hosed up and it may crash. Still investigating why this is.

Nothing else yet on the everdrive issue, I don't know any more yet on how redoing the mappers is going.

So I think I am getting close to a fix on this by stretching out reset a little more.

@kevtris Did you try Legend of Link on a repro ora flash cart? Powerpaks and Everdrives has too little CHR and PRG "ROM" to run that game correctly.

Paperboy expects exactly $41 when a button is pressed, relying on an authentic NES's open bus. I wonder what my open bus tester does.


Perhaps it uses power without M2 oscillation to initialize things like the initial setting of $E000.


You mean there's a game that's actually bigger than Metal Slader Glory?

I wonder if the PowerPak fix for Paperboy's open bus reading issue would work as a fix for the Analogue Nt, at least for flash carts.

The Legend of Link uses 1MB of PRG-ROM and 1MB of CHR-ROM, maxing out the ROM addressing capabilities of the MMC5. All those Link's Awakening sprites take up a lot of space, didn't you know?

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2136/

Thanks Kevin! Switching the menu hotkey to controller #1 fixed that issue.

Have you tested The Last Starfighter? I still can't get that game to respond to the controller on the Analogue NT.

The Last Starfighter suffers from the same issue that Paperboy does, so if he fixes Paperboy, The Last Starfighter should similarly benefit.

I find it likely. Both Paperboy and The Last Starfighter are published by Mindscape. Do the company's other games have the same problem?

I did not know that Captain Planet, Infiltrator, Dirty Harry and Mad Max were also all published by Mindscape until now, and they suffer from the same issue.

I'm glad that Gauntlet 2 works, which is also published by Mindscape.

kevtris confirmed that the game works OK on a normal NES w/ HDMI mod, so the problem is in the NT.

Excellent! Thanks for the update, will spread the word!

Any way to get two NES Advantage stick to work on the analouge not at the same time as a player 1&2?

I bought two to attempt this and well. It only works for player one.

Also you can't have a regular control or and a NES advantage plugged in the system can read both.

Any plans to fix this or is it a comparability thing that the new advantage was never intended to be used with two controllers and co op games?

If I understand you correctly, I think you want to have two players, each using a NES Advantage, in a simultaneous two player game like Contra or Life Force. The Analogue Nt should have no problem doing this.

First, make sure that Player 1's NES Advantage is plugged into the Controller 1 port using the connector with the white stripe on the side. Second, make sure that Player 2's NES Advantage is plugged into the Controller 2 port using the connector with the pure black wire. Third, make sure that Player 1's NES Advantage has its switch set to Player 1 and Player 2's NES Advantage has its switch set to Player 2. Fourth, set the Controller mode select switch on the back of the Analogue Nt to 2P mode.

Update:

Well I fixed the timing issue, so now FDS works great, and CV3/MMC5 works as well. I suspect everdrive is fixed, but I can't test it. I tried to buy an ED but I'm not going to pay over $200 for one; there's only the expensive "special" ones left in stock at stoneagegamer.com which seems to be the only US seller of known legit ones.

I found a few on ebay but they are obviously the chinese ripoffs. I can buy one from the source but then it'll take 3 weeks to get here, so I guess I am going to just say that ED is most likely fixed

The resetting if turning off HDMI thing is fixed too. The new behavior is this:

when turned on, the system waits 3 seconds for hotplug (HDMI plugged in and running). If it does not see hotplug in this time, it runs in composite mode.

At any time in composite mode it sees hotplug, it will reset and run in HDMI mode.

Once in HDMI mode, it will never drop back into composite (or reset via cycling the monitor's power) unless the power is cycled. That should fix it.

I changed the LED flash pattern slightly for composite mode since someone complained it was too annoying

The "rolling" on startup of the video has been supressed. It still does it, but it's hidden (and the CPU stays in reset during this time). I no longer stop the NES clock every frame to resynch the NES to the HDMI frame, and use a PLL method now so the clock does not stop any more.

I have yet to fix the non-saving of the scanline settings (should be easy if I can reproduce it) and add 4x/5x modes if possible. I might not have enough ROM space left to do that though but we'll see.

So it's gettin' there. I was also waiting a while to make sure that nothing else shook out, since I don't want to have to release rapid-fire updates to fix one thing each or whatever.

What about retrogate? Are they legit? They seem to offer it for the same price as krikzz's site. I got mine from there, and as far as I know it's a real one.

http://shop.retrogate.com/EverDrive-N8-NES-EDN8-NES.htm

Ah I dunno. If those are legit I will buy one. I thought only stoneagegamer had legit ones in the US? I am most likely wrong on that, if so I will buy one from them

It doesn't get any more legit than Retrogate. Krikzz runs it, and ships the Everdrives straight from Ukraine. It will probably take longer than if it was shipped from within the US, but it's perfectly safe.

Gotcha. I just bought one so I guess I'll have it in a few weeks. Though I will probably release the update before then.

Speaking of that, I identified and fixed the scanline saving problem. Turns out my "Sanity check" code that makes sure the settings are all valid was screwy and only allowed 0 or 1 in there instead of the entire range so that was a simple fix.

I am going to investigate adding a 4x and/or 5x for 1080p mode but I am not sure if I got room to do it.

Well I tried the update that Krikzz released for the EDN8 and it works flawlessly now on the HDMI-NES. No problems now!

@Kevtris:

Why do the scanlines look sort of odd? When I select the NES style, it seems like one line is "fatter" than the other. So it goes something like normal line, blank, fatter line, blank. I've been playing in 1080p, is this a known issue?

If 4x gives 960 lines, then 5x gives 1200 lines, assuming that you are scaling the 240 NTSC PPU generated lines.

A monitor that has a screen resolution of 1920x1080 is going to have 120 lines cut off with the 5x function. You will lose 11.1% of the screen image on the vertical. Having taken a cursory look at NES games cropped using a near ratio (28 lines out of 240), that amount of cropping will not obscure important graphical information in most games. Of course, if you HDTV does overscan, the cropping and stretching may be too severe. Alternatively, if you have a 1920x1200 monitor (like I do), then you should completely fill the screen vertically.

I got my ED N8 and ED 64 straight from retrogate and have had no reliability issues with it whatsoever. Ditto for my Mega ED and ED GB from stoneagegamer. I swear that half of the forum posts requesting assistance on krikzz's forum came from those who went the cheap option and soon find that they will have to pay again if they want a quality product.

HiDefNES doesn't do 1200p though.

I'm not talking about cropping. The pictures shows up perfectly fine, in the correct aspect ratio.

What I'm saying is that the scanline effect that this adapter has seems to be off by a bit, at least in 1080p mode (again, haven't tried in 720p yet). The scanlines are not an even thickness throughout, so it makes them look bad.

OK the update's almost ready. I have done all I can do. I will do some testing and then probably release the .nes file in a few days.

The changes are as follows:




I could not add 5x mode to 1080p because there's not enough scanline buffer to do so. I would've needed another 15-20 lines and I just don't have it. I did add 4x mode though. It's toggled in the renamed save and options menu (since I ran out of menu entries everywhere else). That was the originally save and update.

I do not think I can add anything else now. The FPGA's sitting at 99% full with around 50LE's left out of 10000, and the menu code's full up too with maybe 15-20 bytes free in there as well. So don't ask for anything else since it isn't happening

Going to make a video tonight/tomorrow about the new stuff for the official release including how the update is applied, etc.

Small update: That zelda hack is doing the identical corrupted thing on my totally stock front loader without the adapter installed, so the adapter is doing the same thing. That makes me feel better. I am going to make a cart of it for testing to see if it does it there as well.

Kevtris, just wanted to say thanks again, your product is awesome and it's great to see you take the additional time to make it the best it can be.

Weeeelllll, here it is. I received the everdrive yesterday and loaded V12? firmware onto it (the version before the "fix" for the HDMI adapter). Thinking this was going to be a "worst case" test. It worked perfectly with the games I tested- I tested about 6 or 7 different mappers and all is well. Reset even worked properly. Before, the error messages wouldn't show up properly but they do now (i.e. no SD card).

FDS is working properly now, and so do MMC5 games (i.e. reset works there too, and no need to use a game genie). I sent it out to a couple people and they could apply it properly, though one person has problems.

He was using a powerpak, and his MMC3 file was different than mine- I think he has the savestate mappers. This caused the update to not work. It reported a data corrupt error and refused to flash the firmware. I gave him my mapper 4 file direct off the CF card on my powerpak and then he got it to work properly.

I don't know anything about the save state mapper, but I assume it cannot load 512K PRG ROMs, because it uses some of the RAM for the savestate part? I could be totally wrong but that's just my first guess.

It works on some everdrives, but some people had issues.

Anyways, here is the update:

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/HiDef ... 0V2.00.nes

To use it, load this ROM on a flash cart (or burn EPROMs? hehe), run it and then get into the Hi Def menu, select "save and update", then "update firmware", and follow the on screen prompts. It will check the update for integrity, and then flash it if it passes the check. Cycle power and it will use the new firmware.

512KB PRG ROMs should work (IIRC I've tested Mega Man 6). Might be some sort of an address space conflict in the $4xxx-5xxx area, since both the old and new save state mappers have some registers there (I may have left some of them enabled to conserve FPGA resources, it's been too long to remember). So, who knows.

Looks like it's an address space conflict. That's where the regs are mapped for updating.

Just poked into the copynes lite bios, contained within the update, and see that none of the code space optimizations made it in. It seems to be the original bios. At least my code changes that made vram/wram testing non-destructive made it in.

Anyone still getting visual glitches with Blaster Master? (the actual cart, not from a flash cart.). Even with the update, I still get garbage characters like 0's on the title screen.

Thank you very much for the firmware update.

I updated it pretty recently, and for the life of me, changing between 4.0 and 4.5 on the height doesn’t seem to produce any difference... On both settings, “NES” scanlines produces three on, one off.

I did cycle the power. Is there something I am doing wrong? I’m playing on an Analogue NT.

Thank you!

I do too. Hadn't tried the game until you mentioned it.

Im not sure why they didnt try to test every game, or do a beta and have people test ever game. Unless thats what they're doing now?

There are 713 licensed games and 114 unlicensed games, and that's just US releases. Not to mention homebrew. To fully test every game manually would take longer than it did to develop the thing in the first place. Software development is an iterative process, and with reconfigurable hardware, the same is largely true for hardware development as well. It's not like we're sending a rover to Mars here and we have to get it right the first time or the whole thing goes up in flames.

Yet we can probably safely assume Nintendo ran the 713 licensed games through lot check on the toploader (model NES-101).


I guess it might relate to the cost of a recall.

I'm willing to bet they didn't fully test them all the way through.

If you're going to sell 100,000 or 1,000,000 of something, a lot of tasks become a more reasonable part of the budget than if you're going to sell 100 or 1000 of something.

For Nintendo it might very well be worth spending $10,000 to hire a few people to play every game for an hour. Not so much for a small scale project like this HDMI adaptor.

Considering that the issues reported have been isolated to a handful of games and the firmware is upgradeable, I would say this is a successful launch.

Now if Nintendo had released the top loader and later discovered that it had a major incompatibility issue with a number of games, then it may have had to engage in an expensive recall. However, they had the best knowledge available and could determine that the changes made, which essentially turned it into a 72-pin Famicom with detachable controllers, would not have likely affected the functionality of the licensed games.

They did with the Power Glove. But most of the problems are something you'd find out immediately, not something like after 2hrs of game play.

BTW I think theres 677 licensed games, unless you're taking into account PAL games and stuff.

It's less of an issue there because the toploader used the exact same CPU and PPU, down to the same revision, as the front loader. A better example would be the SNES 1CHIP or SNES Jr. revisions, which they obviously *didn't* test all games on because there are games that introduce graphical glitches on those versions of the console (or maybe they did test but didn't care, who knows...)

The NES Top Loader had the benefit of using the same revision NES CPU and PPU as most of the Front Loaders, the G revision. However, the Analogue Nt uses chips culled from Famicoms, which use all sorts of revisions, A, B, C, D & E and even no revision. Things changed quite a bit during these revisions, leading to potential issues when you try to push the hardware like the HiDef NES mod does.

I think Kev told me they didn't put those non rev chips in any of the NT's, but that's just hear-say...

Weeelll, I would've needed a complete collection of games. Let me pull that out of my hip pocket... oh wait. Seriously though, I only have a few handfuls of games to test with, and used a powerpak for testing other things. Games are quite expensive now and I don't have a complete collection by far, making it difficult.

I think I did pretty darn good for the initial release, though. The update fixes almost everything, and it looks like the remaining joker is going to be blaster master. I need to buy/borrow a cart of this since I don't know if testing it on the powerpak will be good enough.

Mostly. Only G, H, and E revs were used (I've never found an F rev). The others were indeed culled, though there were very few D and earlier rev parts.

I thought you guys were using an Everdrive/Power Pak in the vids.

How would that be different from using the actual cart? I thought those flash carts just kept the games hex code.

(Altho those mmc5 games that it cant handle, thats different)

They're very different, electronically. For example, I remember something about input not working in some games running on the PowerPak (Paperboy?), which happened because the game made use of the values in some data lines that are not modified by the console during controller reads, but due to the way the PowerPak uses the data lines it returned different values, breaking the game. Or something like this. The point is that the only way to make the games work was hacking them to account for the different behavior, since that was caused by a difference at the hardware level.


That's a huge oversimplification of what a flash cart does. Yes, they load exact replicas of the original ROM chips into RAM chips and make them available for the console to read, but a cartridge is much more than just raw memory. The chips inside the cartridges can be wired in a multitude of ways, including the mapper chips, which are simulated in Flash carts and might not behave 100% like the originals. There's also the issue of mapper revisions, where new versions of mappers like the MMC1 or MMC3 behave slightly differently from older versions, and you never know which version the Flash cart's implementation was based on.

Kabuki Quantum Fighter exhibits some similar issues to Blaster Master - skip through the intro to the part where Kabuki jumps at the screen just before stage 1 begins. Random code everywhere over the graphics.

I have this game so I was able to test it and yes I also get the random code at that point, but the little bit of gameplay I tried was fine, any problems deeper in the game?
I never heard, but is it just the intro on blaster master that has issues or any issues showing up in the actual game?

That is supposed to be there! Did you think that you would see assembly code with labels and comments so carefully displayed as a Hi Def NES bug?

It might have been conceivable based on half-remembered past insinuations about implementing a subset of CopyNES in the mod. CopyNES includes a 6502 step debugger.

Holy crap, you're right!
Man, I feel like an idiot. That is pretty funny stuff. Ahem, nothing to see here, carry on.

The guys at My Life in Gaming said that the Interpolation feature did not work for them or others. They indicated they were using firmware v2.00.

I noticed in Kevin's Update #11 Youtube video that when Birdo fires his eggs in the Doki Doki Panic clip, only the first time the sound effect plays sounds correct. I made a comment on the video, but I am not sure it was noticed.

Other than the random digits in Blaster Master, these are the only potential bugs of which I am aware as of Hi-Def NES firmware v2.00.

The portion of the CopyNES that is not included in the HDMI nes mod, is the Step debugger, and NSF playback. This is mainly due to the bios size being limited to 512 bytes. (The original CopyNES BIOS was 8KiB.)

I believe Hi-Def NES HDMI Adapter will be best gift on this Christmas!

I found an oddity. Has anyone else had this happen to them yet with any game and a 3d tv? I have my toaster NES running V.1 (waiting on the update cart to get mailed to me as I don't have a flash cart) to a Samsung PN64d8000 and popped in a new gem to my collection, Bucky O'Hare. When I power it on, the tv auto-detects that the source is in 3D side by side and the tv flips into that mode. It's not a big deal because I can just use the remote to go back to 2D mode. Not sure if v.2 will fix or not.. Just thought it was weird. No other game has done that to me yet.

Will it ever be sold?

Its been awhile since we had a update from kevtris Hopefully soon. Can't wait to play my NES on my 70in

You need to follow GameTechUS on youtube as well for updates. Here is his latest from a couple of weeks ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ShDaStQbG8

Maybe this was a fluke.. After re-seating the cart today, it's not doing it anymore.

A new update : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TZNg06cDsw

Some things I took away from it (this is based on my memory) :

There will be a v2.5 Hi-Def NES firmware that should fix the title screen to Blaster Master and an unspecified problem with one of the Simpsons games.

The worst issue Kevtris is currently dealing with is the original composite video amplifier transistor, which has caused issues in the HDMI output. It may have to go to

Jason found 10-11 other people he would consider qualified to refer orders of the Hi-Def NES mod. They are located in the US, UK, Europe and Japan, maybe Canada.

The mod will not work in an original Famicom unless the main Hi-Def NES PCB is redesigned, due to the case limitations. He would require compensation to do it and neither of them believe it would be worth it in terms of kits and mods sold for the original Famicom.

I would point out that the full functionality of the Famicom microphone is not easy add into a Famicom AV, someone could take kevtris's comments as suggesting an easy fix.

Looks like more of a product review than his HDMI adapter, though.

kevtris when avs comes out could you find out it's color palette and add it as a choice and could you maybe look into adding 5x scaling as well.

If someone can tell me the RGB values of its palette, I can add it. Without knowing the RGB values I can't add it.

5x scaling is not possible without a major redesign of the hardware, because there is not enough resources left on the FPGA. Another PCB design with added RAM, and a new FPGA would be required along with a $40-50 price increase.

Could someone explain to me the benefits of 5x mode, would scan lines look better on it while using 1080p? $40-50 increase isn't bad but I'd like to weigh the benefits which I don't fully understand

Is it the processing power of the FPGA that's preventing it from added, or simply that there's no more space left in the code? I realize it's a matter of preference, but if it's a space issue, I'd happily loose 4.5x scaling and interpolation if it meant I had 5x scaling as an option.

The input pixels are sent through a circular buffer in the FPGA's block RAM to compensate for the timing difference between 240p and 1080p. The NTSC NES produces 262 lines of picture, and the picture thus occupies 240/262 = 91.6% of each field. But HDMI specifies that a 1080p signal shall be sent with 45 lines of vblank for a total of 1125 lines.

• Scaling to 4x produces a 960p window, or 960/1125 = 85.3%. The difference between 85.3% and 91.6% is 6.3%, with output running faster than input.
• At 4.5x, the picture occupies 1080/1125 = 96.0% of each field. The difference between 96.0% and 91.6% is 4.4%, with input running faster than output.
• At 5x, the picture would be scaled to 1200 pixels tall and cropped. So let's instead crop to 216 lines before scaling. The input would thus occupy 216/262 = 82.4% of each field. The difference between 96.0% and 82.4% is 13.6%, with input running faster than output.

The circular buffer is tall enough to compensate for 6.3% but not 13.6%. That would need a beefier FPGA with a bigger block RAM.

kevtrs bunnyboy said just have you ask him for the rgb values in the format you use.also would consider adding 5x scaling to a redesign or is that out of the question. please reply to all

Pretty sure he already answered that. See below.

I think he's asking Kevtris, if a redesign is actually being considered.

A user by the name supersaiyajingodgoku got banned on the NintendoAge forum for being constantly annoying and asking pretty much the exact same questions over and over again as supermario4 appears to be doing.

yes i'm asking kevtris if he would consider doing a redesign with 5x scaling as an option

I think much of the hate is directed at the form of your reply. This includes lack of capital letters and correct punctuation, as well as failure to clearly indicate to what part you're replying. In the past, these traits have been typical of lazy users who just want, want, want, as opposed to being willing to participate in a discussion.

A post looking like the following might have been better received:

kevtris wrote:

Without knowing the RGB values I can't add it.

bunnyboy said just have you ask him for the RGB values in the format you use.

kevtris wrote:

5x scaling is not possible without a major redesign of the hardware

Do you plan on producing such a redesign? I am willing to pay the "$40-$50 price increase" for 5x.

Are you posting from a cell phone?

He was saying no, he was just being polite enough to give you the reason why.

Do you honestly think he's considering increasing the price by $45 for a minor feature like that?

If you really want to know what the palette values for the AVS will be, all you have to is buy one, display each color with the 240p Test Suite ROM, capture each frame with the Elgato Game Capture HD and then use Microsoft Paint or any other paint program to sample each color. I do not recall that the HiDef NES allows for user defined palettes, so how this information will really help is unknown. However, if it does, I would think it would be a nice feature, I really prefer to see the sky in Super Mario Bros. as sky blue, not lavender.

No I am not going to do a redesign because the price would increase too much and I'm kinda sick of the project

Adding a palette or two is easy and I can do that, but I am not sure when I will do it.

re: last week, I was on vacation so that's why I haven't replied.

Will you at least release it ?

Release WHAT? He already said he's NOT doing an expanded redesign of the project and hence it CANNOT and WILL NEVER support 5x scaling. Jeez.

LN

I think he means get some in stock. Most of the ones built so far are being used by the Analogue NT. A small number is/was available, but more boards are in production and testing right now. The upside to this is that the NT users probably have already found all the bugs.

Either a) using Analogue NT as guinea pig, as Memblers mentioned, or b) it was a request for kevtris to license the design to a third party capable of making larger quantities. Or c) it was a request for kevtris to license the design to a third party capable of making a variant that supports 5x and is $50 more expensive. Does use of "WILL NEVER" imply that you speaking for kevtris that such a license is unavailable during the life of kevtris and his heirs?

Come one.... I don't care about 5x scaling, and I can read kevtris's answers...

This.

I've been following this project since day one, and I think it is a great project.
But it looks like kevtris are like these people who spends a lot of time doing a project, but get bored when it is over/almost over (I'm like this, too), and I am afraid that he is too disgusted by this, and never release the board alone. He has made many other projects by the past which were also never released.

I made 100 already but they are gone, working on another run though. going to announce soon.

This may be a dumb question and one that has probably been answered before.

I know that when the HDMI cable is connected to the HiDef NES mod, the native composite video is unavailable. The best you will see is white squares on a black background due to how the HiDef NES mod works. What about the native audio? The HiDef NES emulates the native audio and sends that through the HDMI cable, essentially sitting on the CPU's data and address bus to obtain the data written to the audio registers. However, that should not prohibit the audio from being generated by the real CPU and any expansion based audio from being and sent to the audio jack or RF unit, depending on your NES model.

So, if you are using the HDMI for video, can you still hear the native analog audio? I think the Analogue Nt HDMI version allows for analog audio, so is there any reason why the mod for Nintendo's own boards be any different?

Original audio still works with hdmi plugged in.

Thanks Jason!

I just recently received an Analogue NT. The Hi-Def NES adapter is awesome. I love all the functionality it has and the picture is amazing. I have ran into an issue in the game Ghoul School, however. The colours are off.

The game is supposed to look like this:



Additional game video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEsz1ZHebN4

However, it looks like this on the Analogue NT:



The game also has fairly severe speckling throughout the picture. None of the despeckle options have any affect.

I am playing on an EverDrive. The game looks normal when plugged into a stock NES + CRT.

Thoughts?

Has the hi-def been upgraded to 2.0 firmware?
Did you try other palettes with the game?

Yes, the Analogue NT arrived with the 2.0 firmware installed. The other palettes have the same issues (blacks are magenta, reds are blue/purple, etc)

Please let me know, how can I be in next queue? Waitin' many month for this adapter...

First off, thank you Kevtris such amazing hardware! The quality is amazing on my NES carts!

However, I'm having issues with my Everdrive N8 Famicom, and my Analogue NT with HDMI mod. Many many games have garbled graphics, and games that do work tend to freeze after 10-20 minutes of play. See below for an example of Super Mario Bros 3:

http://i.imgur.com/vx6SnJP.jpg

The whole bottom of the screen is glitches and shakes constantly. I've tried multiple versions of the ROM and two different Micro SD cards (One of which works fine in my Everdrive MD), but it is consistently giving me the same problem. I also have an actual US NTSC cart of Super Mario 3, which runs fine on the Analogue NT.

The Everdrive is running v13, downloaded directly from Krikzz's website. And the HDMI mod is on version 2.00. I've tried different TVs, HDMI cables, and different power outlets in my house. I ever tried rolling back to firmware v12 on the Everdrive, and still no luck.

Has anyone seen this kind of error before? Krikzz said that due to timing changes with the HDMI mod, there's not much that can be done, but many people have been able to use Overdrives with their Analogue NT fine. I've PM'd Kevtris as well to try to figure this one out.

It looks like playing around with the "Despeckle" options seems to have fixed my issues with the Everdrive/Analogue NT! Using "Phase 01" has removed garbled graphics in a number of games, and Lagrange Point is booting now, instead of crashing at the start. The expansion audio sounds amazing as well!

Kevtris posted an update video last night:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcB0olRfYM0

Biggest news is the next batch of kits has been ordered!
There is also a small firmware update, v2.25.
http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/HiDef ... 0final.nes
This fixes a few games and interpolation.

This completely fixed the issue I was having with Ghoul School!

I know there is not enough room on the Hi Def NES's FPGA for 5x, but would there be enough room if you ditched 4.5x in its place?

The disadvantage of 5x is essentially that you only see 256x216 instead of 256x240. However, the advantages are several :

Better scanline support with the 5x scanline option.
Larger image on a 1080p display
Automatic removal of screen redrawing artifacts in games like Bionic Commando and Double Dragon 2
Uniform vertical pixels
Very reasonable NES aspect ratio with a 6:5. (5/4.5 is better however).

Ultimately, very little vital information is lost within the 24 non-displayed scanlines in most games. Many TVs of the time period were lucky to display that many lines.

It's not lack of fusemap space (which is what you could free up by ditching 4.5×), it's lack of RAM internal to the FPGA.

Please review Tepples's explanation.

Besides, a lot of 1080p displays blow up the image by a few percent anyway for compatibility with early CRT HDTVs, which had overscan.

I'm sorry, I had forgotten that you explained why it is not possible with the existing FPGA in the Hi Def NES. My older, 2008 LCD HDTV does blow up the image, my newer 2014 4K TV does not. On certain cable channels I can see some partially flickering gray lines at the top and bottom of the screen with the newer TV.

Gray flickering lines at the very top of a standard-definition signal may be closed caption signals.

I don't think that would help, as the problem probably stems from the size of the line buffers used and the exact timings to make those work. I believe substantial work would be needed to add another factor; ti's not just a matter of changing a constant and recompiling.

A recent video from Jason and Kevin on Kevin's channel mentioned Sharp twinFAMICOM issues as if they have already talked about them in previous update videos. They haven't to my knowledge. I asked for more info in the comments section but all I got was a reply from someone in the same situation as me (twinFAMI user anticipating the mod, blind-sided by this mention of a problem out of left field).

As a Sharp twinFAMI user I had planned to mod my own unit. I kinda need to know more about this. I searched this thread back to October and found no mention of "twin." Any info?

As stated in the vid, the kit currently doesn't work on the twin and we're not sure why exactly.

With the close release of the AVS, I hope kevtris will still sell his adapter...

There's a lot of overlap, but they're not mutually exclusive products.

AVS is (compared to buying everything you need for an Hi-Def NES from scratch) cheaper, and unless you're comparing to a toploader or BLW frontloader, more reliable. It also can play Famicom games without adapters.

Hi-Def NES can output the native resolution of displays (1080p, while AVS is limited to 720p) and maintains the nostalgia value of using original hardware, particularly if people want to mod *their* hardware.

Personally, I think that the AVS looks like a fantastic product with a very ugly aesthetic (the shape is really unpleasant and the horizontal cart slot will stress the solder joints on insertion/removal), but it's comparably cheap and "just works" without any modding required. So it certainly does reduce the potential market for the Hi-Def NES, but it doesn't replace it.

I realize I'm a bit late to the party, but is it possible to mount the Hi-Def board a little higher or angled upward a bit in a toploader, so that the HDMI port is fully in the rear panel? I would assume you guys considered and tried this, but I would much prefer if I didn't have to alter the bottom shell. It would be great if we could 3D print a new rear panel to match the HDMI port, but even just cutting up a generic 3D printed panel makes me cringe less than cutting the shell (even if it is just a little bit in the back on the bottom).

In one of the install videos/pages somewhere, I saw that there was a chunk of foam to go on top of the board to help hold it in place, so it seems there's at least a little room above it. I'm not sure how the HDMI port, motherboard, and shell seam align though (order screwup means I'm still waiting for my game bit to get here and going mostly on posted pics).

Hello! I recently bought a pre-modded AV Famicom with v2.25 firmware and am loving it, just wanted to point out that Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa for Famicom Disk System is playing music incorrectly through the digital output with FDS enabled (only the FDS part is incorrect). This is using a real famicom disk system, but you can also reproduce the issue with an Everdrive N8. The first level music exhibits the issue, and so does the boss theme and the theme that plays when you pick up a powerup that allows you to run for a brief moment while invincible.

Would be happy to take some footage if needed, and thanks again for all the hard work on this great project.

I noticed that as well and forgot to take footage. The Everdrive N8's wrong FDS audio is different, but similar in nature. Particularly the invincibility music sounds bouncy and odd.

I think I may have found another bug, when playing Battletoads, either the JP or USA version(can't test PAL), upon entering the game the sprites are completely fragmented all over the screen. Here's a link to a video I took showing off the behavior:

https://gfycat.com/SoreLavishKusimanse

This also happens when playing on the same console via composite. I should note that I am using an Everdrive N8 with OSv13 and the no-intro set, and everything works as intended on an unmodded AV Famicom that I own, using the same setup.

If there's anything else I can point out that might help, let me know!

I seen something similar recently, haven't posted the vid yet, but it had what looked like laser marked cpu and ppu chips in an av fami, got all kinds of screwy grafx with them.
What console are you playing it on and can you open it up and check out the chips?

Sure thing, I'm using a pre-modded AV Famicom that I bought from the game-tech.us shop a few weeks ago

http://i.imgur.com/z3BoVa0.jpg Here's a picture of the CPU and PPU. The PPU has text that reads
"RP2C02H-0
3AL 4B"

Kevtris confirmed this to me privately :





I do not think I have ever seen a RP2C02H and an RP2A03G combination. I have only seen RP2C02G and RP2A03G or RP2C02H and RP2A03H in AV Famicoms. Is the CPU a replacement or did it come that way before Jason modded it? If it happens on the native composite signal, then there may be some OAM corruption going because the CPU and PPU revisions are out of sync. Remember that OAM is in the CPU.

I'm not sure as I didn't supply the console, merely purchased it premodded after it became available on the shop. If this is leading to the issue, would very much be interested in syncing up PPU and CPU revisions, if possible!

wat.


(The DMA unit is in the CPU, but the sprite memory itself is in the PPU)

Yeah it's the PPU's fault, iirc this one was done right before I found out about the laser marked chip issue.
I'll send you a G rev ppu.

Thank you! I appreciate it and no problem, can completely understand how this would happen.

I'm Cray Elliott, if you still have access to addresses from previous orders, if not I can PM you. If you'd like the rev H PPU back, I don't mind shipping it either.

I still have your info and yeah we might use that ppu for testing.

Are there now fake Nintendo PPUs in the wild? I guess that is one way to spot a fake.



My mistake, my memory of what I read on the wiki was a bit hazy.

Not sure if they are fake, but the pair I showed Kevtris came out of an av fami, both laser marked and out of a rev 2 mobo.

Anyone having graphical glitches with Iron Tank on the Analogue NT or HDMI nes? Not sure if that was fixed with the 2.5 update since I don't own a flash cart.

They are not fake, the CPU and PPU in my AV Famicom are laser marked. It must be a revision mismatch.

Received the rev G PPU in the mail today, can confirm that it fixed the issues I was having! Every game I've tested so far looks perfect. Thanks! Will be shipping the rev H PPU soon.

I tested Iron Tank out today, didn't see any differences between my unmodded AV Famicom and hi-def modded system, both looked fine. Perhaps the v2.25 update fixed this issue?

What are the issues you are experiencing with Iron Tank? If it looks identical on the unmodded and the modded system, it may be a hardware limitation. Guerilla War, also by SNK, has an issue where parts of individual lines flicker randomly on the screen. It is hard to spot until you know what you are looking for.

I didn't notice any issues, that was in response to Noah98, who asked if anyone else experienced issues with Iron Tank. There is that individual line that flickers every once and a while, but it happens on both consoles so I figured it was normal

If it happens on a stock console (non-modded) with a cart (not a PowerPak), then yup, it's normal.

There are lots of "wobbly lines" and "graphical glitches" in *lots* of commercial NES/Famicom games. We as kids didn't notice -- more specifically, we didn't care -- because we were too busy playing the game. ;)

If you can describe the exact place(s) on the screen that you have concerns about, let me know, as I have both Iron Tank and Guerilla War on cart (and I own no modified consoles).

Here's info about that Guerilla War problem: viewtopic.php?p=161500#p161500

I checked Iron Tank in a debugger, and it too is doing a lot of writes to $2000 midscreen (it seems to be disabling and re-enabling NMIs whenever it's doing mapper writes), so I'd bet that the glitches are caused by that.

Also, please note that whenever testing for this specific glitch you have to try resetting the console a few times, because the glitch only happens on some CPU-PPU alignments (which are more or less randomized on reset). Likewise, if you want to play without the glitch, you can reset until you get an alignment that doesn't produce the glitch.

kevtris did you ever get the avs color pallet?

I'm experiencing bad horizontal line glitches on Ultima Exdous, changing phase to option 2 fixes the line glitches but creates alot of speckle that no other phase option helps. Its a little hard to see the speckles in the video, you can run it on max quality full screen to see it more clearly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6jzYvZBByk

Maybe this can be fixed

Hello, I am having trouble with my nes and since I too have the hi-def kit on it i thought it would be best to start here. The hdmi output is working fine. Nothing wrong whatsoever. The caps have been replaced also. However, there is something wrong with both the native outputs and is an identical problem. BTW this is a front loader.

The correct technique has been applied to the board to make the native output work as far as I can tell. Voultar installed it. Basically the colors of a game are screwed up in 1 of 2 ways depending on a reset and always with no sound and a hum or a buzz. Like i said, the hdmi output is normal as can be and nice looking with sound and all. That makes me think the cpu and ppu are fine but im not expert and i have no real way to test it.

I did attempt to test the rectifier on the rf modulator and "it seems fine" but im also no pro at testing them, had to look it up on youtube. The reason I even checked it was i read on a site that sells them that if there is a problem with the rectifier it can cause a loud hum and possibly video problems but my problem is with both native outputs not just one but I don't know if that makes a difference.

Here are two pictures of what I'm seeing.

https://imageshack.us/i/plFEAPlSj

https://imageshack.us/i/poemujvNj

Now just imagine that with a humming.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am lost as hell.

The black smudging on the lettering of the title screen is almost like a shadowy trace type artifact that i cannot really describe. It kindof morphs around if you play the game. Its strange and it flows around almost like liquid or something.

Voultar says it was like this before (I think) he installed the kit. It did not look like this when it left but it did seem to have some slight strangeness to its behavior before I sent it but It wasnt anything alarming at that time. So the only thing I can figure is being mailed and banging around in transit or modding it caused an already failing component to get worse.

I've looked over all of it and the only thing I have noticed just by site is the power cord on the hi-def pcb isn't attached well. It's hanging on by a few strands on one of the leads. Easily remedied but knowing my luck, that isn't the cause of the A/V problems.

EDIT: Turns out there might not be a hum, it could just be my television. So it could be total silence along with the bizarre video.

That kinda looks like reflections in your video cable (even if it's not). If you use a different length to hook it up to the TV, do the black things appear in a different position left-to-right?

Right now it's roughly 6 NES pixels, or 1us, which is ... really much too long to be ordinary signal reflections, but...

I'm not sure whats going on with it but I know there isn't any sound either and it doesnt matter which output i use (rf or composite) the results are the same. The shadowy look on certain parts of screen and no sound. Sometimes the color is wrong completely also as you can see in the other pic.

EDIT: I just tested it on another TV and there IS a loud buzzing/humming also. So add that to the list.

What chips on the board deals with video besides the ppu? I have never seen this type of artifact. I looked all over the board also for scratched traces and saw nothing. Anyone?

Loud buzzing implies video-into-audio crosstalk. Could be something wrong in the RF modulator, I guess.

The video path inside the front-loader is pretty simple, going through two single-BJT emitter followers for emerging on the RCA jack.

Getting any better diagnosis will be difficult without better diagnostic tools, such as an oscilloscope.

I suppose ill just start swapping out the chips. Maybe ill get lucky. Gonna be a whole lot of trial and error.

If you can get the power/av module off i'd swap it out, the coils may have been disturbed and setting those is beyond most ppl's abilities.

If you don't care about RF out, rebuilding the {voltage regulator and baseband} portion of the RF modulator is comparatively straightforward.

"That doesn't look like a short - the power supply would be much more upset if the 5V rail was tied to ground. Rather, this looks like analogue signal reflection. If the composite video's ground is not connected, this kind of behavior may be expected as well, as the return path is made much longer (and potentially harmful)."

Someone had this suggestion for me. Not sure if its possible or how i can confirm it.

Continuity meter between the NES's RF shield (which is NES ground) and the outside of the TV's RCA jacks while the cable is plugged in.

Was thinking about this today, I don't doubt that available documentation is outdated, but has using the source code of an emulator 'as docs' been considered? In particular, Nestopia has run every FDS game I've thrown at it, and sounds correct. I don't really know if it's perfectly accurate, but could be some good pointers.

Relevant nestopia source. I don't know too much about HDLs so this could be completely unhelpful.. And also I'm not sure if source code licensed under the GPL can be used as a basis of documentation and then use that info to write HDL that is closed source. If the code can't be used as-is, perhaps the author could be contacted for a license exemption for this case(I'd be willing to do that contacting, if that is the case)

I think in the long run it'd only really use a small chunk of this file and it'd have to be reworked, so maybe it's fine?

Could you take some footage? I myself found Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa tricky to emulate the FDS sound correctly for, maybe I could help.


Specifically, I went over it 3 years ago, and I updated the Wiki with information. There is a note pertinent to Bio Miracle here: http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/FDS_audio#Mod_counter_.28.244085.29

Sure thing! Here is a video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkefvuMoXq8

Skip to about 47s in for stage 1-1, 1:05 for powerup, 1:41 for boss, and finally 2:18 for stage 1-2

Does seem like the issue described in that note is happening here

Yeah, sounds like exactly that problem. Unless the timing is very precise the modulator gets stuck in an out of tune position.

Most emulators just do a hack that resets the mod table position to 0 any time you write the current mod value. That's another option which I don't think has any practical drawbacks (except being technically inaccurate). I haven't seen any other games besides Bio Miracle that mess with the mod value while the modulator's running.

I think all the needed information is on the Wiki, though.

When I discussed this with you in E-mail before installing the kit. I suggested to investigate the 74HCU04, so you might want to start there on the audio side of things.

I'd check the output on that chip for audio. The analog outputs weren't great from the get-go, but that might lead you somewhere.

Yeah but I have no idea whats causing the video artifacts. Ive never seen this before anywhere even searching around. The colors on some things are blurry and actually change mid game to other colors (black may flip to white etc.) You would think if the ppu was biting the dust, it would also show be failing to run the hdmi properly but its right as rain. Maybe the Vram?

Has the timing for the 2C33 been so thoroughly investigated and published so that an accurate recreation of the modulator's behavior can be made in VHDL? I think that is what kevtris is getting at when he says the existing information is not sufficiently accurate for his device.

Has the timing for the 2C33 been so thoroughly investigated and published so that an accurate recreation of the modulator's behavior can be made in VHDL? I think that is what kevtris is getting at when he says the existing information is not sufficiently accurate for his device.

Found a bug with the 2A03 digital audio in Paperboy. After playing any DPCM(I think) sound effect (breaking a window, pressing down on the dpad to slow down, crashing the bike), none of the listed sound effects will play again. Pretty easy to reproduce, just press down on the dpad when you're on the bike to hear the brake sound effect, then try it again afterward.

EDIT: should probably add, sorry for all the posts, I'm not looking for issues here, I just like to play a lot of games and figured kevtris might want to know about these issues..

Would be nice if there was a compatibility thread, were any bugs could be listed\compiled. I found a weird one

I've got a ASUS VG248QE monitor for low lag, and its has audio issues with the hi def board that no other of my monitors has. So it may be this monitor is just picky.

It doesn't pickup the audio correctly, In order to get audio I literately have to start certain games first. Like in order to have audio I need to start Mario 3 first then the monitor plays the audio fine on all other games. Its so strange, I've checked the Audio Viewer and the hi def is outputting audio but the monitor won't pick it up, until I literally play a certain game. I can reproduce it every time. Once I hard reset the system I need to re enable the audio by playing mario3 first.

edit: Not really worried about this one too much, just thought i'd share. As I can at least get around it. Other than the problems I've posted about previously I haven't seen any other problems. Very happy with it

Considering kevtris made a whole video of him testing the thing with a HDMI compliancy tester. I think your monitor is probably an exception.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoFeCj1hF_8

edit: don't forget words kids.

I've watched all the videos, but considering it only does it with the kit, I thought it was worth pointing out. It is a name brand monitor.

Edit: I'm only pointing out things so the product can be better. I feel like I'm catching flake for even pointing out things I find odd. Not trying to disrespect anyone.

I wasn't trying to give you flake or anything.
But I was pointing out that as far as one can test, Kevtris' kit complies with the HDMI standard. (according to expensive test gear) So there's not much that can be done about one monitor not working I think. (plus it could be a cable or something to!)

I've been considering buying another monitor specifically for this so that's useful for me to know!

Only other very minor thing I've found since last post is that the Sunsoft 5b output seems to be a little bit quiet. I've turned it all the way up to max volume and it's still not as loud as my actual gimmick cartridge is with analog audio. If the the volume levels could be brought up a bit I'd appreciate it!

On a brighter note, Video output seems to be absolutely flawless and without any inaccuracies. I've played quite a number of games that use tricky PPU behaviors and everything looks spot on!

Thankfully, for now composite audio works just fine for the cases that don't sound right digitally

Just got my NT back from Analogue. I had them install the composite daughterboard, update the firmware to 2.25, and fix compatibility with Mindscape games.

All is well, but Iron Tank still has weird line glitches in the center of the screen. I don't have these with iron Tank on my original nes on a crt. It might be that they are only noticeable because the picture is so clear, but I still think it might be a glitch with the hdmi board.

I couldn't test the av out on the analogue nt because they didn't send me an av cable and it is proprietary. Anyone know of an alternative to buying one from them for $29?

Does it look like this similar-sounding thing in SMB1?

Kevtris said that the "desparkle" option hopefully should fix it.

I was wondering if anyone had the same problems as me. Yeah I have the same problems with a few titles. Just tested Iron Tank and got the same issue
What you'll want to do is change to Phase 2 in the despeckle menu , it will fix the horizontal line glitches. Sadly it will create speckles instead. but its better then those lines.

I just checked Guerrilla War and it has the same line glitches. Does Despeckle 3 fix the lines, but add speckles?

Seems so, On Guerrilla war with me Phase 2 fixes the lines, but I do see speckles using phase 2. I'm really hoping for a possible fix\solution for some of these titles.

Guerilla War / Iron Tank thing is known NES PPU bug. This has been discussed already. But the bug will only show up on some CPU/PPU alignments, which is probably the reason you didn't see it on original NES when you tested it. You have to reset a few times before it shows up.

(That said, the HDMI mod might be more susceptible to triggering the bug, since it modifies the system timing. But it's definitely there on the real NES as well.)

Yes this is correct, I've tested this, on original hardware it only happens on certain cpu\ppu alignments, if it happens a reset will fix it. the Issue is this always happens every boot with the hi def board. Thats my Issue. So I'm hopeful for a fix

The fix is supposed to be "try playing with each of the four options for Despeckle"...

Yeah it does help with some games, like smb1. Other games its either lines or speckles, I'm thinking maybe more despeckle options maybe?? I dunno I'm just hopefully some of these games can be looked at. If its not possible to fix its just not possible, no big deal.

List of games I've seen it in the worst

Ultima Exdous
Iron Tank
Guerrilla War

No matter what Despeckle I choose, Iron Tank still has the lines and looks terrible.

I just tried Iron Tank with all 4 phase options on the rev G ppu I got and yeah, it does seem to be suffering from some artifacts on all phases

Hi there, I recently bought an AV Famicom and I'm getting a Hi-Df NES Adapter installed soon.
I also bought an Everdrive N8 Famicom. What will happen to the audio once the HDMI kit is installed? Will the expansion audio be generated by the Everdrive or the Hi-Def NES Adapter? As I understood both the Everdrive and Hi-Def NES have their own Expansion Audio/FDS Audio support, so I'm kinda confused...

Through hdmi it will be generated by the hi-def kit as long as you turn the exp audio 'chip' on in the menu.
Through analog audio output you'll have to rely on the cart.

Thanks, sounds great to have different options then

Will there will be a way to flash custom palettes to the hi-def nes in the future, similar to the nesrgb? I wanted to try out Firebrand's unsaturated v6 palette and I noticed a few requests for other palettes in this thread too. It might be impossible for all I know, just seems like a neat idea.

For all those asking about the 5x height option it sounds like the new Analague Nt mini (also designed by kevtris) might support it.

In their technical specs (https://support.analogue.co/hc/en-us/ar ... nalogue-Nt) they say:
"Pixel Formatting: 5x, 4.5x, 4x at 1080p and Horizontal Stretch"

I emailed Analogue and they seemed to confirm this but the response wasn't very detailed so it's possible they misunderstood.

edit: Looks like they've also confirmed it via twitter here:
https://twitter.com/analogue_co/status/ ... fsrc=email

This is the first I've heard of the mini, very interesting. doesn't the old Analogue use original chips?? sounds like this is running completely on a fpga. defiantly would like to see it tested.
edit: I wonder if the Zimba 3000 is still in the works??

If it is, in fact, Kevtris's work, it's almost certainly a commercialization of his FPGA NES.

Yes, I believe the nt (1st and 2nd iteration) used some original parts from the famicom (cpu and ppu?)

Yes, the Analogue Nt used an old NTSC CPU and PPU.

Can anyone explain the palette differences that Mega is seeing for the Super Mario Bros background on the Hi-Def NES vs NesRGB:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.ph ... tcount=103

Supposedly the same palette is used but they look very different.

According to the thread, SMB background is $22 (not sure which palette represents FCEUX on the hdmi kit), I also see the some very slight purple, I believe its just the palette being used.

Heres the thread I got most of my info from, its was linked in your source
http://www.famicomworld.com/forum/index ... ic=11846.0

I just got the Famicom cartridge, Getsu Fuuma Den, and I am experiencing graphical glitches around the main character on the map screen (Analogue NT, both HDMI and composite). The game has no glitches when played on my AV Famicom. Any ideas on what could be causing this? Is it the Analogue NT?

It seems it is an upgraded version of his HDMI kit (Altera Cyclone V FPGA used in the Analogue NT Mini, instead of Cyclone III for the HDMI kit).
It allows more features (build in RGB output, 5x scale), I wonder if he'll sell it as a standalone version, or if it is an Analogue NT exclusive upgrade.

Well he stated in his videos he had almost completely used up the resources on the Cyclone III for the HDMI kit, so he'd have to upgrade to a bigger FPGA in order to handle the extra logic and functions in the NES anyways.

As for selling a stand-alone, I'd highly doubt it. If he had that option and went through with it, it would really hurt the sales of the Analog NT mini and also be a conflict of interest. They probably have a NDA or some exclusivity agreement with this deal.

kind of related but I did ask kevtris if this analogue deal would affect the Z3k, he said it wouldn't. that's really all I was worried about.

source in the comment section
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxTYcfILeuw

Yep, he also wrote that hidef Nes wouldn't be affected, so maybe an upgraded kit is possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxTYcfI ... 6544030191

I didn't mention that part cause he was talking about software updates. I highly doubt we'll see a hardware update just because the pcb would have to be redesigned. Anything is possible I guess, but I do believe he already said that it won't happen.

Yeah the zimba 3000 is still in the works. The nt mini will not affect it other than maybe slowing it down some since I have less free time to work on it.

And yeah the mini is running fully on an FPGA.


It looks like people want more palette options in the hi def adapter. I can do it, I just need links to binary palettes. I have room for 4-6 more at least (whatever fits on the menu page, basically) so let me have 'em and I will throw them in there.

An emulator .PAL file works best that's in the standard palette order.

Yeah I am not going to upgrade the Hi Def hardware, but software updates will continue as usual. The FPGA on this project is 99% full, so adding new hardware based features is not an option. I cannot do 5x mode in 1080p because there isn't enough blockram to buffer the additional 6 or 7 scanlines needed to do it. (I think I mentioned this before but I thought I'd mention it again). The next size FPGA costs more money (10 bucks or so), thus it isn't really feasible without a large price jump to pay for the FPGA upgrade and all my prototyping/one time fees for production.

Too bad. I wouldn't mind paying extra money to get the same features as mini (449$ is way too expensive for me).
You can get the palette here (at the bottom of the page).

I would love to use the unsaturated v6 pallete, in particular, which was posted before me!

EDIT: also was wondering if there's a way to decrease the "shimmering" effect when scrolling horizontally at non-integer scales? Only reason I ask is because the AVS seems to do a slightly better job at this at the moment, albeit still not perfectly. It'd still be a very welcome improvement!

More options is always better, now we just need a couple of the best color palettes to be listed.

Edit: Testing out a few different palettes on a emu, I found SONY_CXA2025AS_US.pal looked the best to me.Download

SMB sceenshot using it.
http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/9653/1 ... wm1r7g.jpg

Is there any way to write the palette separately to flash memory? If so, one might make specially crafted NES ROMs that contain a palette and flashing code, which would allow EverDrive and PowerPak users to add a custom palette.

Are you comparing 1080p vs. 720p though? at 720 it's possible that the TV's built in scaler is doing some blending. I think the solution people are going for is to just use integer scaling right now. I don't have enough resources to do any other type of horizontal blending/interpolation on it.

not really. the code ROM only has maybe 30 bytes free in it so I can't really add any new software features, either (that and I'm fairly busy with this nt project so I don't really have time to add such things)

Ah that I am! That makes a lot of sense, thanks for your insight.

I second the unsaturated v6 pallete. This update will work on the 2nd edition nt? Or just hi def nes?
Actually i would like to use the recently posted nes classic color palate.
Kevtris, we know you are busy, but would love this thanks.

I was wondering how clock generation is implemented with Hi-Def NES? Or how autodetection for PAL/NTSC works.
I was thinking of piggybacking PAL/NTSC PPUs and CPUs, with one pair held in reset while the other is active.

From what I understood so far the Hi-Def NES generates the clock itself (probably has to for under-/overclocking), but does it rely the original clock to decide whether it's a PAL or a NTSC system?

Won't work.
That will work.

See viewtopic.php?t=13851 .

It would be really awesome if Kevtris could add the original FCEUX palette and the two palettes I created recently. The workflow for capturing and sampling the NES' composite video signal makes a difference in the end result!

I got a Hi-Def NES kit out of the latest batch from Game-Tech, and straight away I want to say it's an incredible piece of kit. The install is relatively easy and the output is gorgeous and completely lag-free. Love it.

I have found that VRC6 expansion audio isn't working correctly on my system, though. Here's a clip with what I'm getting from Akumajou Densetsu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIQ9sIfL00E (the sound got pretty quiet when I uploaded to YouTube, sorry about that)

Using an Everdrive N8 on a toploader NES-101. I've tested VRC7 through Lagrange Point and Sunsoft 5B on Gimmick and both sound perfectly fine so I'm thinking it's probably not a hardware issue. Maybe a glitch with the Hi-Def NES 2.25 firmware? Couldn't find a download for 2.0 to see if the problem is present there.

Wondering if anyone else has come across this. Maybe Kev has some ideas?

In addition to enabling VRC6 you have to enable VRC6 SWAP to get expansion audio working for Akumajou Densetsu.

Considering Akumajou Densetsu is nearly the only VRC6 game most users will care about playing, why isn't VRC SWAP the default?

You know, I would've sworn I'd already tried that but you're absolutely right. I must've tried turning on SWAP without also enabling the main VRC6. Thanks so much for the help, it sounds just awesome now!

I've received mine out of the latest batch and installed it in a PAL front loader. Installation was pretty easy but I have an issue with distorted image. http://imgur.com/a/8NkjY
It flickers between this and normal a couple of times per second. Is this some sort of CPU/PPU incompatibility or did I screw something up? One of the flat flex cable got sharply bend in shipping and the other one is pinched but they seem fine (checked connections with multimeter). I haven't got another screen to test with but the menu is ok so I don't think it's screen related.
Anyone got any tips on what to check?

Creased ribbons is ok, just can't do it lots of times.
If your ppu is non rev that's prolly the issue, rev A pal ppu seems to be more compatible.
I need to look to see if i have a non rev i can get to Kev for testing.

I recently received a Hi-Def NES kit from the latest batches being sent out.

I was actually kinda surprised to see the red board since it is for a Frontloader install but I went ahead and proceeded to pull my CPU & PPU, install the pre-assembled interposers, remove the 7805, hook up the ribbon cables + power, & attach my NES to my TV to test it.

I am having some trouble getting it to work even though the install seemed to go smoothly.

At first I was getting a grey screen with a low hum & the Hi-Def Nes board had a yellow light blinking on it.

Then I replaced all the capacitors inside the power circuit with those included with my kit thinking it may be power related and now there is no video output and the Hi-Def Nes also does not blink any more.

One thing I did notice is the PPU is getting very hot. To the point where it would be dangerous to leave the system on for more than 30 seconds. Is the 7805 metal piece supposed to remain screwed in to absorb some of that heat? I wouldn't think it would effect anything since the 7805 is not hooked up at all now and the voltage is going directly to the Hi-Def NES board but I suppose it doesn't hurt to ask.

I also removed transistor Q1 after all that just to see if it would help and it did not. I did not bridge the connection on it or remove Resistor R2 though.

Any thoughts or ideas on how I could fix this problem?

Oh I almost forgot to mention that one of the chips in my install says Korea on the bottom. Here are the #s on top of each.
CPU:
RP2A03G
8K1 KJ A

PPU:
RP2C02G-0
9A2 27

For what it's worth I got one of the latest red board productions and encountered some issues myself, it was only after I swapped chips around before I got a working setup. Bear in mind I confirmed these chips work as they should in an original, unmodified except for chip sockets NES setup.

(CPU) RP2A03G 1AP 3Z & (PPU) RP2C02G-0 1AL WP boots up but graphics are garbled badly and some games won't even start or just hang.
(CPU) RP2A03G 0EM 4x & (PPU) RP2C02G-0 0GM 3W will not boot, dead gray screen.

Used (CPU) RP2A03G 1AP 3Z and (PPU) RP2C02G-0 0GM together and it seems to work fine now. I have observed one color glitch that settled itself out after five minutes or so: an orange colored enemy in Street Fighter 2010 turned purple for a while.



Describing a chip getting hot quickly, it sounds like something is shorted. Make sure you've got the capacitor polarities right.

Heat sink doesn't matter once 7805 is removed from circuit.
Did you retest the console right after socketing the cpu and ppu? It's a very important step!
Hot chip usually means bad chip...

Any way to identify a rev A on the outside? I've opened up 5 other PAL front loaders but they all have non rev's. I can send you a non rev PPU if you can't find one...

As with Eatitup86, I am experiencing similar results.

To start the installation, I pulled the CPU & PPU, installed the sockets and then tested the console. Everything was working ok, so I removed the 7805, installed the pre-assembled interposers and hooked up the ribbon and power as the instructions showed.

I have not attempted to remove Q1 (or the lockout chip, but I'm guessing this has nothing to do with it).

When I power up the NES now everything appears like it's working. My monitor's LED changes colour (as it does whenever I use it and wake up the device plugged in), but then nothing shows on the screen and after about 10-15 seconds I get a "No Signal" showing on the monitor. On high-def nes main board the LED is flashing approx every 4 seconds with a slowish fade in/out.

Unlike Eatitup86 however, my PPU is not getting hot.

EDIT: I've just changed the HDMI cable and now I'm getting a large grey square in the center of the screen. This is a bit odd as the first cable I was using is working fine on my computer now. Anyway, regarding the grey screen, is this just my dodgy 72-pin connector not reading the game? I have a replacement one on order anyway, but it hasn't arrived yet.

Hi-def main board led in and out fade means it's hdmi is working, sees your tv/monitor. No video means it's not getting anythign from the interposers, i'd check the ribbon cables, i've even pulled them out without unlocking the conector to kinda scrub the connector surfaces then re-insert them. If you remove q1 and bridge the outside holes you can check composite and or rf output to be sure the connections are good from cpu/ppu to nes mobo.

Hi,

I just made an edit to my previous post, but I changed the HDMI and I now get a grey screen. The LED is doing the same thing.

So, is this just time for a new 72pin connector?

I will remove Q1 and test over RF.

If it grey screens via rf or composite then yes it's the zif.

Ok I'll do that and replace the zif if necessary. Thanks for your help.

I removed Q1 and did some testing, then later on while inspecting the interposers I saw that one of the pins was bent and not in the socket properly... :/

Anyway, I sorted that out and now I have picture & sound! The HDMI picture seems to be quite weird (pixels changing colours quickly) but I'm putting that down to all the console being run without the shielding in place.

Also, RF is just showing the sprites as white on a black background. Is this anything to do with removing R2 as mentioned in the instructions (step 20)?

Did you bridge the outside holes of q1? Grey screen is usually bad cpu when I fix bad nes's.

I edited my last post again... Anyway, I found the problem. It was one of the CPU pins not making contact. RF is a bit weird now but that isn't really an issue as I will not likely use that ever again! Thanks for your help.

Normal behavior. Because the PPU outputs only bits 3-0 of the palette index when in color output mode, an add-on board such as NESRGB or Hi-Def NES needs to set up the PPU's palette such that it outputs bit 4 (that is, whether each pixel is a sprite or background) on composite video out.

The Stopwatch (relative lag) test in versions 0.12 and later of the NES port of the 240p test suite is designed to accommodate this behavior, drawing the frames and tens of frames places as sprites and the places with seconds or larger value (which don't matter quite as much for lag testing as much as for actual stopwatch use) as background. That way, one can connect a traditional CRT SDTV to RF and an HDMI monitor to the add-on board to measure the total lag of the Hi-Def NES (which will be about 2 ms tops) and the monitor compared to the presumably lag-free RF.

Ah I see. Thanks for the explanation! I've never really looked into how these kits actually work.

So RF/composite would now only really be used for confirming everything is working and extended testing?



Yes I did bridge it. I didn't touch R2 though, what does that do?

Kevtris, I want to say thank you for making this kit. I have purchased an NES with one of your first prototype testing chips and the thing is amazing. EXACTLY what I want for my retro systems. That said, I know you are very busy, but are you ever going to entertain the idea of updating the palette colors? The choices you've included are good, but I think some progress has been made on this recently and some of the newer options out there are very interesting, like this post below!



Finally, thanks again, your work is very appreciated!

Finaly got my PAL frontloader to work.

My problem was that the picture startet to flicker after 30 sec from cold start, this was only on HDMI out the AV out worked as normal.
The menu did work as normal and did not flicker.

Switched the PPU from RP2C07-0 to the RP2C07A and no problems

The RP2C07-0 has KOREA written underneath the chip.

Really makes me wonder if the Korean PPU's are all incompatible with the Hi-Def NES?

I tinkered with mine for a day after it was not working and had no luck myself. :\

I do have another NES but I was wanting to keep one stock along with my other 2 being NESRGB + Hi-Def.

Have had 0 problems with my NESRGB mod.

I too tried using a RP2C02G-0 PPU with KOREA printed underneath and the graphics were garbled or some games wouldn't boot at all. I wound up getting the system working by interchanging different CPU and PPU chips from another board. So yeah this kit still has some issues to iron out or there needs to be a more comprehensive listing of which chips will work.

Hmm hadn't heard of a G rev having issues, i'll see if I have a korean G rev to test with.

Just got my Hi-Def NES installed on my PAL-B console and it looks amazing! However I still found some unexpected issues. For some reason the ROMs on my Everdrive are flickering when playing (no problem with the ED screen). When I try playing the same games from the original cartridge it seems to be no problems at all. The Everdrive ROMs are dumps from my actual cartridge so in theory they are identical.

The only original cartridge I have a problem with is Castlevania III. It seems to be stable for about the first level, but then the same flickering start happening.

I have not installed the kit myself, but used an installer recommended by game-tech.us, and he said that it seems like the red hdnes kit have some compatibility issues with PAL.

Anyone else that have experienced these screen glitches, or maybe know if it's possible to fix it?

It's not just the red kits, it's certain PAL ppu chips, rp2c07-0 revs seem to be the worst. Adding a .1uF cap on the ppu clock pin to gnd seems to help a lot, but we'll get Kevtris to look at it closer.
I assume your EDN8 is running os of 13 or higher? I believe that's when krikzz fixed hi-def compatibility.

Yes, according to the OS it should be hi-def capable (upgraded to nesos 15 just in case), but when I load up the ROMs from the main menu I get the same jumpy image on all of them. All of them PAL (b) ROMs, so should not be any region issues. The Hi-def NES installer have installed a 100nf cap.

My Hi-Def NES has been flickering quite a bit, and I can confirm that I have the RP2C07-0 PAL chip. Is adding the cap still the recommended solution? Or would I be better of sourcing a different PPU?

I'm hearing the cap doesn't work for all games, but you could do it till you get a rev A ppu.

It looks like it's the only option until I can source another PPU. Do you think I'll run into compatibility issues if I manage to find a different PPU chip for my PAL nes?

Any word on any firmware updates?? I've had my kit installed since around July I believe? I'm still hopefully some of those problematic games with line glitches can be fixed maybe. Thanks

After my first terrible attempt at installing the Hi-def NES mod, I eventually managed to source another NTSC PPU.

And contrary to my worries, a jumper cable took care of the only via, and once I prepped the motherboard with the sockets, the standard (non-HDMI modded) NTSC NES had been restored to life.

Keen on continuing the project, I proceeded with the steps... and everything went smoothly. Except with the finished install, I get neither HDMI nor composite nor sound from this NES anymore. (though the sound is not really expected to work without a working PPU...)

The behaviour is quite odd really... if I leave the NES unpowered for a while, then power it on, I will get a mostly black screen with occasional "hickups", indicating some video syncing could be taking place irregularly. And the LED on the Hi-Def board does not light up at all. After trying this for a while and powering it off, there will be less "hickups" until I power it on again.

Additionally, at one point, I managed to get more of a composite signal - white horizontal stripes and a buzz - along with the LED being lit in orange, by touching the plastic package of the PPU while it was running. However, I have not managed to reproduce this improved(?) behaviour again.

My PPU is not getting hot at all... but curiously, the CPU is getting rather warm quickly... although not terribly. And I have checked there's no short circuits between Vcc and GND at least.

I'm tempted to remove the interposers and try it with the socketed CPU/PPU again. But I'm unsure whether this will work, or could potentially even damage the board, now that the Q1 resistor is replaced with a bridge, and how to even get the system correctly powered with the interposers removed, without undoing the work of replacing the voltage regulation with the Hi-Def board.

So can anyone give some clues on how to go about debugging this incomplete (and hopefully not busted...) mod? Specifically, I'm wondering:
1) How should the LED on the Hi-Def board behave in a successful installation? What does a non-lit LED mean? And what does an orange-lit one mean?
2) Is there some way to test part of the installation, by keeping the voltage regulation of the Hi-Def board but removing either the CPU or the PPU interposer?
3) Anything else worth looking into?...

Do you have a volt/multimeter? Do you have 5v? You could just email me direct, it'd be faster...

I also have the problem with flickering. At first everything looks perfect, then after a few minutes the flickering starts. Initially only every five seconds or so but it definitely comes more often as time goes by. I see this on both original cartridges and ED.

I have the RP2C07-0 PPU.

Is there a guide on how to fix this using a cap as mentioned earlier? Just like a previous poster I'd like to know if this is a recommended fix or will there ever be firmware update than can fix this?

The gif shows how it looks right after the flickering has started:
http://gph.is/2iXfNho

Installed this on my av-famicom, looking great! Thanks for this amazing product!

Hi, new here - but just signed up to say my PAL NES suffers from the flickering too.

I also have a RP2C07-0 PPU.

I'm going to try the decoupling capacitor as soon as I find one in my parts box.

Other than this - it's an awesome mod and just worked right away - great product, clear installation instructions. Hope to get the flicker sorted soon so I can make the machine the center piece of a games night.

Mark.

I recently got my NES fitted with a Hi-Def NES kit. For the most part, everything appears to work correctly. However, whenever I use my system on either of my Asus monitors, there is a very good chance that I will not get any audio upon startup. If there is no audio, I have to turn the system off and then turn it back on with the hopes that the monitor will get an audio signal the next time I turn it on. I have several TVs in my house (Sonys and Samsungs), and this does not happen on any of them. I have also brought my system to a few of my friends' houses and it does not happen on their TVs/monitors either. It only happens when I try to use my NES with my Asus monitors.

The two monitors in question are an ASUS VH236H and an ASUS VX238H. Both have built-in speakers. The problem happens when using the built-in speakers and when using an external speaker through the line-out connector. I've tried using many different HDMI cables but the results are always the same. Before I give up and upgrade these monitors to another brand, I thought that I'd reach out to see if this is a known problem with Asus-brand monitors.

The HDMI connector on the Hi-Def NES appears to be very sensitive to touch. If I slightly nudge the HDMI cable while my NES is on, the TV or monitor that it is connected to loses the signal. This happens with all of my TVs and monitors. This isn't much of an issues since I don't move my NES while I'm playing, but I am a little disturbed since my NES is the only HDMI device that I own that this happens to. So, I am a little worried that the installation was somehow botched. If this is something that happens with everyone's system, I'm OK with it. If not, I'd like to know so that I can get it fixed.

I'd say some flux got in there, seen it before, just spray electronic cleaner or %90+ rubbing alcohol in it when off and let it dry.

For the asus monitor you could try turning off EDID and retest, that't the one thing that came to mind.

You can try what gametech suggested and let us know if doing that changes anything, but I believe I've tried that without any changes. What I do when I have no audio is start Mario 3 make your way to the world map and audio should always kick in. I'm using a everdriveN8 so once audio kicks in I can just soft reset and load a different game Thats what I have to do everytime I play. Cause I only use the ASUS monitor.

Finaly I got my PAL frontloader to work 100%, I ordered som dual wipe sockets for the cpu and ppu before christmas, this made huge improvements on my nes.

I did get the red batch with the round chip connectors and those are really bad, bad connections lead to errors and the gamplay was no good. Now my system has been running like
it should without any errors.

Reccomend to do this uppgrade! But you should have a good soldering iron and the hakko soldering sucker tool This makes the job easy and you don`t stress the pcb of overheating the traces and so on. You also need to cut down one of the pinheader roaws on one side to make the dual wipe connector to almost get flush with the board. When you inserts the chip you will notice the difference in the tightness. It`s alot bether friction to the chip legs.

Hope this will be changed in the next batch fro game-tech

I cleaned out the HDMI port with some alcohol and that fixed the cable sensitivity. Thanks!

I tried turning EDID off but it did not make a difference.

After playing around for a bit, I found a "fix" that is similar to the one thomas83lin described. Instead of making your way to the world map in Mario 3, you go through the first door in Mario 2. As soon as you exit, the audio comes right on...

This is the same as my experience with a RP2C07-0 PPU.

I have just obtained a second NES to harvest the chip, and of course it had the same PPU in it!

I was thinking of doing the same - but the risk is just the same...

@Kevtris - is there anything you can do to investigate the problem and to try to remedy it? Sourcing these chips is quite hard these days, and buying random NES units until you get lucky is very hit and miss.

The same flickering I'm getting, but only with the EverDrive

It didn't seem to make a difference for me, I will run some tests of real carts vs everdrive.

I do get flickering with Everdrive, but that is a specific line of broken white pixels problem.

The flickering I get with the specific PPU is present without Everdrive being used when I use my normal cartridges is different and is more of a shimmering that affects most tiles in an image (especially when scrolling seemingly).

First of all I just want to say it's absolutely amazing that the hi-def NES kit exists. The fact that the creators sell it is even better. I have followed the project for a while and really appreciate the effort they put into making the videos, tutorials etc.

Now to the point of this post.

I had another NES laying around at home and of course, that one too had the RP2C07-0 PPU. What I can't figure out is just how common this PPU is. My oldest NES has a serial number in the 700.000's, does that mean that all PAL NES's after that has the dreaded RP2C07-0 PPU?

If so, how low should I go to be sure to find a good, working PPU?

Or is it random? Based on region?

Any indication would be helpful as this could narrow down the search. Also, it's much easier to email a seller asking for a serial number rather than have them open up the damn thing.

Like I said, I love the idea of a Hi-Def Original NES and apart from the flickering I love the crisp image quality and additional settings. But as it is now, I somehow regret I didn't go for the AVS. Not giving up just yet but, you know, it's frustrating as hell.

Is this still in the pipeline? If so, there are a bunch of excellent palettes at the "download" link here, including some I don't know the origin of. These include the new ones by RGBSource and FirebrandX.

The most desirable IMO:

Consumer
Sony
Original Hardware by FirebrandX
NES Classic (Firebrand X and RGBSource both have one, virtually identical)
Hybrid by RGBSource

All of these look good with tricky things like MegaMan 2 and the second level in Castlevania that normally look like crap in emulator palettes. "Consumer" looks the most like how I remember the NES looking. "Sony" looks the most like how the games were probably "meant" to look. "Original Hardware" is made so that it produces identical colors to native composite output if you feed it to a CRT (regardless how other displays will show it). Both NES Classic palettes should match Nintendo's canonical new version of the console. "Hybrid" blends the palette as decoded by a composite capture card with the cleaner colors of the FCEUX palette--and the result is gorgeous.

Very happily got my HiDefNES kit in the mail today. Had no issues assembling it (though the CPU/PPU with interposers took a bit more force to get into the sockets than I would have liked). Got everything together, put a game in, powered it up, and nothing. There is some type of HDMI signal being sent as my switcher turned to the NES, but after a few seconds of a black screen it came up with the "No Signal" icon.

Not sure what could have gone wrong. The LED on the main board turns on and remains steady. Any guidance on what to look out for would be great. Hope the CPU and/or PPU didn't get damaged during installation.

Edit: Some updates. I found that if I power on the NES, the LED will glow bright orange, then start blinking on and off. If I switch my AV Receiver to that input, the blinking stops. This is so frustrating right now.

Is there a website that indicates what the LED status is? Might make it easier to troubleshoot.

Main LED should def not be on solid. It should cycle slowly from bright to dim if it sees hdmi cord is plugged in or full bright with an off flash every half second when no hdmi cord plugged in.
Does it still work through original composite and/or rf output of the nes (no hdmi cord plugged in to the kit)?
Be sure the ribbon cables are all the way in, they shouldn't be easy to pull out, take them out, check the contacts and reset them, this may help.
Do you have 5v on the nes?

If none of that helps you may need to put the nes back together without the kit and make sure it still works. There was a step in the guide to check this after desoldering the cpu/ppu and soldering in the sockets, did you do this?

Yeah, after removing the CPU and PPU I put in the in line sockets, soldered those in, then plugged in the CPU and PPU and checked it before doing anything else. It worked just as it did before at that point.

Haven't checked if the other video modes work, but I just went and pulled out Q1 and will bridge that and fire it up via Composite to see if it still works. If not, well, I think it means that the CPU and or PPU broke when pushing it into the tight sockets. If so, that's a my bad.

So I went and tested the normal Composite out. When composite out is used, the LED on the kit stays bright, then flashes off like you said it would. The video displays on my screen with a few graphical glitches, but that's likely because i haven't fully installed the motherboard and cartridge holder. So on the bright side, it appears as if the system still works and no chips died.

Will try messing with the ribbon cables as well and see if that makes a difference.

Yikes! I just powered it on and when the Composite is added and I measured the voltage at the HDMI board where the two wires connect, I'm getting 12 V DC! Shouldn't this be 5 V, or does the kit board downconvert the 12 V to 5V?

Are you using an original ac adapter? Shouldn't be that high, but yes the kit regulates dc output to the rest of the console.

I'm using an AC Adapter that I got from the retro store that i got the NES from. It's made in China and has connectors for the both the SNES and the NES. It's center negative and outputs DC 10 V at 1000 mA.

That junk adapter has been known to cause issues, try something else, can be anything 9v ac or dc out, polarity doesn't matter, over 1 amp is best.

Alright. I'll dig around the house for another adapter. Also, while i have the board out, I'm checking continuity on the pins for the PPU and CPU to the pins on the bottom of the motherboard. Should there be a one-one correspondence there, or are there some pins on the CPU/PPU that should not be connected? Figured i'd ask in case I start wondering why some beep and some don't.

Thanks for your assistance in my troubleshooting here. I'll eventually get this figured out.

No, some signals are interrupted and do not simply go from chip to mobo.

Yup, noticed that. Still, I went and took my multimeter and checked all the traces by putting one lead in the socket, and the other lead where continuity should be. That all turned out good so there doesn't appear to be any lifted pads where I had removed the CPU/PPU.

Went and got a new power supply (Found a 10V/1.5A supply pulled from an old router of mine. Figure this is better than the cheap Chinese knock-off). No change.

I have the HDMI out connected to my AV Receiver. When I turn on the NES, if I don't have the AV Receiver on the NES input, the orange LED on the mainboard will glow bright orange and then blink ever second. Soon as I turn on the input on my receiver to what the NES is hooked up to, it stops blinking and just stays bright orange. TV will show a black screen, then after about 5 seconds it will say "No Signal".

In case it helps, here are the specs of the NES:

Mobo - NES-CPU-11
CPU - RP2A03G 1HQ DS M
PPU - RP2C02G 1JP UR A (THAILAND printed on the back)
Mods - Pin 4 of the CIC chip has been removed, and the resistor on the expansion slot has been added for expansion audio.

Starting to run out of ideas on what could possibly be wrong aside from the board being DOA. Going to try and soak every connector in alcohol and contact cleaner just in case there is something in there that is preventing connection. Will also shove the ribbon cables in as far as they can go. They are in very tight right now, but who knows, maybe additional force is needed. Heh.

Finding it ironic that this install is giving me trouble and I considered it the "easy" install compared to the UltraHDMI on my N64 which went in easily. Heh.

I would try direct to tv first.

No success there. In a few hours, a retro game shop near me opens up. I'll go and grab another NES and try the install on that. Perhaps something happened to my motherboard when I was installing it and that is why it now fails to work. (Strangely, overnight the composite out doesn't work either. It just gives me white garbage on screen).

Still, I really appreciate the help with this. I'll eventually get it working.

So the Mod doesn't work properly for most of the PAL machines (RP2C07-0 PPU), even though it's advertised to do so.

Only the rare RP2C07A-0 works without flickering and stuff

And no bothering or reaction by Kevtris. Thanks alot.

Luckily the German installer I was going to go with told me about this issue.

I noticed some hi def boards are different colors than the one I have, which is blue. Is there any difference on the revisions besides the hdmi connector placement. Any pro or cons from one to another.

So in the end, I'm not sure what caused the kit to not work on my initial NES, but i went and got another second hand NES and installed the kit into it and it works. Will carefully look over my old board to see what the heck could have gone wrong. Sadly, the interposers snapped in two when i was trying to remove them from the board so i had to pick up another kit, but that is not the fault of Kevtris or GameTech. More end-user fault so no hard feelings. I'm loving this thing now and can't wait to really play with it this evening instead of shoveling a foot of snow. (God bless the USPS for delivering the kit to me despite the blizzard warnings).

I've just completed my first install, but it's giving me some problems, although I'm not sure if it's due to the AV Famicom itself or the Hi-Def NES. I gave the console a quick test before proceeding with the install and it seemed to be working OK, but now I have an issue where it will boot maybe once in 20-30 attempts and I've no idea why. I did think it was perhaps just a dirty slot connector, but I've given it a thorough clean (it wasn't too bad anyway) and it still has issues. Another thing that makes me think the cart slot isn't the issue is that when it does boot, I'll turn the console off and on again straight away and it doesn't work.

I checked the CPU and PPU and they both seem to be H rev. and aren't laser marked. I'm also 99% sure the issue isn't with the install work, as it's probably the cleanest job I've ever done and when the console does boot, it works just fine.

In terms of investigating it, I just checked to see that the Hi-Def NES was receiving 9 volts which it is. I have noticed that when the console fails to boot, the orange LED on the Hi-Def NES is on constant low brightness and when it does boot it pulses and is far brighter (pic below is when it has booted).

Any ideas on what I can do to get it working reliably would be appreciated.

EDIT: Hmmm, I had ordered two boards and swapped the main board around and the second one works flawlessly every time. Have many people had issues with faulty Hi-Def NES boards? I'll try the one I've been having problems with in another console and see if the issue persists.

I have just opened up my third PAL NES and there was no REV A chip inside! So if you need a RP2C07-0 for testing let me know and I'll ship one over to you if it isn't too expensive(I checked, I think it will be cheap enough for me to forget about it).



I was recently reading this and saw in the notes section about how the clock cycles differ between NTSC and PAL CPU/PPUs...



Forgive me for asking, but does the Hi-Def NES account for the different CPU & PPU clock cycles for a PAL system? I'm assuming it does, but thought I would ask.

I can also send in a rp2c07-0 ppu, hell the entire console if you want. But please try to work this out.

In videos from the NT Mini, it seems those Hi Def NES boards have more features and options than the stand alone boards. Has there been any word from Kevtris on when he'll be releasing a firmware update to bring parity between the two?

I'm assuming that they would also need the CPU from the PAL system.

That's because the Nt Mini doesn't use a Hi-Def NES board at all. The whole system is based on a bigger, more expensive FPGA.

Kevtris has said that the smaller FPGA used by the Hi-Def NES kit is already maxed out, so there's no way to bring the current boards to parity. He's also said he has no intention of making the kits with a more expensive FPGA. So other than bug fixes or the unlikely possibility of removing old features, we'll have to be happy with what we've got.

I would love to have more palette options though.

Ahh ok. Didn't realize that. Thank you. I too would like more palettes, esp NES Classic and FirebrandX

I'd like to have a couple of the FirebrandX palettes, the RGBSource "Hybrid" palette, and the Sony/Consumer/CXA2025AS palette. I'd be willing to give up the black and white palette if there isn't room.

Well, I tried the capacitor, and it made my NES produce a solid grey screen.
Removing the capacitor returned it back to normal. So - for me it didn't work.

It would be nice if Kevtris could at least let us know if he's willing to investigate this issue.

I feel like this kit wasn't sold to me on the understanding that it might not be 100% compatible with a PPU that seems to be very common in my territory.

Of course Europe only enjoyed sales of around 8 million compared to the 30 million the US got - but that's still quite a user base.

Well, no PAL support = no money to Kevtris & any installer. So he has to decide.

I've caved in and bought an NTSC "Kit" of a NTSC PPU + CPU and some crystals from ebay. I'll just convert my console to NTSC.

My reason for doing this is that I would really like to play some of the Japanese games properly so having a PAL console was always going to prevent this anyway.

So in a few weeks time, I'll have found a way around the problem - but the problem will still exist for others.

Can you share the link for these kits? I was thinking about doing this but haven't ever seen the NTSC chips for sale anywhere.

Oh wait, are you referring to this from ebay.com ? If so, would it not be cheaper to buy a NES from the states and salvage the chips that way?

Similar kit - different seller, about 20 dollars cheaper.

No, from what I've seen - first you have to find a seller in the US willing to ship to europe, not all do. Next you need to find a dirt cheap but still working unit. Then finally factor in the cost of shipping it. All in all I don't believe it's any cheaper.

Additionally, you've got to remember that you still need to extract the chips. Of course I have the tools and did this for my hi-def NES install - however it's all added risk that just doesn't make financial sense. Screw up the removal and kill a chip, then you've got to repeat the process all over again.

As there are so many of these units in the us you can literally pick up from any yard sale for peanuts, you'd think there would be some US sellers wanting to strip them for spares and parts.

That was true in the past, but not so much anymore. Now it's rare to find one for less than $50. I think people tend to look at ebay listings to see what something is worth, or they've heard about some dork paying $10K for Stadium Events and think they're sitting on a goldmine.

I'll look out for that, care to share the ebay seller or did you get a one off?


I found a few "working console" auctions today on eBay that ended around $60usd shipped to uk (bad condition exterior though), however I suppose there is no guarantee you will get one that works and you can't exactly ship it back if it's bad!


Depends on the modder! I had no problem doing this with my Hakko, but I see your point!


I can only assume there isn't a market big enough for this to be worthwhile, I can't think of any other reason to want a NTSC console over here (to play region exclusive games maybe??)

In other news there was an update on the game tech website:

This is has nothing to do with the most recent posts, but a Japanese Famicom owner has managed to get the Hi-Def NES mod working with a non-AV Famicom : http://vaot.mydns.jp/fc/hi-def-RWFamicom.htm

Of course, if you want to do something crazy like this, you are on your own.

Hi all,

I also tried to install Hi-Def NES. Got the CPU and PPU desoldered intact from two Nintendo's but I managed
to break partly both main boards. Few mobo's couplings was broken. What I am doing wrong here? Am I using too hot desolder temperature (340 celsius)?

I am giving up on this because don't want to break the third main board

You might be applying too much heat or for too long.

Ideally you should use a de-soldering iron, however the good ones are not cheap. I use a Hakko FR 300 and can cleanly remove a chip in about 5 minutes with it. I think game-tech did a video about what he uses which explains in more detail the process.

Where are you from btw? I'm looking to buy a NTSC PPU/CPU

Yes I might be desoldering too hot. My desolder gun station is some cheap ZD-915. That Hakko FR 300 would be great. I will check that video, thanks.

I am from Finland so most of the NES are PAL. Mine luckily had that working PAL PPU and originally that NES was from Spain.

Does your desoldering iron have a vacuum pump on it? I tried to remove an IC for a different project a while ago using just an iron, wick and a solder sucker thing and found it way more difficult and messy to do. Also more time consuming!


I thought I would ask just incase it was NTSC What is broken then, traces on the main board? If it's not too bad and the chips are good, it could be repairable.

Yes I have a pump in that gun and that vacuum function actually works quite well.
This seems to be same device:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ZD-915-Desolder ... 1935511733

And yes the main board have few traces broken where the CPU and PPU was soldered. I might have use too hot temperature because I only kept the gun
for like 2-3secs for each pin or I was too rough.

I will look at it and see if I could fix it.

Too bad I don't have any spare NTSC chips

Ah maybe it was the heat then. Sounds like some bodge wires should sort that out though!


No worries... I was being optimistic!

Can you provide me with a serial number for that pal nes? Doesn't need to be precise, just roughly in the millions. I have a pal with the "bad" ppu but I'm trying to narrow down the search for a good one.

So, I'm still a few days within the warranty for my Hi-Def NES upgraded Analogue Nt. It's a second run unit with composite video support--for which I only recently got the required video cable. I just found out the RCA audio jacks don't work. Analogue Support is trying to tell me Kevtris' HDMI upgrade isn't compatible with analog sound. I'm pretty sure that's BS, right?

If the CPU/PPU are still good, then it would be worthwhile to repair those boards.

That temperature is about right. Even with the best desoldering tool, it's easy to damage the pad by pressing the tool against it. Ideally what you'd do is add extra solder beforehand (improves heat transfer), then hold the desoldering tip against the pin and the solder without touching the pad at all. The other thing that damages the pad and trace is if you try to pry the pin out while there is still solder holding it in. If the hole is tight or the suction didn't remove every bit of solder, sometimes you do have to kind of snap it out. But in most cases the chip should fall right out.

Sure, I will check that serial number on this weekend and let you know.



Thank you I think this has been exactly my problem because I did press the tool against the pad and then turned it a bit so I thought it would help.
And few traces broke so easily.

This is what happens when I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing

They've outright deleted my support ticket now. I guess I won't be getting any support (or any other future products) from them.

I've opened my NES plenty of times, but never the Nt. Does anyone know if their HDMI kit differs from the others in any way? Or can it be transplanted?

The hi-def kit only does digital audio/video, the analog stuff is straight from the cpu/ppu AFAIK.
The nt hi-def kit is powered from the console so r35 jumper resistor is missing, no biggie, and there another resistor that sets it to an nt version with it's specific menu title. That's the only diffs I know of.

Thanks!

So if my analog audio doesn't work, that means it's defective or they purposely disabled it for who knows what reason...

[quote="flamepanther"
So if my analog audio doesn't work, that means it's defective or they purposely disabled it for who knows what reason...[/quote]

Sorry, I'm not familiar enough with the nt to give you an answer honestly...

That's completely understandable. But it doesn't disable the RCA audio on a stock NES or Famicom, correct?

Correct.

The serial number in my NES-ESP-2 is PE5744876.

Hi,

the past few months I've been trying to source a pal ppu to work with the Hi-Def Nes kits i have.

these type of pal consoles do not have the 'A' revision PPU RP2C07A

PAL DUTCH - NESE-001 (HOL) sn: PE28**924 / PE34**284 / PE21**957 / PE15**605 / PE28**924
PAL ITALIAN 'MATTEL' - NESE-001 (ITA) sn: PM02**41
PAL FRENCH 'SECAM' - NESE-001 (FRA) sn: PE35**641

I also went to a retro game console shop here in Belgium where I could open up the consoles they had, 11 in total
all were PAL DUTCH - NESE-001 (HOL) and none of them had the 'A' revision PPU RP2C07A

hope this helps if you want to buy a console with the needed revision ppu, do not choose one of the above ...

So PAL people are pretty much screwed...

I've tried installing the Hi-Def in a PAL NES, but I'm getting a bad image which is flickering between a good image and the one below, tested fine running on composite after I socketed it. I'm assuming it's the PPU issue mentioned above, but thought I'd check to see if it's consistent with what other people are experiencing. Will try adding a cap to pin 18 tomorrow to see if and how well it fixes it. I did try swapping the crystal and installing an NTSC CPU and PPU, but kept getting a grey screen for some reason.

CPU: RP2A07
PPU: RP2C07-0

They are from a UK PAL console, serial number PM572816. I do have another PAL set from a French NES (PE4731293), but the PPU is the same revision.

Do we know if Kevtris has had the time to look at our PAL problem?

Any sort of estimate of how long it might take to be addressed?

I was just wondering from a previous comment - once the HDMI board has worked out what chipset/video format you have, if you try to change it wihtout performing some sort of factory reset - is this why you can suffer the grey square on your HDMI output?

I suspect that when I get around to fitting NTSC CPU PPU and crystals I'll just end up getting the Square so I'll be no better off.

Bump

Been testing the kit a bit more and it seems like my Hi-Def NES (PAL-B, rev-0 cpu/ppu) doesn't like Blaster Master, Batman: The Video Game and Little Samson. The games are flickering the same way most of my Everdrive-games do. And it's even worse with Super Mario Bros. 2 and Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers. Been testing the games in another NES, and they all work fine. They do seem to work fine in composite-mode on my Hi-Def NES as well, but for some reason the composite mode are much worse after the kit installation, so it's not really a alternative playing any of the games that way. Do anyone else have any issues with the composite mode after installation?

Sorry I been scarce awhile. I was working 12 hours a day getting that nt mini out the door last year and the start of this year. Those that don't know, this is a multiplatform FPGA videogame system I designed. It nominally plays NES but can play all my other cores too (well mostly).

Anyways, I have been working on the hi def, fixing bugs tonight. So far, I have squashed the following bugs:

* DC level on the audio causing audio to be silent until i.e. some sound effect plays on certain models of monitor (I'm looking at you, ASUS). The fix removes the DC offset, which should fix this.

* FDS audio channel not being right. This was fixed now too, so it should sound correct in i.e. Bio Miracle. I am not 100% sure it's perfect since I can't play the second track of the NSF. It crashes the NSF player on the powerpak. Though the first sounds fine which is also tricky to get working.

* DPCM fix. The dog now barks 3 times in duck hunt, and paperboy has the proper DPCM sound effects now. The issue with both was that they don't write 0 to 4015 bit 4 to retrigger the channel, they just write 1F to 4015 to trigger it. So that was a fairly easy fix.

* Palette screwiness. On some chips (laser marked H rev PPUs, PAL PPUs, and the twin famicom (though it has not been tested on this yet but this SHOULD fix it)) the palette wouldn't work properly, and the screen would look screwed- tiles would be right but colours would be waaay off. This appears to be fixed now, it was caused by my address bus filtering being wonky, so I fixed that up and it seems to have fixed those issues.

I still have 1 bug left, on some PAL PPUs, there are speckles on the screen. I am not sure what is causing this, except it looks like the video coming out of the chip is a bit faster than other chips, so I think adding a bit of delay should fix it. I will use J4 on the board to enable this delay if this is what fixes it.

To make these fixes fit, I had to remove the interpolation setting, which I highly doubt anyone used. The FPGA is reporting in at 100% full now, so these fixes better be it, because there's no more gates left! I will remove the menu entry for it, too.

I might be able to stuff a few more palettes in, like 2-3 more. which ones should I include? This is probably the last thing I can add because the ROM inside is full up too. This design is using literally every resource available on the FPGA now.

Hi Kevin

Great to hear you have an idea on the PAL glitch bug ...

When the new firmware is available i'll be happy to test it , i have 4 different (Dutch, German, French, Spanish) pal consoles ready with the hi-def nes kit installed.

Hi Kevin,

Let me first say I love my HiDefNES kit. Every time I load it up I'm blown away. If I can make a suggestion on Palettes maybe one of FirebrandX's palettes would make sense to add to it.

http://www.firebrandx.com/nespalette.html Maybe the PVM Style D93, or Composite Direct palettes would be one of the options to add. Since they're both geared towards matching the hardware on modern displays. If just one palette could be added I'd probably vote for the PVM Style D93 from Firebrand X.

Thanks for your amazing work!
John

Hi Kevin,

Thank you so much for making the Hi-Def NES, definitely the best thing since sliced bread!

One thing I find could help improve the image quality a bit, would be to fix the missing pixel at the top of alternating frames. It eventually fixes itself a few lines down and that's usually covered by overscan but on HD TVs you can and want to see the full screen. The result is a wavy dozens of lines at the top... See attached screenshot.

I have scanned through this topic and couldn't find anything about it, there's so much info in here. Has this been reported already? My sincere apologies if it has. And if not, I would be very grateful if a fix could be implemented.

Again thanks for making such an amazing product!
Nic

Is this the result of the mentioned palette screwiness?
That is on a NTSC Rev. G PPU with a Famicom Adapter.

If you're not using any of these yet, here are some potential considerations.

http://www.firebrandx.com/nespalette.html

I know I have had a number of customers request the nes classic palette. I agree with everyone who has pointed out using firebrandx palettes. I don't know of anyone that actually uses the black and white so if one had to be removed to make room, I would vote for that one.

1st choice: "NTSC Hardware"
http://www.firebrandx.com/nespalette.html
Closest possible to the actual output of an NES console.

2nd choice: "Hybrid"
http://rgbsource.blogspot.com/2016/11/n ... e.html?m=1
Strikes a gorgeous balance between accurate(ish), dark, muddy, direct-capture colors and too-bright oversaturated emulator colors. It's prettier than the real thing without looking weird in Castlevania and Mega Man 2.

3rd choice: "PVM Style"
http://www.firebrandx.com/nespalette.html
Simulates the look of an NES on a PVM over composite.

I can't speak for others, but I'd happily give up the black-and-white palette to make room, if needed. I wouldn't miss the X-ray filter if it made room for something useful either.

It would be excellent if you could add HYBRID and NESCAP palettes to the Hi-Def NES!

http://rgbsource.blogspot.com/2016/11/n ... lance.html

Would it be possible to add a custom palette entry or two that you could burn to the firmware with a small special utility? That way anyone could add any palette they liked, all it has to be is 192 byte file.

yes, that is it. This should be fixed now. for good, I hope. I haven't tried it on a twin famicom, but I do have one here. not sure if I will have time to open it up and put the mod on for testing though. Modding the twin fami is tricky because the way it handles power is... weird. it really should have the power system redone. The problem is they use a discrete regulator, and the power switch does not turn the power on and off. It controls the base drive to the pass transistor! I don't know why they did this. The heatsink is obnoxiously large, too.

looks like I fixed the "wigglin' pixels" PAL problem too. This was caused by capturing the data at the wrong place. Jason sent me 5 sets of PAL chips, 3 sets of laser H rev chips, and a weird ebay sourced counterfeit CPU for testing.

4/5 sets of PAL chips had the wiggling pixel issue (As people have shown earlier in the thread) where leading edges of solid colour areas have a wiggling border. This is fixed now for 5/5 sets of PAL chips I have here.

The address line filter fix fixed the 3 laser H rev PPUs showing bad palettes/tiles, and several of the PAL chips had this issue too- but that is all fixed as well!

The counterfeit CPU interestingly works perfectly fine, and has looped noise and the duty cycles don't appear to be swapped. I am not sure who made it. It doesn't have ejector pin marks on it, so it's not the UMC chip and not a legit chip. The non-rev CPUs don't have ejector pins either, but this chip has looped noise so I don't think it's one of those. The chip gets a bit hotter than a regular E/G/H rev CPU, too. The chip is blacktopped, then laser marked "RP2A03E" (lol). I don't think they were using laser marking in the mid 80's! I heard of people buying these off ebay and getting PAL chips instead of NTSC ones. This chip is definitely NTSC, I ran the "flowing palette" demo and it worked properly so the timing is right.

Could be a rebadged TA-03N... I remember reading that they ran hot but were otherwise quite accurate 2A03G copies.

Well here it is, after 14 months!

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/HiDef ... 20beta.nes

Changes:

* Audio DC level restoration to fix some monitors that'd be silent or have other weird audio volume issues.
* FDS channel redone to be hopefully more accurate.
* DPCM fixed to allow retriggering.
* Address bus filtering fixed so that graphical/palette glitches should be a thing of the past.
* PAL pixel capturing fixed.
* 4 new palettes added.
* Removed interpolation and associated menu. I needed the logic gates in the FPGA to fix the other things.

I tested 5 sets of PAL chips- 1 set always worked, but the other 4 had minor to very severe "speckling". These are all working perfectly now.
I tested 3 sets of "laser H rev" parts as found in the newest AV famicoms (I think) and they are all working perfect now as well.

This should fix all the problems people had I hope.

This update is a beta because I am not 100% sure I didn't break something else relating to DPCM, so if I did please let me know.

The four new palettes are:

Firebrand X NTSC
Firebrand X PVM D93
RGBSOURCE Hybrid
RGBSOURCE NESCAP

The original 4 palettes are still in there of course.

Hope that's enough because this thing is fulllllllll up. There is absolutely no room left anywhere. I have scavenged it all. btw,
the xray mode is "free" so it doesn't use any logic elements. It's the internal decisions being made about the HQX stuff. It's basically detecting edges.

This is good news. Hope this can help the Pal-consoles. Any special way to update the firmware, or is it just to put the .nes-file into my Everdrive and start it up?

AWESOME! Thanks for fitting 4 new palettes in there, that's super fantastic. Can't wait to get out of work, get home, and get this new firmware on there!

Thanks again for this awesome mod!

Awesome work, thanks for your hard work Kev!

Any chance someone could comment on my wavy lines (missing pixel) issue at the top of the image? Are people not having the same problem? If so, is it just not bothering you or is there a way to make it better?

Thanks
Nic

I'm having trouble updating from 2.25. I'm using an (unfortunately) knockoff/clone EverDrive. Loading the HidefNES firmware update ROM leads to a gray screen and HidefNES's firmware update process fails the integrity check.

Just an FYI in case anyone else is in a similar position. Suppose it's time I upgraded to a legit EverDrive.

I had the same issue with v2.25, v3.0 beta seems to fix it!



Thanks kevtris! This update is really great. Fixes lots of things

Oooohh! I can't wait to get back home to try this! I really appreciate the reply.

Thanks
Nic

No problem!

kevtris, could the Sunsoft 5b expansion sound be increased in volume? I turned the volume slider all the way up to FF, but it's really quiet, it was the same with v2.25.

Thanks!

Thank you so much Kevtris! The sound for FDS games now sounds great and not "off" to me. I really am loving this HiDef kit!

Well I just installed V3 and the missing pixel/wavy lines issue is unfortunately still there. I'm not too surprised, I don't think anybody had mentioned it before. Kevtris, any chance this is something that could be fixed in the next version? This happens will all my televisions at home.

I don't remember where, but it's been mentioned. That's not a problem with yours, that's all of them.

Seems like it might be fixable with a quick hack, but for now you could just blank the top three lines.

Yup, I realize that it's happening to everyone but as per the last comment, I had hopes this would be gone with V3. I had a thread on shmups about this issue way back before the Hi-Def NES days when I was doing NESRGB. I'm just thinking it would be great if the kit could simply add the missing pixel or just blank it so the image is stable, otherwise the top rows are just wasted. I would much rather see them if possible. Anyways just a thought since I found this development thread. I hope it makes it to the TODO list at some point.

Thanks to all!
Nic

Hey Kevtris got a quick question for you. ive heard that the hdmi nes mod chip has the foot prints for the copy nes but there is no hardware revision with a usb port yet.

so my question is can a usb be soldered on the chip manually in order to use the copy nes function?

also when is a usb port revision going to happen? it would be convenient to have for updating without having to have an everdrive or power pak and an optional ram dumping to hack games and make cheat codes would be cool if possible.

ive been holding out from getting one of these cause it doesn't have the copy nes feature and ive been waiting for a possible revision.

Hmm odd, I think perhaps my crop settings were already set to cut those pixels out. My apologies

No worries. I was just stoked to get an update. Perhaps it will make it in the next release.

it's in there but you'd need to write the PC side host code. the existing host code won't work. I tested a "proof of concept" and used it to dump a few carts so I know it works well enough for that.

usb port upgrades will never happen. the FPGA is 99.5% full, and the ROM with the firmware has 32 or so free bytes left. The chips are used to the absolute maximum and nothing else can or will be added. I had a hard time making the last round of bug fixes and had to perform a featurectomy to make them fit. I removed the mostly useless "interpolation" settings.

ah ok. well what about a FPGA that can handle more commands and larger flash memory? then a usb port could be implemented? if a usb port isnt going to happen thats fine i have a copy nes mod chip i installed awhile back. i was just hoping for a 2 in 1 console anyways thank you for the reply Kevtris ill go on and order one once you release your latest firmware.

Get an Analogue Nt mini if you want a bigger FPGA.

Between the inclusion of the RGBSOURCE Hybrid palette, which comes very close to my CRTs and the purplish-blue tinted SMB sky, and the fixing of the firmware to work with laser-marked rev. H PPUs (again which I have), I was very pleased upon reading this update!

I slightly changed the way DPCM works, so it should be correct now with regards to retriggering it. It will only retrigger now if the sample is done playing, instead of retriggering no matter what.

Also, I bumped the volume up by a factor of 4 for sunsoft 5B since it was kinda quiet.

I noticed something really weird though with DPCM. I have a laser H rev CPU here and the DPCM is... corrupt on it sometimes. I tested with the 2.25 rev of firmware and it does it there, too so it isn't something new I introduced.

Using a legit SMB3 cart, it works fine- DPCM drums play OK, game works fine. I tested both composite and Hi def outputs.

Using a powerpak, though (with powermappers) DPCM is kind of broken. Samples end earlier than they should, like the length isn't being programmed right. The analog audio coming out of the CPU is broken in the same way, and watching the CPU bus the sample fetching just stops! I am at a loss as to what's going on here. Needless to say, it only happens with one specific CPU chip out of the dozen or so test samples, so I am not sure what's going on. I am suspecting the chip might be flaky somehow.

Anyways, here's the latest update:

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/HiDef ... 0V3.01.nes

Is there any guide to add the USB port (I guess some other components would be needed).
For 99% of people who won't use the copynes feature, would removing it free some space on the FPGA ?

Thanks for the update !

I'm having an issue with switching between 4X and 4.5X 1080P60 height. I've been trying to determine what I need to do in order for the change to take effect but looks like I always have to switch between 720P and 1080P a few times and restart the console a few times before it works. Saving the settings doesn't seem to help. Am I missing something? I don't recall testing this out so much with V2.25 but I've had the issue with V3 and V3.01. On that note, seems to me like the placement of the setting if misleading, since it ties in with the resolution it would be nice if it would be under that menu, we could have two options for 1080:
1920 X 1080 4X Height
1920 X 1080 4.5X Height
... or something like that. I realize we're running out of space in the menus... Or was it hidden away under "Save and options" because that settings is savable?

Last question, is there a reason why select is the key to exit the Hi-Def Adapter Menu rather than just B? Seems to me a little less intuitive.

Thanks
Nic

Hello,
did anyone tried to update the firmware using a Nintendo MMC3 board (with sockets) + eproms and NOT a flashcart?
I'm stuck on firmware below 2.25 over a year now and can't get it to update. When I turn on the console I only get a grey screen.
I'm using AV Famicom modded with the black Hi-Def NES kit.

I have tested it again with V3.01 and is it fixed, thank you!

While testing V3.01 I noticed an occasional glitchy horizontal line in the middle of the screen with Super Mario Bros. Is that something new?

I think you may be experiencing this here: http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10104

Is this what you are seeing?

It's unfortunate that interpolation was removed, as it seems to be the only way to get a 4:3 aspect ratio without uneven horizontal pixel sizes (and the resulting shimmering).

Would it be possible to remove the HQX stuff so that interpolation could be re-added? I would imagine far more people would want interpolation than the HQX scalers.

The free-running (not matched with NES lines) scanlines could be removed, as I can't imagine anyone would pick them on purpose over the other options.

Yes, thanks, didn't know of that glitch, was only aware of the one in the Mega Man 3 Level Select screen.

Thank you again Kevtris !

Today i updated the Hi-Def Nes kits in 4 different PAL machines (German, Spanish, Dutch, French - secam) with the v3.01 firmware.

All the glitches are gone !!!

Simply Amazing ...

Proof here -> https://youtu.be/oQx4ucVmeQI

Best Regards
Bjorn

awesome! so glad it worked!

I see three counts of "I don't want this feature so nobody probably does".

I can confirm that v3.01 has fixed all of the PAL issues I was experiencing!

I just updated to 3.01. The new Palettes are cool!

I only have one problem at the moment and it involves the extra sound channels. Sometimes I get a loud buzzing if Sunsoft 5B and/or VRC6 is enabled. It depends on the NSF or game. I can post a sound sample if needed.

This existed prior to the update; You'll want to disable these extra channels if the game you're playing doesn't support them.

From what I gather, enabling these is like switching to an input on a stereo amplifier that doesn't have anything plugged into it, you'd just get ambient electrical signals.

Oh, OK! Makes sense. I'll just enable the ones for the particular game I'm playing instead of going hog wild and checking all the boxes.

Oh thank you for confirming I'm not just hearing things. Not a big deal at all. I freaking love this thing and showing the NES Games to my 7 year old nephew is just priceless. Thanks guys!

I'm not saying nobody uses those features, I'm speculating that less people use HQX than standard interpolation. And non-aligned scanlines, I'm not even sure why that's a thing, so I can see where that suggestion came from.

Discussion begins around here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=12019&start=30

Can anyone test FDS Metroid on their Hi-Def NES? Apparently the most recent update to the Analogue Nt Mini, also designed by Kevtris using his FPGA design, may have silenced the door opening sound. Kevtris asked about it on the AtariAge page dedicated to the Nt Mini. The firmware upgrade fixed the FDS sound in Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa, but there may be a regression somewhere.

Here is the report : http://atariage.com/forums/topic/242970 ... ?p=3755991