PowerPak Lite ram cart now available

PowerPak Lite ram cart now available
by bunnyboy on 2007-06-01 (#24618)

My PowerPak Lite cart is now available! This is a RAM cart used for CopyNES. It will automatically configure for 8 different mappers including:

iNES 0 - NROM
iNES 1 - MMC1
iNES 2 - U*ROM
iNES 3 - CNROM
iNES 7 - A*ROM
iNES 11 - ColorDreams
iNES 34 - BNROM
iNES 66 - GNROM

Right now it is only supported by the qbasic CopyNES software, but should be easy to add to CopyNESW. I do not have a system that will run CopyNESW so I cannot test it. The flash programming mod is needed.

This cart can only be used in a CopyNES system. Once the power is turned off or the cart is removed the RAM will erase.

by leonk on 2007-06-01 (#24620)

Thank you for the clarification. This explains a lot! Excellent job.

by Jagasian on 2007-06-01 (#24621)

I am going to get a regular PowerPak first. I'll buy the PowerPak Lite later. I need to acquire these things in stages, otherwise my wife will freak out.

by leonk on 2007-06-01 (#24622)

Q: How does it know if the game is H or V? I known UNROM boards have it hard wired, and if you have it set incorrectly, it'll act funny on your system.

(This is how I learned that many .NES files have the H/V settings wrong in the ROM, but emulators don't care about it).

by dvdmth on 2007-06-01 (#24623)

leonk wrote:
Q: How does it know if the game is H or V? I known UNROM boards have it hard wired, and if you have it set incorrectly, it'll act funny on your system.

(This is how I learned that many .NES files have the H/V settings wrong in the ROM, but emulators don't care about it).
You will need to verify that your ROM headers are accurate before the ROMs will be playable in the PowerPak or PowerPak Lite. Bad headers also trip up emulators, the main exception being Nestopia (which has its own ROM database for resolving bad headers). The mirroring flag, battery flag, and the upper bits of the mapper number are very frequently set wrong. The arcade flags, the WRAM size field, and the NTSC/PAL flag are even less reliable (if they are used at all). This continues to plague the NES emulation scene, and the problem may never go away (unless ROM sites actually begin fixing headers, which they don't seem to want to bother doing).

by bunnyboy on 2007-06-01 (#24624)

dvdmth is right, the .nes headers are used and completely trusted. There is no crc database to check like in some emulators. No reason to have bad headers, everyone talks about new file formats without bothering to correctly use the one that is everywhere now. Might help if emulators either fixed or just warned about bad bits when they are found.

In this case if the mapper high bits are wrong it will say not a supported mapper and refuse to load. If the H/V is wrong then graphics may be corrupt. If PRG/CHR size are wrong it might crash, havent tested that part. Other parts like WRAM size or battery bit aren't used by the PowerPak Lite.

Jagasian wrote:
I need to acquire these things in stages, otherwise my wife will freak out.

Please buy many now so my wife freaks out less about the mess!

by dvdmth on 2007-06-02 (#24630)

Having emulators automatically fix bad headers will definitely help here, but it won't solve the problem completely (a complete solution probably doesn't exist, however, so I guess a partial remedy is better than no remedy at all).

Perhaps someone should extract Nestopia's ROM database and write a ROM header correcting program based on it. Once the program is ready, bunnyboy can either add the program to his site for download or link to it. Provide instructions to the user informing him to verify the ROMs using that program prior to using them on the PowerPak. The validation program can also generate an empty .sav file of the correct size (i.e. 8K for most games, 1K for MMC6 games, 16K/32K for MMC1/MMC5 games with larger WRAM, etc.) which can then be loaded onto the CF card if the user doesn't have a battery RAM file already.