Connect NES to PC to load roms and play on the NES?

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Connect NES to PC to load roms and play on the NES?
by on (#3580)
Hi,

First, greetings to you all since I am new to the board...

I got this idea some hours ago that no doubt many people have had before, yet I could not find any projects on google for it. I don't know much about neither electronics nor programming, but out of interest and a dream of this project to once become true by if not my own hand then by some other peoples hands, I'll spit it out.

It would be so cool if you could somehow connect a cable to the connectors of a cartridge, so data would go from the cable to the NES and not through some chips on the cartridge board, and then hook that cable to a computer somehow, i guess through a serial or parallell (or usb or whatever) port, and then have a way to talk to the nes through the computer.

Next thing would be to code an interface and program that could "load" a game rom that the NES can pull when it is powered on.

I know it's an insane project both in complexity and timeconsuming....

I mainly want to know what people who have a grasp of electronics and how the NES works, and programmers also, think of the idea. Just want someone to start thinking about it. Seeing how the discussion goes, perhaps I will even dare to start tinkering around with it, without any hopes to actually get it working but just for fun.

I am realistic enough to realize I personally likely could never pull it off heh. But it would be cool if someone did and I could build that thing and load roms from my pc someday.

Here is a silly sketch of the idea: Image

// J

by on (#3582)
If you look around these boards, you might find that there are already projects that are similar to this idea.

Look around this board and see why it isn't as simple as the GBA flash carts... (besides demand)
Re: Connect NES to PC to load roms and play on the NES?
by on (#3595)
jesperj wrote:
It would be so cool if you could somehow connect a cable to the connectors of a cartridge, so data would go from the cable to the NES and not through some chips on the cartridge board, and then hook that cable to a computer somehow, i guess through a serial or parallell (or usb or whatever) port, and then have a way to talk to the nes through the computer.


I remember someone a long time ago talking about an idea like that, I think as an ISA card.. maybe it was on the old forums.

The thing is, the latency needed would be extremely low. There's gonna have to be some hardware in the interface somewhere, because I don't think software could be fast enough to handle it just yet.

Maybe the closest thing to what you want is an EPROM emulator.

by on (#3635)
A lot of people would like a card with 128 KB of PRG RAM, 8 KB of CHR RAM, a few KB of ROM to bootstrap the thing, and an UNROM-style mapper (with bit 3 selecting ROM or RAM in the upper 16 KB). Connect a cable from the PC's parallel or serial port to the NES's controller port, and you have multiboot just like on the GBA.

Or you could get an FDS RAM card and an FDS Loader cable, which has much the same idea as what I presented.
=P
by on (#4037)
Project ufo1.zip Illustrated UFO Encyclopedia v1.0 ufo_guid.zip The UFO ...
for emulation of COM and LPT devices by Henrich Fukna lentilky.zip Lentilky ...

maybe u can use this little info, sorry, i dont have more =(