FDS ram adapter question

I have seen several games prototyped using this board. Is it analogous to any certain mapper type or retail board?

Not at all - on the other side it's very unique. It comes in an unique shape too.

How then could it be used for game prototyping when it is incompatible with standard cartridge hardware? I know that both Dragon Warrior and Bio Force Ape have betas that run from these boards, but neither have the same mapper architecture. BFA is MMC3 and DW is UNROM in Japan and MMC 1 in the US (due to many programming upgrades.)

Perhaps the developer versions of some of the boards came in FDS RAM adapter-like shells to make it easier to swap EPROMs in and out.

Because it's RAM, it was very easy to update the code. A lot easier than programming an EPROM. Of course now we have good emulators which are much better at prototyping than the FDS is.



It's still running on an NES CPU. A lot of the important hardware is the same. If you treat 8000-FFFF as read only, and don't need the extra sound or IRQ, it's kinda trivial to port something that runs on FDS to any cartridge mapper. Even the RAM at 6000, and an equivalent IRQ are also available on several common mappers.

Ahh, that makes sense. It does lots of things that several mappers also do.

There are many mappers with similar capabilities that are not compatible with each other. You can prototype a game in a cart and later move it to a different mapper with similar capabilities, you just have to change the routines that interface with the mapper hardware.

They're just using the plastic case. It doesn't use any actual FDS hardware. Atleast that's what I've read about those.

Makes you wonder, what the Dev doard is then...

Who knows, maybe it's a hacked together or some pcb produced to fit into the RAM adapter. Either way, it's nothing terribly interesting.

It's still running on an NES CPU. A lot of the important hardware is the same. If you treat 8000-FFFF as read only, and don't need the extra sound or IRQ, it's kinda trivial to port something that runs on FDS to any cartridge mapper. Even the RAM at 6000, and an equivalent IRQ are also available on several common mappers.[/quote]

I've always wanted to have a working copy of SMB2J on a cart. Yes, I'm aware of loopy's patch for the pirate version so that it runs on MMC3.

I think SMB2J doesn't even access the disk drive once it's loaded, not sure how much easier it makes porting to cart.

SMB2 (J) reads map data after every four worlds.

Yes, it is just an MMC3 (sometimes MMC1) board that fits into all the unsold FDS RAM adaptor plastic shells. This makes EPROM removal faster and the cartridge much more stable when it's in the Famicom, so it's quite apt as a devcart shell.