NES/FC/FDS/Dendy

[fierce estuary]

a lot of the things that corrupted save files weren't software but hardware. when you power up a system the pins are generally in an undefined electrical state for a brief time, and if you're unlucky, that electrical state tells the ram to do stuff that you don't want, like write a byte of garbage

later mappers started implementing write protect flags that had to be disabled before the ram would respond to write signals

[tepid umbra]

That sounds really bad tbh. Or as someone smarter than me put it: shitty & absurd.

[cursive sable]

The only reason such a mapper exists is to make it easier and cheaper to manufacture modern cartridges. It would be a lot cheaper and easier to stick a flash chip on a cart, write the game rom to it, and then use same said chip for saving than a proper maskrom setup. Problem is to save you are now writing to the same chip that stores the game, and the game area also possible to write to.

I can't imagine much if any devs have any reason to ever overwrite the game area, it's just something that is technically possible by the nature of the hardware

(I think I saw some NES homebrew game that advertised you can download patches for it, so maybe that? But for all I know the patches could be stored in a seperate file)

IIRC no, I think you need to do some specific set of instructions to enable writing to the flashrom, a glitch would either have to get very lucky to do those instructions all correctly in the correct order, somehow trigger the code from the game that does it in the correct order, or somehow trigger AFTER the game has done it but before the game itself starts writing to have that happen. And I am not sure if you even need to do more after saving to have the changes actually get written. Basically, it's not zero but just something like a random missingno glitch should not be able to do it. Yes it corrupted your SRAM save on the Gameboy but there was zero checks in place there, the zero checks were part of the reason why a very tiny oversight in being able to get into battles on a small strip of the cost caused such a massive glitch in the first place.

[granite pivot]

I'm guessing there is no time for Klax?

[cursive sable]

It is not the nineties

[fierce estuary]

me or someone will fix it eventually, it's a fairly minor mapper tweak

[granite pivot]

I'm curious about the hori track. Operation Night Strikers tried to emulate it for the FC Operation Wolf's mouse mode with disasterous results (the mouse mode has poor diagonals). Though I also heard the controller itself my not be that great. Then again, the person doing a play through video on Youtube on actual hardware seemed to do well with it.

[fierce estuary]

the what?

[mellow dawn]

Presumably https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Hori_Track

[steep yew]

https://tenor.com/bSFw3.gif

[granite pivot]

Operation Night Stikers is an official compilation with Night Striker, Operation Wolf, Operation Thunderbolt, and Space Gun, and ports of them as DLC. It's on switch and Steam. The DLC is somewhat disappointing since the original in game options are blocked out from some games and the NES mouse mode is stuck with simulating the hori track (poorly) with no option for simulating the lightgun (though the SMS version simulates the light gun).

Not that I would want the mouse to simulate light gun in Operation Wolf since it lacks rapid fire. No support for stuff like the sinden lightgun either.

[fallen brook]

what is the issue with klax?

[granite pivot]

From Marteicos:

FPGA
— 10/26/2025 5:55 PMSunday, October 26, 2025 5:55 PM
Someone reported on MisterFPGA's reddit about having issues with Klax (USA).
https://www.reddit.com/r/MiSTerFPGA/comments/1oguj3h/klax_usa_on_nes_core_graphics_issue/

[fallen brook]

interesting, thank you

[fierce estuary]

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

[fierce estuary]

yes I know

I thought I talked about this already

KLAX uses a mapper called RAMBO-1 which is tengen's knock off MMC3 mapper. It's behavior is poorly understood, but the mapper code just needs a tweak for the game

[granite pivot]

That was in reply to iamTeddyNL

#1091056042667937944 message I copy and pasted this earlier post because I was trying to figure out how to link earlier ports like this.

[fallen brook]

IRQ timings?

I've quickly compared the code with what the nesdev wiki says and I do see some stuff that does not match the wiki

even though the wiki is also pretty cryptic for this mapper

[fierce estuary]

the IRQ is the issue, yes. Really to do it properly it should be reworked to be on par with the MMC3 mapper in terms of using the m2 clock and a12 filtering and things

the problem is nobody really knows how this mapper works

no implementation of it anywhere is 100% correct

[blissful prairie]

Well, I guess with all games being unlicensed ports of Atari arcade games and being "downfitted" to the NES doesn't help its matter.

[fierce estuary]

atari and nintendo had beef

atari stole nintendo's cic chip patent from the patent office and started making bootleg games

it was all janky

[blissful prairie]

It's somewhat funny that Atari wanted to release on the platform of its competitor at all

[fierce estuary]

they weren't doing so well at the time

or ever again

[blissful prairie]

Yeah, the Jaguar project didn't really rescue them

At least they tried to hide their contributions by using the Tengen moniker

I guess that Williams and Midway were not doing well either at that time. Otherwise Midway would not have sold out to Williams

So the big US arcade giants in a crisis. At least Williams managed the turnaround.

[vivid roost]

i like how even when you try and work on the nes core you can't escape atari

[fierce estuary]

atari is like cancer, you're never truely rid of it

[steep yew]

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSCQMQ27

[dreamy marten]

Christmas comes early this year

[steep yew]

actually it's late :/

[dreamy marten]

But the website date says nov 3rd?

[steep yew]

jeff is fucking me again

[clever scarab]

Giving you the ‘ole bendozer

[steep yew]

bezos'ed

[fierce estuary]

atari conversation is now banned from this channel!

[clever scarab]

I like Nintendo and Nintendo cores

[steep yew]

Hey robby, I can't remember, who published Klax?

the nintendo game I mean

[clever scarab]

Tengen ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh lol

[steep yew]

https://tenor.com/beT6W.gif

[dry lynx]

Nintendo and Nintendo accessories*

[granite pivot]

At one point Atari split into two different companies. Atari Games, the arcade division, is the one that became Tengen, not the Atari Corp that made the Jaugar. Atari Games/Tengen/Time Warner Interactive was later bought by Midway and absorbed into them before they went under.

[granite pivot]

There was also a rights dispute between Midway and Infogrames at one point over who owned which games (Midway got the Atari Games/Tengen games and Infogrames got the games before that).

Atari Corp. had to license the Atari Games ports on their computers, Lynx, 2600, 7800, and Jaguar from Tengen.

[fierce estuary]

whoever did this... I.. grr...

MAPN163 n163
(
    m2[7], m2_n, clk, ~enable, prg_write, nesprg_oe, 0,
    1, prg_ain, chr_ain, prg_din, 8'b0, prg_dout,
    neschrdout, neschr_oe, chr_allow, chrram_oe, wram_oe, wram_we, prgram_we,
    prgram_oe, chr_aoutm, ramprgaout, irq, vram_ce, exp6,
    0, 7'b1111111, 6'b111111, flags[14], flags[16], flags[15],
    ce, (flags[7:0]==210), flags[24:21], audio_dout,
    // savestates
    SaveStateBus_Din, 
    SaveStateBus_Adr,
    SaveStateBus_wren,
    SaveStateBus_rst,
    SaveStateBus_load,
    SaveStateBus_Dout
);

[hasty river]

I dunno what I'm looking at but I'm making grr faces for you

[fierce estuary]

In case anyone needs to play the new lost splatterhouse game, you have to switch the mapper to ines 210, for now

though it wont be very meaningful to you if you don't speak japanese

[timber lava]

I didn't know there is a new splatter house game

[fallen brook]

that looks very sophisticated for an NES game. hope somebody will translate this at some point, I like games like these

[fierce estuary]

it was just discovered, lost prototype

https://bsky.app/profile/west-mansion.bsky.social/post/3m4jxwhb4hc2z

West Mansion: The Splatterhouse Homepage (@west-mansion.bsky.social)

STOP THE PRESSES.

The ROM for the unreleased Famicom RPG Splatter World has been released (in a thread on 4chan, of all places). I've tried it myself, and it does seem to be genuine. If it's a fake, it's a damn good one.

Expect (more) coverage on West Mansion soon.

@hg101.bsky.social

Reposts

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270

Bluesky · Nov 1, 2025, 2:45 AM

it appears to be real, it has code for an obscure interface with a bandai serial controller port debugging interface that almost nobody is likely to have known about

I think it'll get translated, it's pretty much complete and polished

[fallen brook]

(c) 1993, at the end of the nes lifecycle

and usually when the best games start to appear

maybe they cancelled it because they feared they were too late on nes

[livid leaf]

Late NES/Famicom releases were typically really low budget releases, like puzzle games or FDS re-releases to cartridges.

Japan didn't get the cartridge version of The Legend of Zelda until 1994

[fierce estuary]

I think bandai was on their way out by then anyway

[livid leaf]

Nah, they were still publishing games for the Famicom all the way up to 1994.

[idle patrol]

Nintendo itself sucks, but Famicom/Nes is one of the best consoles ever.

[glacial turtle]

Is the raw dump set to use a mapper not implemented or set wrong?

[fierce estuary]

it's set to use the wrong mapper

sort of

it's mapper 210, but it's not submapper 2

it's submapper 1 with 8Kib of save ram

if you change it to ines 210 it'll work (because it assumes the ram) or if you set it to nes2.0 210 submapper1 with 8kib save ram it will also work

the core is fine, the mapper is wrong

that's why it only works in fceux by default, because it's so old and jank it doesn't do nes20 properly so it's just using ines instead

[clever scarab]

lol, it only works because the emulator doesn’t work correctly?

[fierce estuary]

yes

the emulator isn't respecting the nes2.0 header's specification that it has 0 save ram

it should have save ram

and be a different submapper too

[glacial turtle]

How do you think it wound up being set wrong? Dumped wrong, or something due to it being a prototype cart?

[fierce estuary]

human error

it was dumped fine

it's a brand new prototype so no dumper will know what to set the header to by default, so a human just did it wrong

[clever scarab]

LOL

[fierce estuary]

it's fine, it's no big deal, it just needs to be corrected to use it

[clever scarab]

So the patch “fix” is actually converting it to be a correct dump?

[fierce estuary]

no

the fix is just setting the header properly, like 90% of mister "this game doesn't work" issues

4E 45 53 1A 10 20 23 D8 10 00 70 00 00 00 00 01

[hasty river]

is that something you can add to your magical header fixer thingy

[tepid umbra]

Can you pls fix my head as well?

[urban meadow]

Easy enough. 🔨

[fierce estuary]

once the database is updated to include this game, yes

[hasty river]

Huzzah

[mellow dawn]

Uh....That may or may not be the work of an off-white rebel...

Once upon a time I thought it would be a good idea to keep code that would make swapping bsck and forth between Powerpak mappers (or other open source hdl carts) and MiSTer mappers so that improvements and fixes could be easily shared.

[fierce estuary]

I don't mind the extra module so much as I do the lack of port names

[granite pivot]

The proto is named Splatter World? Looks interesting. Too bad the ultimate crossover game, Splatterhand, was never found. 😉

[fierce estuary]

a lost proto with that level of quality and polish is exceptionally rare these days

[glacial turtle]

And apparently turned up on 4chan of all places

[fierce estuary]

on halloween

someone was clearly sitting on that for a bit

and decided to post it on 4chan

[amber willow]

Looks good, I'm a fan of the other famicom game.

Having the bosses be inspired by horror movies was a cool idea

[urban meadow]

So it was basically Namco's take on Castlevania!

[hasty river]

that was my first thought as well

[fierce estuary]

"lets make splatterhouse into an rpg"

I love nes era

[hasty river]

Turn based horror is so suspenseful

[livid leaf]

Not that strange to have leaks on 4chan. The anonymous nature of the boards means it's very easy to sneak confidential material onto the internet, prototypes of video games included.

This is how we also got the Nintendo Gigaleak back in 2020 and the similar Pokémon Teraleak in 2024.

[glacial turtle]

A good point, well made.

[steep yew]

It's hard to remember that 4chan is more than /b/ and /pol/

that's all I associate it with

[hasty river]

I actually know nothing of 4chan despite being online since like, 1997

[elfin flume]

it's for the best

[fierce estuary]

wisdom right there

the less you know about 4chan the happier you will be

[tepid umbra]

I only know 4chan from some true crime podcast that did an episode about them.

[jade zenith]

only board on 4chan that i frequent is /vr/ (retro games), which is where the splatterhouse world proto was dumped i think

there can be some good stuff on there but a lot of the time it's just this

[tepid umbra]

Yeah but I imagine really interesting stuff like prototypes filter through to normal places like this discord so I don't have to sift through the muk.

[hasty river]

I shoud be god damned blissful then lol

[fierce estuary]

It can always get worse

[fallen brook]

@fierce estuary I think I see how to support persistent flash writes now, thanks for the nudge. question is before I start writing something, should I check the mapper number for going after prg_rom, or claim an unused mapper flag?

the latter might be better if there are more mappers that do this but I thought to check with you

[fierce estuary]

I'm not following why you need a new mapper flag?

typically we'll use the mapper number for special behavior in the code, often in the game_loader module

you'll see some mappers need special memory clears and things

adding arbitrary flags could create conflicts in the future if they turn it into a real mapper

speaking of flags, mappers can also flag for special behavior they need

oh that's what you mean

duh

yeah you can use a mapper flag if you want

whatever is cleaner

so FYI teddy, going forward, in mappers, CE is going to be at the falling edge of M2

and m2_inv will be the rising edge

ill rename the signals in the future to be more intuitive

[fallen brook]

yup 😄

[fierce estuary]

most mappers don't write til the falling edge because on NES the dbus value is unstable on m2's rising edge (usually open bus)

[fallen brook]

why this remark? did I get this wrong somewhere?

[fierce estuary]

no

[fallen brook]

or just as a heads up

[fierce estuary]

just a heads up since you seem interested in mapper stuff

because right now it's confusing

[fallen brook]

gotcha

yes I'm interested in this, seems to fit my skill level. I can do digital design but not design a complete cpu or ppu, this mapper stuff seems straightforward

[fierce estuary]

it's a good entry point

some of the mappers could use a real cleanup too

[fallen brook]

👍

[tepid umbra]

I like games on the nes. but I hope y'all have fun with yo mappas as well, whatever that is.

[fallen brook]

it's the cartridge hw. your games won't run without 🧐

[blissful prairie]

Like mini PCBs behind the plastic case. You plug them into your NES, hidden behind the plastic.

Most "Nintendo seal of quality" cartridges had rather common stuff in there.

Unlicensed "pirate" releases had mappers in there that are sometimes poorly understood because the games themselves were not really worth extensive reverse engineering efforts. Aftermarket games sometimes put modern chips onto those mappers which are hard to implement im FPGA or even anachronistic

[glacial pecan]

Sadly Sega failed to release a 32x based mapper cart in '95.

[smoky fox]

[cursive sable]

Is that 8KiB for PRG RAM? I am seeing an option for both PRG and CHR RAM when editing the header.

[fierce estuary]

yeah

prg ram battery

[cursive sable]

Thanks

[half pasture]

What app is that?

[cursive sable]

It's an emualtor called puNes, it just has a built in header editor.

I pretty much just use it to check/edit headers or try out roms with weird mappers since it seems to support just about every mapper that nothing else supports. Though in terms of accuracy it's not as great as Ares or Bizhawk.

[half pasture]

Thanks a lot!

[cursive sable]

No problem

[fierce estuary]

mesen i smuch better

[clever scarab]

smuch better!

[amber willow]

No you're smuch better

[urban meadow]

Smooch better? 😚

[blissful prairie]

Smooch butter

[clever scarab]

I wonder if this core will ever support the ZDog

[steep yew]

whats updog

[hasty river]

Draggin' bofa deez!

[granite pivot]

A canine superhero who constantly speaks in rhyme?

There's no need to fear, updog is here!

[clever scarab]

https://bootleggames.fandom.com/wiki/ZDog

[cursive sable]

Clearly, we need a ZDog core!

[fierce estuary]

what is all this not-nes discussion

[clever scarab]

Ok hear me out, the ZDog is a famiclone but uses modified system on a chip specs to be like souped up famicoms

[tepid umbra]

Zdog core when?

[main narwhal]

oh it is indeed a custom system...

this one is even more interesting, but it would need its own core

https://bootleggames.fandom.com/wiki/UM6578

who knows if its even dumped though

[simple hedge]

Which NES editor is this?

[cursive sable]

It's an emulator called puNES, it just has a built in iNES header editor

[tepid umbra]

That fixed header could be distributed via ips patch, right?

[clever scarab]

There’s a fixed header version already out there, works fine on MiSTer

[clever scarab]

I like that the MiSTer core is the most accurate NES emulator out there. I use Ares to test games or patches I apply before I move it over to my MiSTer but I’ve noticed it’s not as compatible with some games not even running. I guess I should stop doing that.

[cursive sable]

Ares appears to currently be the most accurate software NES emulator in most cases, yeah. Not counting TriCNES orf course, which isn't a playable emulator. Though, puNES supports some games nothing else does, not even mister, ares, or everdrives, since it's focus seems to be to try to support every mapper in existance.

But puNES is lacking in accuracy beyond that

[tulip basin]

all these years and all these nut sack mouse icon emulators and no one has made pe-nes

disgraceful

one day devs will get their acts together

[cursive sable]

I mean, in the 90s/early00s we had Nesticle and Genecyst, also one with a name I refuse to even type out.

[tulip basin]

nesticle was my first
emulator

once they added the nut sack for a mouse pointer i was convinced no one could improve nes emulation and stuck with it for years

[cursive sable]

Yeah, was my first too, though I always used the DOS version so I was not aware of the pointer, I am used to the bloody hand cursor

[undone willow]

I would be very surprised if Ares passed more of those recent accuracy coin tests than Mesen does.

[clever scarab]

Yeah I dunno what’s more accurate. I just know the fixed header rom for Splatterworld and the FF7 Advent Children romhack don’t load on Ares.

well didn’t for me, so maybe user error

[undone willow]

Still think its wild that after so much time a bunch of new tests were written, amazing that there were still areas to improve on.

[cursive sable]

Oh right, I keep forgetting about Mensen

I actually ran the test the other day again on Mensen, Ares, Bizhawk, and puNES, they were most to least accurate in that order

Though all of them except puNES were close

[fierce estuary]

mesen is the most accurate software emulator

mister is the most accurate fpga emulator, and there's a tas tool that is a bit more accurate than mesen but im not sure it's fair to call it an emulator because it's not really mean to play games so it's sort of a different catagory of tool

[tepid umbra]

Between mesen and mister, which is more accurate?

[blissful prairie]

MiSTer of course 😉

But it always depends on your definition or metric: the mapper support of MiSTer is solid, but Mesen has support for more mappers. And puNES has even more but is otherwise not among the memorable emulators.

The "main NES" is represented best by the Kitrinx core.

[glacial turtle]

I think at this point asking which NES emulator is better, Ares or MiSTer, is like asking which is better: a Ducati motorbike or a Ferrari car.

[dry lynx]

The answer is a neither. It’s a Sinclair C5

[glacial turtle]

Not going to lie, I have said for years if I ever somehow became super rich I would buy a few C5s so I could race about my fantasy property with mates, but have no interest in ever having a fancy car or bike. You can get C5s for like £1000 as well, probably less.

[fierce estuary]

mister is for right now

but the difference is not large

it's more of a technicality than especially significant

[steep yew]

I just want the green light to put it on a t-shirt

[tepid umbra]

Mister wins again!

[blissful prairie]

A bit confusing when Fish Stick and Stick Fish communicate 🤔 Some bootsector vibes as well.

[latent breach]

@steep yew oh wait actually

[steep yew]

I’ll take 2

I will 100% spill ketchup on one of them

[glacial pecan]

but I though mister is now more accurate than most hw nes...

[latent breach]

yeah, that’s why I amended my first “design”

[glacial pecan]

Yes, at closer inspection those are indeed different pictures

[jade zenith]

even if mesen was more accurate than the current nes core, i'd still probably rather play on my mister. it's 10x easier to get running on a crt and has virtually no input latency

not sure if there's a way to achieve that with software emulators, outside of crt emudriver/batocera or something

[ember bone]

I can never figure out what is it with white shirts, and automatically being a stain magnet. Like you could wear darker shirts and not get a single stain. But as soon as you put a white one on, you get a stain within like five minutes.

[covert crypt]

The mister has greatly helped me enjoy NES more. I have no nostalgia for it whatsoever as I never had one but the negligible input lag, nice palette (Kitrinx) and accuracy has helped me just play these damn games.

[jade zenith]

one of the main reasons i got a mister was because i didn't want to spring for a real famicom with an rgb mod lol

[covert crypt]

I've been playing such classics as Big Nose the Caveman and Bee 52

[hasty trout]

I have several rgb modded famicoms and even the rgb blaster from krikzz, but the nes core is definitely the best

[covert crypt]

The whole RGB mod thing made me just think a MiSTer was a far better solution as we're already into "not the original hardware" territory

Even if I got a fami/nes, I don't think I'd RGB mod it. If composite is the best it can generate, then that'd be the limit for me.

Otherwise, there's the MiSTer

[steep yew]

I’m in the same boat. I was watching tiktok and someone was talking about a modded saturn and I was like “oh man, I’d love a modded saturn - but I wonder if it has an hdmi mod.” 2 weeks later I had a mister and tink4k

[jade zenith]

for 5th gen consoles, i still use real hardware, but once a mister 2 comes around those cores get some more headroom to work with, i don't doubt that they will replace my consoles too

[tepid umbra]

That's actually Kitrinx' fault, she named us thus. Before we were Chicken McNugget and Nugget McChicken, way easier to keep apart.

[tulip basin]

rf or die trying

i feel like i’m pants on head crazy. i want my nes sprites to shimmer

and colors to bleed

or it ain’t real to me

i probably played 20 plus nes consoles at friends houses growing up and literally exactly no one had a trinitron with rgb and pixel perfect sprites. rf into some random tube and i think that level of distortion helped hide how simple the graphics were

like i use my svideo out from my composite adapter…. to go into an rf modulator. because it makes the games look perfect. genesis and snes too.

the more you can smear individual pixels into brush strokes of color the more cartoonish and alive these games actually look. it’s like the mona lisa vs the mona lisa printed on a state of the art printer

[main narwhal]

it all depends if you have/want to run real carts. MiSTer will not touch that... so next best step would be a modded FC/NES

you can now get original CPU and PPU on brand new motherboards with composite, SVideo, RGB and HDMI built in

with palette and filter support like the MiSTer core

[clever scarab]

So many cool options out there, I feel like every retro fan is taken care of these days.

[dreamy marten]

Yeah i would wear this to some nerd event

[main narwhal]

if I'm not mistaken there is an open source motherboard for Famicom already,

so I think we're not far from seeing a version of that with an FPGA

I just know that Chinese companies won't do that because they are concerned of ripoffs (there's some drama in China over 2 makers of clones that use real chips...)

there is already a new injection mold one can buy separately

[jade zenith]

these are already using an fpga for video generation

[main narwhal]

yeah or similar. it creates 4 video signals on the one I have

but it still runs an original PPU

for some reason

[jade zenith]

i think i've already seen some fully fpga clone consoles on ali but i might be mistaken

[main narwhal]

yes there were. but I think they weren't popular as I haven't seen them in a while

possibly they used a custom core

I see much more clones that advertise using the real chips; there's two main brands, Lava FC and another

[jade zenith]

the lava FC consoles look like a pretty sweet deal in all honesty

[main narwhal]

the other brand is , according to some Baidu forum posts, a clone with poor support

Lava FC seem to be legit, I did ask for updates and they sent me new firmwares with fixes

they have mostly 3 models (composite only, RGB, and HDMI) with different prices

[jade zenith]

interesting

i kind of prefer the lava RGB kits over the original NESRGB honestly. i don't really have a need for all the extra features the official kit has

[main narwhal]

if it's like the Lava FC Pro (with HDMI), it can already do palettes at least

[main narwhal]

I think we will see a full FPGA remake one day based on the MiSTer core.. It shoudn't require a big FPGA once you remove mapper support e.g. if it can only run carts

FPGA could be even be smaller if the PPU/RGB/HDMI layer is kept separate to reuse what already exists

[fierce estuary]

it has to emulate a lot of annoying bugs

so it can't be as tiny as people would like

bugs usually require analog stuff which takes a lot of le

[glacial turtle]

I wouldn't be surprised if someone does a NT Mini style NES clone using the MiSTer core either. It has been money on the table for Analogue not to rerelease NT Mini Noir in a cheaper plastic shell. Those are selling for north of a grand now.

[main narwhal]

ah good point

[main narwhal]

I don't have a working original NT to test, but I'm sure my LAVA FC Pro is already as good or better in AccuracyCoin

(both use original FC chips)

the NT Mini Noir is far lagging behind for the same test

so arguably there is a better alternative than paying a bunch of money for a Noir

I'd say the key niche is to make an HDMI-capable device with an FPGA for less than $100... that has not shown up yet

but the low margin may not be worth it

[fierce estuary]

well, previously i'd say the nes core wasn't really made for handling real carts

but it's pretty close in the current branch im working on

[main narwhal]

Kitrinx FPGA motherboard soon? 😄

(j/k it's obviously a very different animal to have to deal with pcb, resistors, and other physical components)

(not to mention sourcing a proper FPGA that can be hand-soldered or assembled cheap with it)

[fierce estuary]

I don't really see the need

what's wrong with mister

it does more, why take a multi function device and make it worse?

[glacial turtle]

If I have learned one thing over the past few years it is you will never convince a large number of people to give up their carts and embrace using ROMs.

[tepid umbra]

Just use nfc tags and tell them it's game key cards.

[blissful prairie]

If I remember well, Taki Udon already teased a possible NES style MiSTer. Possibly with the addition of reading carts? What's up with the Heber Multisystem2? Doesn't that read NES carts?

Ok, that seems to be dropped for now:

"The MiSTer project, upon which the Multisystem is based, is continually evolving. While there has been experimental work mentioned by Heber employees regarding the possibility of reading real cartridges (like Game Boy) using the advanced I/O of the MMS2, this functionality is not a standard, advertised feature and would require specific, non-standard cartridge reader add-ons and core support."

I thought that slot on the top was supposed to enable cart reading to some extent.

Like the Pocket

[dry lynx]

The only argument I can see for this (but not cart reading etc) would be to remove a layer of user interface, configuration etc - but I suspect that could be done in MiSTer itself by autobooting into a core, maybe with a custom main/menu or whatever to strip out some UI buttons and just set defaults

So just streamlining for single core use

(Not for me, but maybe there are some sickos who only boot into one core ever)

[main narwhal]

it would be the only way to use carts with with 100% remade but accurate hardware, and the final nail in the coffin for any other Famiclone

eventually somebody in China might do it

[jade zenith]

let them suffer

[main narwhal]

you can configure MiSTer to start on the last core that was used. I do that for my arcade setups

[main narwhal]

the slot on top is a replacement of the USB3 connector for user IO (SNAC, etc)

[dry lynx]

Sure. I was talking about a version that deliberately locked things down a bit more to remove potential user error

But there’s a lot that you can do just with config 🙂

[main narwhal]

there is an option for that too I think

but even without that, I think you can map a controller skipping the OSD button

so you can make it so that you need a keyboard to open the OSD

; When attempting to access the OSD players will be prompted for an unlock code.
; U = Up, D = Down, L = Left, R = Right, A = Select, B = Back
; Setting osd_lock to DUUUD would require entering the sequence Down, Up, Up, Up, Down
;osd_lock=DUUUD

; If osd_lock is enabled, allow the OSD to be opened without entering the unlock
; code if less than osd_lock_time seconds have passed since the OSD was closed.
; set to 0 for manual lock from OSD
osd_lock_time=5```

here you go ^ from the latest INI file in the MiSTer_main repository

[clever scarab]

Ah yes, seems like this chat is in order, carry on!

[main narwhal]

what is your computer smoking

[late flower]

malware flavor cigs maybe

[dry lynx]

I don’t actually want to do it 😉

But even if you do load up the OSD, you’re greeted with things you don’t want to see if it was a single use device. That’s what I meant by streamlining

i.e. change core

[tepid umbra]

I think there is a limit to the ineptitude of a user one should cater for.

[dry lynx]

I wasn’t saying it was a good idea - just what I would do if I was a company and wanted a low investment single purpose MiSTer

[fierce estuary]

at some point, you really have to let natural selection work its magic

[clever scarab]

so you're saying you're adding jailbars?

its natural part of CRTs!

[tepid umbra]

I was 100% certain you'd agree. 😅

[urban meadow]

Robby downloading games from 4chan again I see.

[heavy dust]

I bought a Famicom and have collected carts and controllers but only because they’re simultaneously neat and not grossly expensive. It’s 100% wasted while I already have a MiSTer.

[cursive sable]

i just wish it was possible to have both RGB and HDMI from an NES at the same time like you could with the N64. Every mod for the NES requires you to choose one or the other.

[fierce estuary]

they all change the behavior of it too

[cursive sable]

Wasn't there an expiremental Gameboy cartridge adapter for the Multisystem2, which is basically a custom mister?

[cursive sable]

Yeah, IIRC the RGB mod requires you to desolder the PPU (or was it the CPU?) and put a pass-through board between it, and the HDMI mod requires you to do that to both the PPU and CPU, I would imagine that probably effects some things

Is it even still using the NES's original CPU and PPU or is it just replicating it on a FPGA at that point?

[hasty trout]

HDMI mod also slows the system down to 60.00hz, one of the reasons I sold mine

[cursive sable]

.... Virtualboy? .... game.com?

[heavy dust]

I don’t get all those picture quality mods. Feels like it ruins the “aesthetic” of going to the hassle of using original hardware and MiSTer already does it all if you don’t want OG.

They made sense before MiSTer though when we needed ways to get a clean signal into our retrotink

[fierce estuary]

it even makes the thing start failing tests

it uses chunks of both, the hdmi one is especially invasive

[cursive sable]

I suppose on top of some people just preferring to run their caridges and/or not download roms illegally, there is also the argument for being able to use/backup your original saves, carts that have special mappers, and carts with special add-on hardware, like those GBA games that had a tilt or light sensor, or the gameboy camera, or the mario artist games that had composite inputs

[cursive sable]

If I had the money to do those mods, I would do it in a way that could not possibly be stupider.... use the mod just so I can get the best impage possible into an upscaler so I can replicate a CRT on a modern display XD

(I really don't want to mess with actual CRTs anymore)

[heavy dust]

My son broke most of our hdtvs so crts are practical for me.

[cursive sable]

.... what?

[heavy dust]

Long story. He’s special needs and electronics tend to be short lived. 🙁

[cursive sable]

ah

I used to love taking apart electronics all the time when I was young

[heavy dust]

Same here. Plugged my capsella kit into the mains. It went pop.

Well, the motor did go really fast for a very brief moment before it went pop.

[cursive sable]

heh

Thankfully people tended to throw out electronics all the time where I used ot live back then, so I had plenty of discarded junk to mess with

I remmeber when one of them was a massive rear projection TV, I coulden't bring it into the house so I had to take it apart right there in the alley XD

[clever scarab]

I one took apart my PlayStation and accidentally touched my screwdriver to the power coil lol

It burned a nice little hole in my room’s tile

[dry lynx]

And your brain

[cursive sable]

Thankfully I never did something that dumb as a kid

.... I did accidently pick up a soldering iron from the wrong end because I wasn't paying attention though

which is arguably much dumber

[heavy dust]

I was starved of oxygen at birth and took a lot of hits to the head growing up. Far as I know, you’re all imaginary.

[cursive sable]

WHO BLABBED?

[main narwhal]

not the Lava FC Pro console. It has 4 simultaneous video outputs

but it is a layer on top of the original PPU. AccuracyCoin results are high (122+), but it fails a few tests more than an unmodified AV Famicom

all video (inc composite) goes through the new circuit, to allow for palettes and the config OSD

[main narwhal]

the cart experience is just different. I have entire console collections on SD card in the MiSTer, yet still enjoy having a curated set of carts out for choosing a game

I am not saying its superior though

maybe using those NFC thingies (is it Zaparoo these days? they changed name) would give a similar experience

[cursive sable]

Those woulden't really allow for any of the things I mentioned

[main narwhal]

yes special carts (including homebrew) will need original cart ports

another example is competitons where they care about using a specific cart variant (e.g. Tetris championship)

although I heard they were OK using a Retron1 HD (NoaC with built in composite->hdmi converter that also just costs $40)

thats why I think there is a niche for a super accurate FPGA NES that takes carts, if it can be done cheap

[fierce estuary]

no, it's not

the cart experience is something people desperately try to justify in their head as being different

they spend a lot of money on basically large plastic thumb drives and convince themselves that plugging in a thumb drive is somehow magical or special compared to choosing from a menu

[jade zenith]

collectors trying to justify spending the price of a used car on a little samson cartridge

https://tenor.com/view/zaunvi-caitvitwt-gif-5209896407858944574

[tepid umbra]

I like my physical collection of games from my childhood and think they look cool on a shelf but I'd never play them lol.

Also they're all pal versions, so the worst versions.

[main narwhal]

it's not one or the other; you can enjoy both

[tepid umbra]

No that's not allowed.

[main narwhal]

its like having an Amiibo collection to some extent. In fact you could use Amiibos to run games with an NFC reader

[tepid umbra]

I was in fact wondering about this. Just stick the nfc tag on an empty cartridge and have the babys play pretend.

[main narwhal]

you could do that, even have a fake cart slot (connected to nothing) to hold it in place

[tepid umbra]

Imagine somebody's surprise when they plug in an n64 game and their nes plays it since it's secretly a mister inside. 🤯

[main narwhal]

I imagine some people ask for fancy UI with covers because they want to simulate the experience of choosing a cart by looking at box art / cart label

[tepid umbra]

I have that on wii. And tbh it's more fun to setup than to actually use.

[main narwhal]

yeah

thats why for MiSTer I prefer to have the spartan menu , like an everdrive

who needs more

[fierce estuary]

looking at a cart is a great way to choose a game

[tepid umbra]

Wait a minute, that's basically just game key cards!

[main narwhal]

yes, big N knows whats up

[fierce estuary]

taptoo is basically just this, it's pretty popular for mister

I dont really understand it at all but people seem to like it

[main narwhal]

yeah that's why I was talking about NFC

[tepid umbra]

I wonder my much these cart enthusiasts really play their games tbh. To me nostalgia is petrifying in front of the screen and playing final fantasy or dragon quest or pokemon for 10, 20 sometimes 40 hours nonstop only to have the police show up at my place because my employer got worried when I didn't show up.

[main narwhal]

it's both for me. I found myself playing FC Gradius a lot out of nowhere (a game I never got into before) because I happened to have it duplicate, and was using it to test a Famicom 😅

[fallen brook]

ppl implement NFCs for the same reason they still want to play on CRTs, nostalgia

[main narwhal]

then again, for a long game where I want to backup saves often, MiSTer would be the way to go

[tepid umbra]

CRTs are very hard to emulate on a modern tv imo. I still prefer my 77" sony bravia with an rt4k for crt effects over a real one though, mostly because crts are tiny and old and finicky.

That's 63" in 4:3. What's the biggest crt that was commercially available?

[main narwhal]

15" CRT are a nice sweet spot for composite. Bigger ones are too heavy to manage; they can look gorgeous, but if I want bigger screens then yeah a modern TV is the way

[tepid umbra]

🤏

[main narwhal]

43 inch for CRT, maybe bigger for a projection TV

[tepid umbra]

Too small.

[main narwhal]

I mean, if you want big you just used a projector

you could go to 100 inch with that

but yes, there's no denying that modern TVs with low input latency and good black levels are fantastic

and a 1080p display with MiSTer display adjustment for it looks great

[covert crypt]

All my cartridges have been in the attic for well over a year and I was using a flashcart even before that. I am a sucker for boxart though; having the zaparoo stuff is nice to just have a curated folder of games so I'm not crippled by choice paralysis

I'm also a sucker for arts and crafts. I've spent more time designing, printing, cutting and glueing the cards than actually using them but I enjoyed doing it so I'm a winner.

[tepid umbra]

Having a real cartridge of my own romhack was one of the best feelings ever but I won't pretend that it's a practical thing to have.

[latent breach]

I have a deck on nfc cards that load random games from specific cores. It’s fun to shuffle the cards, pick one and scan it and see what I get

[tepid umbra]

A random option in the main menu would be fun.

[blissful prairie]

Me.

[hasty river]

There's still the retro avs, unless they don't make those any more

[hasty river]

well, it is different, you can't really argue that to be fair lol

[main narwhal]

yes though it could use sone updates

[hasty river]

literally physically different

[jade zenith]

physically it's different but the end result is identical

[hasty river]

correct

point being it is indeed different and they did say not necessarily better lol

[fierce estuary]

carts may have bit rot I suppose

and be different in that they have become corrupt, where files typically you can check the hash

[main narwhal]

NES carts have been pretty solid in my experience... HuCards not so much, Bonk2 is infamous for going bad.. CD do rot

[keen pasture]

One argument against ROMs/multicarts that I hear often is that real carts force you to focus on one game instead of mindlessly surfing the entire library... but that's more of an user issue

[hasty river]

Carts are different in that they are a physical object you insert

[fallen brook]

look at that, a mapper 30 game that made a lovely dump of prg-rom as a persistent save file 🥳

[hasty trout]

Nice work!!

[fallen brook]

ty ty

still have to do some more testing to make sure I didnt break anything

[timber lava]

[mint lichen]

Awesome, that's sick

[tulip basin]

i think i remember a kid in the 90s who had a 65. at least 55. it rested on a speaker just as wide. being rich in the 90s was wild you could flex all kinds of tech. between gargantuan crts and projectors i’m not sure which was cooler

meanwhile my family shared one 26 inch crt

[hasty river]

I remember the brief popularity of projection TVs because they were big and cheap. They looked like total shit though, despite every owner trying to explain how amazing they were

[supple jasper]

Rather than carts I went and bought a few compendium books. Most people know the Pat the NES Punk's guide books but Chris Scullion has some rather excellent books with screenshots and mini reviews for lots of systems. Takes up way less space than a huge collection, and in my opinion is a way nicer experience than any convoluted menu system. I love the dead simple text list menu system of the MiSTer and do not understand why anyone would want to complicate it.

[heavy dust]

You are 100% right and I still like them because I'm a fleshy bag of hormones and dopamine.

[heavy dust]

CRPG and JRPG Book are fantastic. Other similar books from Bitmap haven't been as good, but those two I can't recommend highly enough.

[cursive sable]

Wouldn't NES carts be closer to the equivalent of a plastic ISA card than a thumb drive?

[cursive sable]

I have an Amiibo collection, just of characters I like. Don't actually use the Amiibo, I just have a NFC device for that, it's so much easier and more convenient.

[cursive sable]

I disagree about CRTs, many use them because of the way a lot of games were designed for the way a CRT/composite signal would blend pixels together, also they have faster response times and can work with light guns. I personally would prefer to find a way to replicate those on a modern screen though than try to use decades old massive heavy tubes if I can.

[heavy dust]

My son keeps breaking our HDTVs but our CRTs are immune so that's a reason I like them.

[cursive sable]

I really don't understand how, CRTs are a vacum-sealed glass tube, they would be far more sensative

[heavy dust]

You try punching a 35" CRT

That's a battle your knuckles ain't winning

[cursive sable]

(User's house has exploded)

[heavy dust]

Nah, we hid the key to the gas fireplace.

[cursive sable]

heh

Try punching that like 100inch CRT or so that was on the news recently

[clever scarab]

It meshes the physicality of game selection with the convenience of digital. For a lot of people, its nostalgic to plug in a cartridge since that experience is no longer available for most modern devices. Its importance is a form of ritualism, the process of preparing oneself to play a retro game.

I know it may not seem logical to you or most others but ritualism is deeply rooted in human emotional processing. The physical reacting to the mental state of mind. Its extremely powerful.

[cursive sable]

I don't really see a point to NFC either. It's nothing like plugging in a cart IMO

I have a favorites menu for that

Only real times I have heard of it being a good idea is for when someone else is using someone's mister, like a kid or something, to give them a curated selection

[clever scarab]

But retro game prices are out of control and most people lack or unwilling to use that space for a retro collection. It serves as an analog to that process. The ritualism of physically holding an object and inserting/placing it.

[heavy dust]

Cartridges have the same appeal as Vinyl records. You have to commit yourself to what you put in, and can't just jump from game to game after five minutes.

[clever scarab]

You don't have to get it and thats ok if you don't. Its importance is deeply rooted in emotion and memories.

For those who like it.

[cursive sable]

Heh, reminds me that I was looking of the price of some silly SegaCD game that I have many visual glitches in, just to make sure the redump-verified image itself isn't a bad dump... and it was like $100-300, no thanks

[heavy dust]

Emotion and memories are dumb, and we all need to be a bit dumb from time to time.

[cursive sable]

It's not even some popular or good game either

[clever scarab]

its what makes us who we are, the idiosyncracies and eccentricies

[cursive sable]

Like that song says: "Dare to be stupid"

[heavy dust]

Mark Mothersbaugh got mad at Weird Al over that song because it was such a good pastiche of Devo.

[cursive sable]

I got lucky though about two or so years ago, guy was selling NES games in box for 25 cents each, one of which was Megaman1

At a garage sale

[heavy dust]

That's an insane discount

[tepid umbra]

I can't jump games every 5 minutes because I'm having genuine fun playing them.

[heavy dust]

I am so jealous

I can't even remember which discord server I'm in for more than five minutes

[fallen brook]

think I am done, I could use some help testing this before I raise a PR but it looks like I do not have permission to upload a core build to discord

anyone up for testing flash saves on mappers 30 and 111 and hunting for saving regressions?

[mint lichen]

Sure, I can give it a shot

[heavy dust]

What would it entail?

[fallen brook]

https://github.com/littlegamer87/NES_MiSTer/blob/flashsave/NES_flashsaves.rbf

I am looking for saving regressions, to be safe backup your saves if they are precious to you

feel free to try the flash savings for mappers 30 and 111. you can test normal SRAM saving but seems to work fine, famicom, eeprom and bram games (whatever they are)

[heavy dust]

What are some mapper 30/111 games?

[fallen brook]

https://www.khangames.com/my-games this guy made a few (UNROM512 and GTROM)

they are homebrew mappers

[heavy dust]

So I'd need to find one that would normally save to cart?

[fallen brook]

or test for regressions in saves from other mappers

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/blob/db51757ab3cf991cfa69ef9a2c19b304dedcca64/NES.sv#L1264

[topaz moon]

wire [8:0] save_sz = fds ? rom_sz[17:9] : bram_en ? 9'd3 : (prg_nvram == 4'd7) ? 9'd15 : 9'd63;

[fallen brook]

there are different save routines for famicom, bram and nvram. these I would also like to test. no idea which games save on eeprom

[mint lichen]

Anguna works now, good one to test since you can save immediately and it says "Save Failed" on the regular core

[clever scarab]

Does this core let me replicate the Sunsonic 986-II with built-in CRT and famiclone?

[fallen brook]

lol

[fallen brook]

that one I tested indeed, also checked the sav dump and it is exactly prg-rom, minus the header, with the save written at 0x3a000

cool game too

these games seem to be writing constantly to flash tho, those real carts will probably wear out eventually. at least this only saves when you open osd

[mint lichen]

The Storied Sword is now saving your stats and keeping the Achievements menu unlocked

Courier seems to work, that one would get really messed up graphics when you died

[fierce estuary]

is this ai?

[mint lichen]

Nope, seemed to be real when I looked it up yesterday, here's a vid of one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE5MYHwOpZk

[jade zenith]

crts are built like tanks. you ever seen those videos where people hit them with baseball bats? it takes good 2-3 smacks before the glass even gives

but yeah, playing on a crt is a whole different thing than using cartridges for loading games. i don't use a crt for nostalgia, i use it because it's the superior, intended look for me

[teal ivy]

i have this "Smart Child" variant. great for easy mode Duck Hunt

not so much for Famicom Disk System...

[jade zenith]

that child doesn't exactly look very smart

[granite pivot]

Looks like they traced over Richie Rich

[fallen brook]

@mint lichen thank you for testing. I will raise a PR

[timber lava]

@fallen brook Maybe I found something with the last test core, if you set autosave to off.
You have to save backup ram and opened a second time the OSD for the save to be taking in account

with aguna

[fallen brook]

"and opened a second time the OSD for the save to be taking in account" - wdym? im not following

[timber lava]

If you set Autosave to off and choose save backup ram OSD, it doesn't produce the save
You need to open the OSD again to have the saving ... OSD screen

and the save is generated

[fallen brook]

I dont think I changed the parts that can cause this. is it possible this also happens on (un)stables?

not on flash save mappers ofc

just tried some things on stable with kirby's adventure and I am getting some weird behavior when autosave is off. it skips the intro cinematic

[timber lava]

or maybe it tooks more time to save

and shows it if we opened the OSD again

just after save on OSD

[fallen brook]

looks like it yeah

if I disable autosave and do a manual save, the game just carries on but I do see on ftp that the save is created

open osd after a while and there is no saving message

[half pasture]

Is there a way to prevent PRG ROM to be placed on the save in order to make it smaller?

[fallen brook]

you could come up with a special format for these but that takes up logic. I think saving logic is worth more than saving storage

I dont think you can get sd cards below 4GB anymore so 512KB is nothing to be concerned about the way I see it

[half pasture]

Fair enough. Do we have a “saving…” screen on the NES core GUI just like we do on the SNES and PSX cores?

That feedback might be useful for such a big save files

[fallen brook]

yes. try it yourself

[fallen brook]

over here

[half pasture]

Thanks!

[fallen brook]

lol wrong link

https://github.com/littlegamer87/NES_MiSTer/blob/flash/NES_flashsaves.rbf here you go

[cursive sable]

I don't think it's a space issue, I can see how some would argue that the save data now contains copyrighted data and would not allow such saves to be shared on many sites if the save contains the PRG ROM in it for these games.

(Also it's not easy to even get cards below 64GB anymore without going out of your way to get possibly sketchy cards, much less 4GB)

[timber lava]

FDS games have also the whole game on save file

[fierce estuary]

great job following through with that

it's good to have that solved

I don't care much that they contain rom, I mean there's no other way to do it unless you want to create a diff, but who wants that kind of complexity and when does it even matter

[fallen brook]

appreciated @fierce estuary

once this is merged ill have a look at that tengen mapper, see if the irq spec from nesdev is enough to fix it

[fierce estuary]

it just needs a little timing tweak because the a12 timing probably is slightly different

[fallen brook]

it said something about an extra tick that that game really needs

[fierce estuary]

and it was probably kinda bodged to work with the core before for no special reason

I remember fixing that game before, but I probably fixed it around a slightly off a12

[half pasture]

MiSTer wins again!

And thanks for working on this @fallen brook ❤️

[cursive sable]

I personally don't care, just saying I can see others who are big on doing everything by the book (or paranoid about lawsuits) complaining.

[fierce estuary]

what book? where?

if they are playing a rom they already have it by some means

the save file is irrelevant

[cursive sable]

I meant sharing of save files

[fallen brook]

my pleasure, happy gaming 🥳

[clever scarab]

what games use mappers 30 and 111?

[cursive sable]

IIRC Mapper 30 is the most common one for modern homebrew to use a modern flashchip instead of maskrom so I would imagine a lot of homebrew NES games use that one

I think that's the mapper that NES Maker uses too?

NESDEV has a list of Mapper 111 games, I assume the Mapper 30 games were too numerious to list

https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/GTROM

"Submapper 4: No bus conflicts, an additional register controls LEDs inside the cartridge shell." Hold on, we need to implement a pointless flashing led for mapper 30 then!

[fallen brook]

I would suggest to try Anguna scourge of the goblin king. I used it to test the updates but the game impressed me

[cursive sable]

? How did you install updates to an nes game on mister?

[fallen brook]

updates to the mapper

that unstable that just went live

[clever scarab]

#unstable-nightlies and is also pinned

[fallen brook]

think the leds were for the 8-bit xmas carts

[cursive sable]

Oh, I thought you meant the game took advantage of being able to reflash itself to install updates

I know there is at least one NES game out there right now that does that

[fallen brook]

that one probably runs an arm inside then or something

@clever scarab also that leisure suit larry game (and the long look for a luscious lover) is quite hilarious. i love that I can now save my quest to get laid huehuehue

[cursive sable]

IIRC it has an ESP32, but it's just for online and updates, AFAIK none of the game itself runs on it

[main narwhal]

Ive been wondering if that kind of save would be a good fit for the Apple II core... have the option to dump modified disks to .sav instead of writing to the original disk file (which could be inside a .zip)

[cursive sable]

Some very basic homebrew smash clone

[clever scarab]

whaaaaaaat, someone ported leisure suit larr to NES??

[cursive sable]

This is soemthing I would love for computer cores to have in general, so I don't risk changing the data on verified disk images

[cursive sable]

Many of the cores don't even have an option to load a disk image as read only

[main narwhal]

maybe if TeddyNL wants a new challenge 😁

[cursive sable]

I mean, there are only several dozen computer cores, each with at least one if not several floppy formats...

How complicated can it be?

[main narwhal]

just do one core first then see...

Apple II has tiny disks

relatively speaking

[cursive sable]

I am guessing for that one maybe it would be a good idea to have a kind of delta

[main narwhal]

yes but thats extra logic

[cursive sable]

Don't think that would need to be on the FPGA side right? I assume the ARM side handles all the file I/O anyway, can't it be used to calculate the deltas?

[main narwhal]

uhm true, it could

[fallen brook]

he is just called larry but the resemblance is curious

[heavy dust]

comfortable evening wear Larry

idiosyncratically attired Larry

[fierce estuary]

I don't think i've ever played a single mapper 30 game

I probably wrote them all off as modern junk

I don't really understand why you wouldn't just use an mmc mapper

it seems like just laziness or cheapness

[fallen brook]

no, they are not modern junk, they did put effort into it

that anguna game is similar to zelda 1 but a better game if you ask me

[timber lava]

@fallen brook Courier doesn't start with last unstable

[fallen brook]

with or without save file?

[timber lava]

I have an old save it works now ^^

So i need to remove some

sorry

[fallen brook]

np

[amber willow]

The mmc chips might be overkill for most homebrew games, and if you used one you'd have to source x number of those chips if you were going to try and make carts, clones do exist but don't think they are made anymore.

[cursive sable]

Can you even use flashrom with an MMC chip? I thought the reason for Mapper 30 was so people would produce NES carts with modern flashroms unstead of having to create maskroms

Also yeah, where would you get an MMC chip, unless you used a FPGA to implement one

For some homebrew dev trying to make physical cartridges of their game it's likely not financially feasible to use a real MMC/FPGA and maskrom

[timber lava]

Not a new issue but I would like to confirm if someone could reproduce on MiSTer and if it works ok on real Hardware.
I couldn't reproduce on my side on Mesen.
Zelda - Perils of Darkness (v2.0) (HardMode) (Hack).nes and header
When I enter or go out the house (to get the sword) on the right at the start of the game. The game hangs time to time like this.

[mint lichen]

Kitrinx talked about it last time it was brought up #1091056042667937944 message

I had tried it on console and it did crash one time but not again

[timber lava]

Great I didn't follow this topic

[fierce estuary]

I can add a toggle for oam corruption when I get back from spain

[shy plinth]

I sometimes forget how iconic Battle City is to normie younger Millenials and older Gen Z

[clever scarab]

More so for Europeans and South Americans, I think? Battle City was one of the mainstays of pirate carts which you didn’t see much here in the US.

[shy plinth]

I randomly brought my Mister FPGA in a non-gaming party attended mostly by people in their 20s and 30s, and among the games played, Battle City was a crowd pleaser

More so than any PS1 game lol

[clever scarab]

omg

[shy plinth]

Also I didn't realize how much people liked Twinbee

Adventure Island and Nuts and Milk are obviously iconic

[clever scarab]

how do you know people who know what Nuts and Milk is

[shy plinth]

A lot of 90s and 2000s babies' exposure to NES/Famicom games are via bootleg consoles which often have Nuts and Milk and Battle City

Also funny thing, but the JP version of Ice Climbers is more familiar to people than the US version.
When I booted up the US version of Ice Climbers, someone asked why the enemies are different coz they were expecting to see seals.

[clever scarab]

Are you in the US or EU

[shy plinth]

And honestly same, coz the version of Ice Climbers I played when I was like 4 years old in 2001 had seals

[shy plinth]

Southeast Asia

[clever scarab]

Oh sorry for assuming

[cursive sable]

I had a "128-in-1" with it, but it was always called "Battle Tanx" on it

[cursive sable]

https://tenor.com/view/devil-laughing-fire-flame-gif-12310226

... there are SO many ways one could answer that one...

[granite pivot]

I'm more familiar with the Yeti version, but I have the JP FC version with the seals on cart. Odd thing is that Vs. Ice Climber and the FDS version have the Yeti., though some of the changes in that are pretty odd. FDS tried to roll back a couple of them, but did a lazy job of it since the horizontal flying bird (formerly the bee) doesn't count as a bird on the score tally.

[hasty river]

I don't know what Nuts and Milk is

Is it like Nuts and Gum

[mellow dawn]

I seem to recall different games being hard to get working at the same time. My memory points to Hard Drivin and Skulls and Crossbones as problematic.

[teal ivy]

TIL there's an ancient TAS device for Famicom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l-qbaOzkYA

[heavy dust]

I almost bought one

But actually thought better of it

[fallen brook]

yes it is awful, especially klax. but I think I found the answer in nintendulator source. it mostly matches the wiki except take one cycle delay on a12 edge in scanline mode and it doesn't glitch anymore

[fierce estuary]

something like that

nobody actually knows the correct way the mapper is supposed to work

so they just have sort of a cooked up workaround for various games

nintendulator NRS is what I would trust the most with mapper references

New Rising Sun makes it sort of his mission to add and understand mapper behavior to the fullest extent

[fallen brook]

PR raised 💪

[ember bone]

Was trying a few aftermarket games on the new test core tonight and got the following results of what I tested:

WORKING:

Rugrats Adventures in GameLand
Haunted Halloween ‘86 Onslaught Edition
Haunted Halloween ‘86 Spirit Halloween
Gaplus
Garbage Pail Kids
Yars Revenge
Battlezone
Berzerk
Crystal Castles
Desert Falcon
E.T.
Frenzy
Journey
Larry and the Long Look For A Luscious Lover (Engagement Edition)
Millipede

NOT WORKING:

Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl
Asteroids
Astrosmash

[dreamy marten]

TIL there is an anachronistic nes cartridge that should have been released in 1999

And that it doesn't work on this core

[granite pivot]

Which Millipede? The 2600 port or the Ed Logg prototype? Almost forgot about the actually released Millipede version, which I actually have on cart.

I noticed some of those NES on a chip devices with generic unofficial games often have hacks of the Intellivison NES on a chip ports.

[cursive sable]

I can't find any information on Asteroids or Astrosmash for the NES, but Jay and Silent Bob is mapper 446, neither 30 nor 111

Or at least, that's what the rom's header reports, possible bad dump? nesdev says it's 446 as well

[granite pivot]

I just assumed he was testing aftermarket games, regardless of mapper.

[fierce estuary]

I mean, not all mappers are supported, nor should they be. Mappers for games that are too garbage to play just waste fpga resources and make the core that much harder to keep stable for no reason

even if someone does the work to make those mappers, they aren't without cost just existing there

on an fpga, that mapper is active all the time, no matter what game you are playing, always churning away. Its not like software where unused code just sits there dormant

[main narwhal]

maybe at some point the core should be forked into a "bootleg famiclone" core with just those niche mappers

taking away the main mappers so there is no overlap

[supple ermine]

If mappers are always active, are there some mappers that are just impossible because they would interfere with others that we already have? Like using the same register for a different purpose or something

[cursive sable]

I mean in terms of garbage games the core already supports games like Silver Surfer, Where's Waldo, Dr Jekyll, Super Pitfall, just about anything LJN...

[fierce estuary]

or maybe if you want to try a useless garbage game for novelty you can just use nintendulator NRS, that's what it's there for. You don't need an fpga to boot some chinese learning to add game for 15 seconds.

[fierce estuary]

a reasonable bar is to support the entire licensed library and any technologically reasonable game that a person might realistically enjoy playing

there's basically an infinite number of garbage for nes

[granite pivot]

and if you want to play an infamous learning to add game on the MiSTer core, there's always Donkey Kong Jr. Math.

[fallen brook]

just my opinion but a lot of homebrew games are of better quality than most of the nes library

older unlicensed games are already included, most pirate carts are not worth it because it's either junk or it is playable in another rom format

446 is a tricky one because it can switch mapper with a supervisor registry

but I think you could implement something like that on cart level, then it would just be that control register and a few muxes because you do not want to duplicate the mappers in logic

[jade zenith]

i think all aftermarket games should be supported as long as it's within reason, so no pirate multicarts since they're mostly garbage, and probably no homebrew with insane mappers, like former dawn

[fallen brook]

my thoughts exactly, thats why I took the effort on 30 and 111 because I felt it was worth it

[fierce estuary]

there's enough stuff on 30 it's probably worth it, you can realistically play and enjoy those games

I do wish people would just make their homebrew with real mappers though rather than new junk

I think it's very inconsiderate to just invent new mappers

there's so much stuff out there that it's really unnessesary too

people do it just from hubris or laziness

[cursive sable]

Pretty much how I feel. I don't see a point in bothering with all those mappers that were just for pirate multicarts that just had existing games together on them, or for bootlegged versions of existing games, but for the mappers that enable new original games like the ones for homebrew I think it would be a good idea to try to support those, as long as it's not nonsense like that doom "port"

I assume Mapper 30 was made so carts could be made out of modern flashrom chips, where would one even get the old mappers for physical copies of their homebrew games, and burning maskroms would not be cheap for most devs

[fallen brook]

exactly, its the cost why these mappers make sense. 111 even has the nickname 'cheapacabra'

but then the devs should also treat it like flash and not like ram. they write constantly to it and I think that's foolish. not an issue on mister fortunately but I do think they wear out the cart

[fierce estuary]

we dont need carts anymore

there's no reason

those "cheap" style carts are responsible for some heinous things too, like it was the cheap carts on the atari console that just use software emulation of mappers on an off the shelf microcontroller that led to the arm-based atari games

because making a hardware cart is very easy with modern parts, that doesn't mean it's the right choice

I have no respect

[fallen brook]

i mean youre not wrong

personally I dont think we need CRTs anymore either for that matter but plenty that dont agree 😅

[fierce estuary]

I do

the goal is to replace the rotting old parts with things that are equivilent or better but preserve the original experience

clinging to old parts just prolongs the problem, it doesn't solve it for the future

at the same time, losing the actual spirit of the art medium with modern junk equally harms the experience

[fallen brook]

hear hear

[half pasture]

CRTs FTW!

[keen pasture]

we're not fully there for a 1:1 crt replacement, but we'll get there eventually

[keen pasture]

I'd subscribe to a Patreon for Titenic mapper support 🥲

[jade zenith]

crts are definitely necessary for achieving the intended appearance of 15khz content. cartridges are not necessary for recreating the gameplay experience of a 3rd-gen console

[keen pasture]

I had fun collecting them, especially fancy Japanese boxes, when they were cheap, but I never ever use them

[jade zenith]

me too. i have a small collection of famicom games that i keep on my shelf, and that's enough to satisfy my need for physical games

[keen pasture]

they're not even physical games anymore, just the millennial equivalent of those angel porcelain dolls grandmas used to have

[clever scarab]

Could ask the homebrew dev to support a real mapper

Or just enjoy the game on a software emulator

[main narwhal]

or write their game for the PC Engine rather than trying to make the NES work like one

[clever scarab]

damn, you right

I never thought about it that way but that’s a great point

[ember bone]

She and it’s the Millipede from the Flashback console

Yeah I was basically testing some aftermarket titles to see which worked and which didn’t.

[main narwhal]

I suspect some of the homebrew extra mappers are just a form of copy protection

probably the case for Paprium

I remember reading about that upcoming RPG for NES where the guy explains why they need a custom mapper,

and I couldn't help but think "you wouldn't need any of that on the PCE"... he's using the wrong platform 😄

[clever scarab]

Ok that’s pretty smart

[glacial turtle]

If you are making a game to sell on cart, then making it easy to dump and emulate isn't going to help your sales.

[main narwhal]

that said, it would be sweet to put a VDC (Hu6270) in a NES cart; if somehow we can make it work with the PPU.
It wouldn't be as horrible as running a full ARM CPU to run DOOM; you'd still use the native CPU

not sure colors would work but at least you get 64 sprites and a whole background plane

[amber willow]

Most mappers you could still make a new cart for because they mostly used TTL parts which you can still buy, but the ones that use custom chips like mmc, vrc(konami) or like sunsoft are harder.

[fallen brook]

yay, merged 🥳

any more mapper stuff that needs fixing? I am on a roll now 😅

[timber lava]

Thank you 🙂

[frigid marten]

while i'm far removed from understanding any of the fpga programming or anything seeing the progress being done recently was still fascinating to watch

[main narwhal]

MiSTer progress since 2017 has been fascinating watch 😄

ever year at least one amazing new core

[frigid marten]

i can imagine, too bad i joined only last year

[main narwhal]

never too late

[timber lava]

plenty of cores improved greatly

[frigid marten]

before getting my mister i was watching VGE's coverage of the N64 core a lot, i still remember the troubleshooting of Conker specifically

but yes, seeing things evolve and being along for the ride is amazing

[granite pivot]

Doh! Sorry about that.

[ember bone]

It’s okay you’re good 👍🏼

[mellow dawn]

To be fair, I think some of these new mappers are to make it easier to produce a variety of carts, not just to be difficult or as copy protection. 446 for example, appears to be a bunch of different mappers all supported by one board/chip. I find myself wondering if it would work as one of the individual mappers and the only reason it is set as 446 is because they chose to produce the cart with that hardware implementation because it is easier to produce one board that supports most mappers than multiple boards-one for each mapper.

[cursive sable]

I don't see whats wrong at all with wanting physical copies of games

[cursive sable]

Some are, IIRC one of them used for one dev's games are full of copy protection checks according to NESDEV

But that's the flash mappers that support like, 2 games at most

[cursive sable]

Yeah, although I feel it's a bit pointless to bother, especially for a smaller group which is going to be wasting time and limited money trying to implement something that will likely be broken. Many of them just don't bother and even sell the ROM alone or if they release an emulated version on Steam just include the ROM with that

[cursive sable]

Looking more into it, yeah, Mappers 406 and 451 seem to basically just be there for copy protection, each for a different game from the same dev. NESDEV says they are basically just slightly altered versions of MMC3 with the added ability to save high scores to flashrom and copy protection checks. (and in the case of 451, there are two versions of the game, a normal one, and one that.... plays MP3s?)

https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/NES_2.0_Mapper_406

https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/NES_2.0_Mapper_451

30 and 111 were the big ones anyway, beyond those there is basically just the two ones I just mentioned that were mostly there for copy protection and 446 which only three games support, and that's it, unless you count mapper 342 which is pointless since it's only there for making your own multi-carts like the all those bootleg "999999 games in 1" carts from decades ago

[fallen brook]

then I guess it makes sense to take a crack at 446

that one is gonna be a lot more work 😅

[grand jewel]

Some future translations from Retro-bit will most probably use it.
I see the release of Hammerin Harry 2 as a 'test'.

[cursive sable]

I was mostly using this page which lists all the known mappers that use flash for saving, not sure if that's all flash mappers period but I am not aware of a mapper that supports flash as read-only: https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Category:Mappers_with_flash_save

[mint lichen]

Listed on the 446 page, Blazing Rangers is an NROM game, and the copy of Jay and Silent Bob I have is set to MMC1 and works fine on the core

[cursive sable]

Some of the flash mappers were/are partially supported before in the NES core, but as read only, they used to not support any save functions though which depending on the game either prevents saving progress to prevents the game from running properly until iamTeddyNL implemented that for 30 and 111

[clever scarab]

@fierce estuary I razzle dazzled your channel

[fierce estuary]

Rrrrr

[clever scarab]

😳

[cursive sable]

https://tenor.com/view/zeron-zeronperon-the-razzle-dazzle-youtube-idol-gif-27483572

[clever scarab]

This channel now has pins.

[cursive sable]

What about needles?

[ember bone]

As a diabetic, I have both 😣

[dreamy marten]

I read the pin as saying that the link is for a kitrinx patreon.

[clever scarab]

It’s what I do when the core dev doesn’t have a Patreon, link to Sorg’s

[fallen brook]

where can I find the rom for asteroids and astrosmash?

[tepid umbra]

Pretty sure it's illegal to ask for roms or where to find them on this discord.

[glacial turtle]

As long as nobody posts an explicit link or uploads the file then it is OK. It is a fine dance, we just don't want to fall foul of sharing copyright material.

It is better to ask in a more obtuse way as well i.e. "I am looking for X and struggling if anyone has any hints" rather than straight up asking. It is us being cautious of not breaking any of Discord's TOS.

[fallen brook]

its homebrew, cant tell if it is actually being sold. I cant even find it on google apart from some listings without links

[tepid umbra]

Some companies don't sell their games but still get pissy when you acquire them by other means. See Nintendo for example.

[blazing oracle]

‎ 🎩

🧿👄🧿 ✨
‎ 🫴

[ember bone]

Google “Erista”

If this is too obvious, feel free to delete

[fallen brook]

thx

[steep yew]

Myrient is the only word you need 🙂

[fallen brook]

@ember bone interesting find. the header says it is mapper 4 submapper 0. this is a valid config according to the wiki but it does not seem implemented in the core

this is for asteroids

[fierce estuary]

if they are not freely distributed

that sounds copyright

[ember bone]

That’s why I try to test a little of everything lol

[fierce estuary]

mapper 4 submapper 0 is just mapper 4

it's the default

ines

[fallen brook]

then I wonder why this game is not launching. runs fine in punes

this is what the wiki says on submapper 0: Sharp MMC3: IRQ is asserted on A12 rise, and loading the latch with 0 produces an IRQ on every scanline. MMC6 also behaves this way. Some later games rely on this "new style" behavior.

this mapper is complex, i have to do some digging

btw @fierce estuary I think I found a PPU bug in pal mode with the 240p test, just raised an issue for that here: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/issues/442

[fierce estuary]

truth be told PAL mode is a complete hack atm in the core

in the branch im working on that makes the ppu/cpu synchronization variable it makes it work the way it's really supposed to

[fallen brook]

it also says the aspect ratio is wrong in pal mode and I think that is an easy fix, I did something similar for SNES the other day in overscan mode

[fierce estuary]

yes it is, I did that on purpose because PAL aspect ratio is a travesty

[fallen brook]

why do you say that?

[fierce estuary]

it literally makes everything look warped and wrong, it was never corrected for on NES

so using the 224x240 aspect for ntsc will be the way the games are supposed to look

it's the same drawn area on both regions

in the core, it still does draw that as well, even though the top line and a few of the side lines are masked to black

tl;dr is the european NES was a poorly executed hack by nintendo that had pretty terrible outcomes for the gamers there, with games that ran too slowly that were warped

I don't see any need to add insult to injury by recreating this

I figure if anyone really, really wants messed up looking games they can just use a custom aspect ratio

[fallen brook]

interesting point, ty

[fierce estuary]

you can argue since all but like 7 games were made for ntsc, we know how they are supposed to look

ironically even the europe exclusive ones look more correct with the ntsc aspect ratio

there wasn't really much technical means to adjust for it

[warm galleon]

I wonder if they developed them on screens that could switch to ntsc :p

[fierce estuary]

they were developed in japan, so yes

the european ones were just minimal ports for the most part

since the systems were similar enough, typically they just adjusted slightly for the vblank and just let them run at a slower speed and lower pitch music

[warm galleon]

The differences aren't influencing analog output are they?

[fierce estuary]

nope

[warm galleon]

Sweet

[fallen brook]

childhood = ruined 😥

[warm galleon]

Scaled output personally should always be accurate + best, analog output should be the analog in all its grimey glory

So sounds like the NES core matches that typical trend.

[fierce estuary]

if it was a later system, i'd go with teddy and say the aspect should be region correct, but this is sort of a special case

[warm galleon]

Yeah

[fierce estuary]

it's just a straight downgrade

[warm galleon]

SMS I still feel is incorrect somehow for analog output but I lack the skills and knowledge to prove it.

[fierce estuary]

and alas, my sega allergy prevents me from getting involved

[warm galleon]

Yeah you prefer upscale brands like Atari

[fierce estuary]

i'd help if I could

[fallen brook]

do I smell another challenge? 😄

[fierce estuary]

atari I think it's some kind of pathological need to self harm

[warm galleon]

Yin and yang

[glacial turtle]

SMS core could do with some TLC for sure

[fierce estuary]

tender loving care really is heavily contingent on the "care" part

[steep yew]

Jaguar, my beloved

[ember bone]

Was Noah’s Ark one of those seven? I’d like to give it a real play through one of these days

[fierce estuary]

I cant remember, I dont think so

elite was, smurfs, asterix

[ember bone]

Same. A little pissed that the new Jaguar video board is being done right when my Jag is at Stone Age Gamer getting a tune up…..I could’ve had the work done while it was there 😫

[blazing oracle]

‎ 🎩

🧿👄🧿 ✨
‎ 🫴

[ember bone]

Even if MiSTer has a good Jag core that plays the CD, it’s too sentimental for me to part with

[steep yew]

It sounds like 8 of those boards were made. Did you get your hands on one?

I can feel Kit glaring at us for polluting this chat with Atari stuff.

[ember bone]

Only eight? Damn….really

I just know they were sold out

[clever scarab]

Is this emulator perfect yet? I only play on the best.

[covert crypt]

I was trying out some PAL NES games last week. Heck, I thought the Megadrive was bad for PAL.

The music is not only slower but pitched down in some instances

But at least Probotector isn't violent

[fallen brook]

I think I understand why this asteroids game is not running on the core

the header says it has no CHR-ROM but it does have 8KB CHR-RAM, I don't think the core accepts that

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/NES_MiSTer/blob/18abe159b3947421af03c0150321fd9827fa883b/rtl/mappers/MMC3.sv#L815-L825

[topaz moon]

assign chr_aout =
        (four_screen_mirroring & chr_ain[13])? {10'b11_1111_1100,              chr_ain[11:0]} :   // DxROM/TVROM 4kb NT RAM
        (TQROM & chr_ram_cs)                 ? {9'b11_1111_111,    chrsel[2:0], chr_ain[9:0]} :   // TQROM 8kb CHR-RAM
        (mapper74 & chr_ram_cs)              ? {11'b11_1111_1111_1,chrsel[0],   chr_ain[9:0]} :   // 2kb CHR-RAM
        (mapper191 & chr_ram_cs)             ? {11'b11_1111_1111_1,chrsel[0],   chr_ain[9:0]} :   // 2kb CHR-RAM
        (mapper192 & chr_ram_cs)             ? {10'b11_1111_1111,  chrsel[1:0], chr_ain[9:0]} :   // 4kb CHR-RAM
        (mapper194 & chr_ram_cs)             ? {11'b11_1111_1111_1,chrsel[0],   chr_ain[9:0]} :   // 2kb CHR-RAM
        (mapper195 & chr_ram_cs)             ? {10'b11_1111_1111,  chrsel[1:0], chr_ain[9:0]} :   // 4kb CHR-RAM
        (m268_chr_ram)                       ? {11'b11_1111_1111_1,            chr_ain[10:0]} :   // 2kb CHR-RAM
        (mapper268)                          ? {4'b10_00,              map268c, chr_ain[9:0]} :   // Mapper 268 override
                                               {3'b10_0,                chrsel, chr_ain[9:0]};    // Standard MMC3 CHR-ROM/RAM

[fallen brook]

this will move to default at the bottom, which is CHR-ROM. RAM is ignored

despite that comment which says ROM/RAM

[fallen brook]

the astrosmash game also has mapper 4 submapper 0. it starts by setting up chr banks to 8, 10, 12, 13, 14 and 15 and it already fails there

it has 8KB of CHR-ROM according to the header but i am missing a mask for that

[clever scarab]

@fallen brook are these retail games or homebrew and if it’s the latter is it just incorrect mapper applications on the developer’s end?

[fallen brook]

no it is homebrew

there is a case to be made for a wrong mapper because there are apparently no mapper 4 games with only chr-ram

but the astromash game does nothing wrong I think

sure it sets bank beyond the available range but that should work because the mapper masks for that, and this mapper doesnt

[clever scarab]

Fascinating. Ok so my next question is just a thought exercise but addressing those mapper inconsistencies on the emulator’s end, if we want to. Wouldn’t that encourage bad development behavior since the game still ends up working?

Or would it be the case that the core doesn’t support it and be perceived as less accurate by the general public.

[fallen brook]

if I am right then the astrosmash game should just work and this is a valid mapper bug. surprised no other games are breaking because I thought it is not unusual for games to set their banks beyond their available range

the asteroids game, simply put, has a config that the mapper doesn´t recognize. you can easily fix that without breaking anything

it's interesting food for thoughts but I dont have all anwers @clever scarab

incl whether or not this is worth a PR

it was good practice tho, thats for sure

[clever scarab]

Sorry, don’t want to distract you. It’s just something I think about.

Thank you so much for your continued work.

[fallen brook]

my pleasure, I am enjoying it 😄

I now see that there is chr masking happening on cart level, so either I am missing something or it is something else

aha

think I got it, the game is writing to CHR-ROM

should've asked for RAM instead ffs

even if the core does not accept that

still, if I add another config that checks for chr-ram, and I update the header, does it work?

[ember bone]

It’s a mixed bag. It’s aftermarket but the Intellivision plug and plays and Atari flashbacks were made with those NES on a Chips so the games were converted to NES titles

[fallen brook]

well one title is declaring chr-rom and then writing to it, so that's bad. m'kay

the other game is not declaring chr-rom but chr-ram, but the mapper does not acknowledge that

I think a homebrew game that properly declares chr-ram should run but curious what you guys think

[fierce estuary]

im not sure that's true, I dont think that's common

but yes the masking happens up a level

[fierce estuary]

this is occasionally done for copy protection reasons

unless it's just a bad header

[fierce estuary]

I personally don't consider those nes or part of the nes core, they are just garbage which was nes-like for cost

[fallen brook]

even if you correct it to chr-ram, it still won't run because there is no state for that in mmc3

[fallen brook]

this part

[fierce estuary]

is it a valid configuration?

it sounds like not

otherwise we'd have seen this before

[fallen brook]

that's the question. is it valid if the game asks for it in the header?

knowing it is homebrew

[mellow dawn]

I have had a change of opinion on this over the years. I now think the header should override how the original hardware worked. By putting it in the header it can be implied that the difference between original hardware is intentional and new hardware and boards can be built that do behave that way and it prevents the need for adding more mappers.

[fallen brook]

sounds like @mellow dawn thinks it's valid

[steep yew]

Maybe (probably?) a dumb question but could this lead to a situation where a rom could work on the core but not on original hardware (assuming you’re putting on a real chip and not an everdrive)?

[hasty trout]

Depends what you consider original hardware. There isn’t any way to play these Atari games on a real NES aside from flashcart so there isn’t an original hardware reference.

You could build a cartridge for it and if you did that, it wouldn’t be hard to add CHR-RAM. So it would work on a real nes/Famicom in that sense

[fallen brook]

not really. if you can get a mapper to work on the core, you can do it on a real cart too one way or another

[mellow dawn]

That was kind of my point. If you took an MMC3 board and swapped out the ROMs it would not work, but you could build a board that behaved like mapper 4 but with exceptions specified in the header and it would work.

You could probably even use a real MMC3 with additional wiring and logic, but it should be noted not every mapper 4 board used official MMC3 chips.

[supple ermine]

I thought that the
Atari flashback is mapper 534. Individual games using mapper 4 are extracted from it and converted, they were not sold that way.

[cursive sable]

No CHR-ROM? Did the game process the graphics in software and write them to RAM mounted as ROM like Elite did?

[mellow dawn]

To me, adding a Chr Ram size to the header is functionally equivalent to adding a submapper. It already implies a difference from the base mapper.

[fierce estuary]

not really

you couldn't make an mmc3 like that without really hacking it up

while I think nes 2.0 headers are good for covering the options with more precision, I don't agree we should allow them to do hardware impossible things because that's just sloppy

it invites more and more janky homebrew things

in this case, I think this flashback stuff doesnt even make sense. who would ever use this when there is atari cores

[fallen brook]

yeah I wasnt planning to do a pr for these

maybe there will be homebrew in the future that does something similar but actually worth playing, not these

[clever scarab]

Janky ass keychain micro players lol

[ember bone]

Just to make sure it all works lol

[granite pivot]

The cartridge uses 446 (or some other odd mapper) and seems to have other ROMs on the cart. The actual ROM is mapper 0 (NROM) and the version sold on itch is mapper 0. I found out the hard way when I tried to dump my cartridge (didn't really need to since I already bought the rom, but I wanted to try dumping it myself).

Most of those Flashback NOAC ports aren't even good ports of the 2600/7800 versions. Intellivision NOAC ports are also janky.

NES version of Estique uses an odd mapper to switch between PAL and NTSC ROMs. Using the settings to dump the JP version dumped the entire PAL rom and I used a hex comparison to make the NTSC ROM.

[river mesa]

Anyone else encountering instability in the latest NES core (25.10.13)? In the past few days I’ve had a few games either crash on me or have graphics that became corrupted after extended play sessions.

For example. First screenshot, Power Blade 2 just crashed on me.

Second screenshot, the tile graphics in Guardian Legend became corrupted (notice the malformed letters) .

No screenshot but Crystalis also crashed on me with garbled graphics after entering a cave.

[mint lichen]

Someone was having issues with the Famicom version of Power Blade 2 and turned out they had a bad ROM, so I would try source some new ROMs first #1091056042667937944 message

[river mesa]

My rom comes for a No-intro set and has been run through a header fixer and has CRC32: F8E0BC9B. Can you confirm if this is good or should be something different?

[fallen brook]

a header fixer you say?

[grand jewel]

The CRC32 value seems correct for a iNES version.

I tried to enter the cave on Crystalis, I completed the first 3 levels on Power Blade II and 2 levels + password verification on The Guardian Legend on the last unstable core.
No issue at all, so try to update the core to the unstable one or to reinstall the last stable one @river mesa

[fallen brook]

do you play other games or other cores?

[grand jewel]

The question was or me, or for AtomicShroom ?

[fallen brook]

no not for you zet, for atomicshroom, sorry

guess the rom is fine if crc checks out and the header fixer did nothing

[river mesa]

The issues happened to me after multiple hours of play. You wouldn’t reproduce them by just trying. For example the crash in Crystalis happened only once in the course of me beating the entire game. It played fine otherwise. Same with the graphics becoming corrupted in Guardian Legend, it happened towards the end of the game after multiple hours. The crash in Power Blade 2 happened more quickly though, after about an hour.

And yes I play many other games/cores and have no issues to report.

I have a saved state saved which exhibits the corrupted graphics in Guardian Legend. Would this be of any help? I would assume no since the glitch that caused them has already happened by that point.

[amber willow]

look for one with the crc32 of 69CA5633, and compare the header of the 2 files and let us know what's different

could probably find it in a new no intro pack, maybe one from archive from 2024

[river mesa]

This here: https://github.com/Terrabits/nes-rom-header-fix

I have no idea whether it made any changes to the Power Blade 2 rom or not. But seeing as how the CRC is correct, then I assume it does not matter.

[amber willow]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frederic-mahe/Hardware-Target-Game-Database/master/EverDrive Pack SMDBs/NES2.0 SMDB.txt

[river mesa]

No matter where I search I cannot find this version of the rom.

This is what the header says in the F8E0BC9B version:

[amber willow]

F8E0BC9B crc32
4E 45 53 1A 08 10 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

69CA5633
4E 45 53 1A 08 10 40 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01

there is the header (first 16 bytes)for both files.

I'm thinking you have the ines headered roms

there's a couple differences in the header, 2 bytes, a 08 and 01 at the end.

think the 08 just tells that the header is nes 2.0, the 01 may just say it uses controllers.

I'll let the header or mapper experts chime in.

if you can reproduce with the old rom, you could try manually changing the bytes and trying to repoduce again

[fallen brook]

header seems fine

did you test sdram? maybe try that, if not to rule it out

[river mesa]

Yeah no this is getting ridiculous. I’m not going through all that trouble just to play an NES game. Sorry.

[river mesa]

I did a long time ago and it was fine. I’ve been playing the N64 core for months no problem.

[fallen brook]

n64 only puts the cart in ram and doesnt write to it I think

except when loading a game ofc

[river mesa]

It has been running for an hour now and this is what it says:

Should I leave it running longer?

[cursive sable]

Basically, as long as taht bottom red number is zero while the top-right number is showing at least 130 you're good

After running it for a while

The red number is errors detected, the top-right numberis current speed it's testing the ram at

[clever scarab]

It’s close but at least you were one number away from summoning the devil.

[fallen brook]

see if you can capture it in a state then, maybe that helps

[river mesa]

Weird. So I kept running the memtest for another hour, soft rebooted, started Power Blade 2, and it would not get past the title screen, completely frozen.

Reloaded the rom once or twice, and it did the same. So then I hard rebooted the MiSTer and now it works fine. I’ll let it run its attract mode for a few hours and see what that does. Something really funky is going on.

[steep yew]

power supply?

[cursive sable]

Possibly power or the sd card

[river mesa]

I’ve had this exact MiSTer setup for over 2 years with no issues. I don’t understand why things would suddenly go bad. Does the NES core read from the SD card once a game has loaded?

[latent breach]

can’t that stuff also be MiSTer ini or core config files issues sometimes too

@river mesa have you tried deleting your NES cfg file and saving a new config and checking your MiSTer ini to make sure it’s the latest version?

[river mesa]

I guess I’ll try that. Power Blade 2 has been running its attract for like what, 3 hours now, just fine.

[fierce estuary]

That sounds like an issue with the mister. The ram, temperature, or power supply most likely

After some period of time the marginal conditions come up snake eyes

[fallen brook]

ram failure is ruled out with that test. that wouldve picked it up

sd card is also easy to rule out hopefully, then look at psu

if psu is also ruled out, then its the mister

[half pasture]

Sometimes my MiSTers need a hard reboot otherwise some cores start up with garbled stuff or have issues loading roms. It’s pretty rare to happen though

[teal ivy]

I was having veeeeery slow rom loading and other weirdness on the NES core for a while (and other cores, but I noticed it more on NES), re-formatting the SD card fixed it

[fierce estuary]

Anyway that error can't be the core other than just coincidentally being a little different timing tolerances and it's very unlikely to be the ROM

After a long period of usage it has to be hardware being marginal somehow. FPGA stuff is really deterministic

It could be sdram refresh timing, that's the only core related thing is suspect at all

[tepid umbra]

Now I live in fear that my mister could die before me. 🫣

[blissful prairie]

At the MiSTer front we might have a MiSTer 2 at some point

(and I hope that we won't get one too soon, remember Jotego who spent more of a year to have his cores ported to Pocket instead of giving us new cores)

[stone bolt]

I think we will be using both mister and mister 2 simultaneously for a long time.

[vivid roost]

might be that thing that happens when you switch cores without going back through main?

sitting in main for a minute does some like sdram clearing thing

[blissful prairie]

@Mike: Yeah, but I fear endless and boring porting with no benefit for most cores.

[clever scarab]

Original de10? Clone hardware? Where did you get your ram?

[river mesa]

Got it all pre-built from UltimateMiSTer back in 2021.

[clever scarab]

Ok cool!

[river mesa]

Been rocking the same setup since, never had any issues until now and only with the NES core.

[half pasture]

Metastability caused by the mappers all working at the same time maybe? 🤔

@river mesa what’s the last version of the core that works without issues on your side?

[stone bolt]

I am sure lots of porting will be done at first. Kinda like the mist to mister ports. Aside from N64, Saturn, PSX, ao486 improvements, I don't see many current cores that will benefit from a mister 2. Maybe coin-op collection midway core will be possible on mister 2.

[dry lynx]

Buy a second as a spare

[blissful prairie]

Yes. Maybe not much to gain for current cores and more "modern" chips might not be feasible as FPGAs in the next years to come (eg Furrtek was interested in chips up to 1993). eg the Dreamcast was not a classic console like those before anymore: it hat a Windows somewhere within its stack, it had a classic 3D accelerator that was used on computers, it had active fans to cool that thing, it had higher progressive resolutions. It was much more a consolized computer in many ways. It was C based and not assembler and much more high level than the old stuff. Thus cycle/timing perfect replicas are much less needed than for the old stuff.

[cursive sable]

I do not consider the Dreamcast a consolsized computer at all, I feel that started around gen 7, and especially gen 8

Though the Xbox was very much a computer

[latent breach]

any chance you tried clearing the cfg and updating the mister ini yet? Would be curious to see if that fixes your issue

[river mesa]

It’s hard to tell if anything fixes anything since issues only seem to randomly manifest after multiple hours of play.

I haven’t tried anything and Power Blade 2 has been running for over 12 hours on its attract mode without issue. I’ve begun playing the game but my time is limited. It’s currently paused on level 2 (where it crashed last time) and I’ll leave it there for the day. If only there was something i could reliably reproduce that would help with troubleshooting…

[jade zenith]

what made porting mister cores to the pocket take so long? don't both the mister and pocket use the cyclone v?

i don't own a pocket nor know anything about it so correct me if i'm wrong

[glacial turtle]

He has so many to port

[half pasture]

Your MiSTer probably just needed a bio break so a reboot sometimes resolves that!

[glacial turtle]

I would say it is probably a good idea to hard reboot after hammering Memtest for awhile, before launching another core

[vivid roost]

porting to pocket is pretty quick and easy i think most cores were ported in some form in under a month? some adjustments have to be made for its different memory setup, and not having an hps etc but its quite doable. what takes the most time is probably testing?

[cursive sable]

Dosen't the pocket not give you full access to it's hardware in openfpga mode?

[vivid roost]

you don't get access to the smaller fpga that runs the OS/scaler

[ember bone]

As someone who trained and cut their teeth on Windows 2000 and IDE computers, I concur. Working on Xbox consoles helped me polish my computer repair skills and vice versa

[cursive sable]

They run the OS on a FPGA? Not an ARM chip?