I want to make a Final Fantasy III reproduction cart based on the 2011 English fan translation and bug fix that offers extras like dashing with the B button.
However, I've been told this game is only playable in emulators as the original Final Fantasy 3J uses TGROM, MMC3 + battery backed sram with a maximum CHR/PRG size of 256K. Unfortunetely, the 2011 English translation exceeds this, doubling both to 512K each for a 1MB game.
Recently I've become involved in the already incredible Rockman 4 Minus Infinity project which moves Megaman 4 (also TGROM with the same limitations, but without battery back up). Minus Infinity is a rom hack that moves the entire game to MMC5 with battery back up. Specifically, it now uses the NES/Famicom's most advanced board type ever made, ETROM - which allows a maximum 1 MB PRG and 512K CHR.
This got me thinking - is it possible to move Final Fantasy 3J to ETROM? ETROM boards have battery backed 8K SRAM and 8K work ram, but they use MMC5, not MMC3.
So what I'd like to know is to get a repro of FF3J working on the real hardware, is what I'm talking about possible, and is there anyone here who has the expertise to actually do the mapper hack? From what I've read MMC5 should be able to do everything MMC3 can.
S-series boards are used with MMC1. T-series boards are used with MMC3. E-series boards are used with MMC5. The boards you're thinking of are TGROM (Mega Man 4, Mega Man 6, Ninja Crusaders) and TNROM (Final Fantasy 3 and a few other Japan-only games). Both of these boards use CHR RAM. No official MMC5 board uses CHR RAM, and no official 72-pin MMC3 board uses both PRG RAM and CHR RAM. I wonder if infiniteneslives could help with the FF3 problem.
Oh you're totally right. I remembered wrong. Yes, it is TG-ROM that Final Fantasy 3J uses.
I want to switch to ET-ROM (MMC5) using a Koei Famicom donor, not an NES repro. Famicom ET-ROM boards use four NES security screws, granting easy access to the pcb and making that board ideally suited for reproductions, especially in this case.
Take a look here for details of one of the donors I've got to work with:
http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=1729
MMC5 donors are far and few between, and the few games released in the US that use them are particularly tragic to consume. It'd be far better to build a new MMC3-compatible thing using INL's boards, possibly using one of the funny Waixing (74, 192, 194, 195) TQROM-alike mappers that appear to support 1MB PRG for emulator compatibility.
My boards support TNROM, I've tested them with FF3 and several other TNROM games.
This statement confuses me...
Quote:
However, I've been told this game is only playable in emulators as the original Final Fantasy 3J uses TGROM, MMC3 + battery backed sram with a maximum CHR/PRG size of 256K. Unfortunetely, the 2011 English translation exceeds this, doubling both to 512K each for a 1MB game.
I thought we were talking CHR-RAM games/boards? There's 512KB of CHR? If so, how does the hack expand the MMC3 to support all that?
1MB of PRG data can be done several ways with MMC3. I'm working on a QJ-variant of the MMC3 that latches extra address bits from $6000-7FFF. That obviously won't work if you've got WRAM. But if you were interested in a non-standard MMC3 that supported 1MB of PRG data it'd be pretty easy to create with my boards. MMC3's prg bank registers are only 6bits wide (ROM A13-18 for 512KB max). Making those registers 7bits wide would give 1MB of PRG data available. Which also works since my boards support up to 1MB of parallel rom. Going 8bits wide to step upto 2MB would probably work too, but would require stacked memories and some jumpers as there isn't much available for 2MB 5v parallel roms.
Edit: a third less software freindly, non emu supported, but standard MMC3 compatible option: Assuming you've got small amount of CHR since it's RAM, you could use upper CHR address bits for extra PRG similar to what nintendo did with the MMC1 on SUROM and SXROM boards.
If you're looking to step to MMC5 for it's large memory abilities alone, I should be able to support most of that as well. I haven't played around with it much yet, but it'd be 'heavily simplified' as all the extra MMC5 features would have to be stripped.
Well actually, I'm not totally sure what the breakdown is. Since the final ROM is 1 MB, I naturally assumed the PRG and CHR were 512K split down the middle. That might be wrong though. Here's the patch for you to look at yourself.
http://www.romhacking.net/translations/1590/If you like I can provide the patched rom to work with.
I don't really care how it's done, but I'd like to reproduce this on a physical cart as neither the Powerpak or EverDrive can run it on real hardware, and there's no existing ready to use MMC3 donor that I'm aware of.
The original FF3J was 512k PRG on TNROM (battery-backed PRG RAM and CHR RAM). The translated version is 1M PRG.
What? FF3 translated is 512KB, just like the Japanese version.
Edit: Apparently, I completely missed the second translation of this game. Seems to work fine on PocketNES despite being 1MB in size.
There are two fan translations of FF3J for Famicom. The first one is kinda rough in it's translation, but otherwise is just the same as the original.
The translation I want was made years later and features many bug fixes and the all important ability to dash holding down the B button, something missing from the original and the first translation. It also cleans up the text considerably to more or less match the DS translation.
the original FF3J board:
http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=1507If all 1 MB is PRG, does that mean the CHR is combined into that PRG chip?
What I need is a board donor that can support that size PRG. As I say, I have several ETROM boards which can support that (Metal Slader Glory did so apparently), but ET-ROM is MMC5, meaning this English translation would need a mapper hack.
ETROM:
http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=1729So what I am asking are two things:
1. Is it possible to transfer the FF3J translation from TGROM to ETROM, and more importantly
2. Is there someone here with the expertise to actually do that? That kind of thing is totally out of my league.
If this isn't necessary and there is another alternative board type (especially a 72 pin alternative), feel free to lay it out. It doesn't matter to me how this is done, just that it is done. I know I could play FF3J on any number of emulators or just go with the modern remake, but I'd like to have the original game playable on the real Famicom hardware with all the modern tweaks the 2011 translation offers.
I wonder if it's possible to hack the game to Mapper 245? Mapper 245 is a MMC3 pirate variant uses CHR bit 2 to switch between two sets of 512k PRG. This could be done with an existing MMC3 chip, and a slightly different board layout (maybe moving a wire or something).
You are mistinguishing the release order of the translation, the expanded translation is acutally older, and it has of course nothing to do with the DS release. It was made back when Nesticle was the standard to play NES games. (only it's submission to RHDN is newer).
As for your questions, the answer are :
1) no
2) no
If any MMC3 ROM with 1204KB of PRG-ROM were to hit real hardware, your best bet would be make a CPLD or FPGA clone of the MMC3 with more PRG selection bits. Remember that the MMC3 is itself a clone of a Namco mapper with more PRG and CHR selection bits.
The expanded translation was released in 2005, compared to the other translation released in 1999.
It is possible in the same sense that it's possible to, say, port a flash game to the NES. Actually a little easier because you don't need to rewrite everything. But it's a royal PITA, and I really doubt you're going to get anyone doing it for you out of the kindness of their heart.
Mapper 224 (what nestopia calls 'Waixing type J') seems to be an MMC3-compatible mapper without any PRG ROM size limitation.
Dwedit wrote:
Edit: Apparently, I completely missed the second translation of this game. Seems to work fine on PocketNES despite being 1MB in size.
Then presumably they just expanded the 6bit prg bank registers to 7+bits. Should be an easy setup, I've just got to get some 1MB roms to test it out. I'll post the results when I get my hands on some chips, I don't feel like messing around with two 512KB roms.
Want me to make a big-MMC3 test ROM like the one I made for mapper 28? And while we're at it, I thought of the obvious back-compatible extension to larger PRG RAM using bits 5-0 of $A001.
The translation actually checks to make sure it's running with more-than-6-bit PRG registers and gives you a nastygram if it's not.
I'm kinda torn about legitimizing oversize MMC3. It's not like most flashcarts can use more than 512KiB PRG anyway, and nor can the original hardware. In hardware, only modern FPGA or CPLD reimplementations can exceed the 512KiB limit.
Hm, so ETROM is completely useless for this task. Disappointing, but not totally unexpected or someone else would have done this already. Sorry, I thoguth the hack was newer than it is. I had an old build with the dashing, but it seemed different from the one that was put on rom hacking in 2011.
Dwedit wrote:
I wonder if it's possible to hack the game to Mapper 245? Mapper 245 is a MMC3 pirate variant uses CHR bit 2 to switch between two sets of 512k PRG. This could be done with an existing MMC3 chip, and a slightly different board layout (maybe moving a wire or something).
That idea sounds promising. What board type would be the most likely donor for such a reproduction?
infiniteneslives wrote:
Then presumably they just expanded the 6bit prg bank registers to 7+bits. Should be an easy setup, I've just got to get some 1MB roms to test it out. I'll post the results when I get my hands on some chips, I don't feel like messing around with two 512KB roms.
I'm eager to hear what you find out. Thanks for everyone who takes interest in this.
lidnariq wrote:
I'm kinda torn about legitimizing oversize MMC3. It's not like most flashcarts can use more than 512KiB PRG anyway, and nor can the original hardware. In hardware, only modern FPGA or CPLD reimplementations can exceed the 512KiB limit.
This is precisely the problem. To play FF3J, I need to rely on emulation, and I'd really rather not. I want to have that connection to the real hardware if at all possible. So if there's some way to hack MMC3 to work with this or change the mapper to MMC5 (which given Metal Slader Glory, can run 1 MB?) then that's what I'm seeking.
lidnariq wrote:
It's not like most flashcarts can use more than 512KiB PRG anyway
Personally, I wish there were more interesting 1MB games out there so that the guys making flashcarts would consider going over the 512KB limitation.
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and nor can the original hardware.
The original hardware supports only 32KB of PRG and 8KB of CHR. If everyone considered that the maximum amount of memory the system could handle the NES would have died much sooner than it did. I see nothing wrong in creating new mappers to support more memory, even if one of these "new" mappers is 99% identical to the MMC3.
SatoshiMatrix wrote:
That idea sounds promising.
Depending on how the game combines switchable banks at run time, this conversion might not even be possible. If it is, it will probably be harder than converting to MMC5, since the MMC5 can do everything the oversize MMC3 can, it just does it differently.
Anyway, is there any reason for this task (converting to MMC5, I mean) to be any harder than the typical mapper hack? Since the MMC5 can do everything an oversize MMC3 can, wouldn't it just be a matter of patching all mapper writes?
tokumaru wrote:
lidnariq wrote:
and nor can the original hardware.
The original hardware supports only 32KB of PRG and 8KB of CHR.
Big N released the MMC3, therefore it counts as "original hardware". Enforcing the limitations of this original hardware enables us to continue ... repurposing original hardware, I guess. Kinda lousy, when one puts it that way.
In any case, the proposed extensions would be backward compatible with all existing mapper 4 ROM images, so there wouldn't even need to be a new mapper number.
SatoshiMatrix wrote:
If all 1 MB is PRG, does that mean the CHR is combined into that PRG chip?
Yes, this is how all CHR-RAM games work including all versions/patches of FF3 that I'm now aware of.
Yeah, at this point it doesn't get much more legitimate than having built in support by a large number of emulators and a desirable game/translation that requires it. Putting it on real hardware and fully documenting it just formalizes it. Nothing about any of this is or ever will 'legitimate' IMO (at least how I define the word)...
tepples wrote:
Want me to make a big-MMC3 test ROM like the one I made for mapper 28? And while we're at it, I thought of the obvious back-compatible extension to larger PRG RAM using bits 5-0 of $A001.
Test roms are always good. Although if the user already has this rom then as linariq pointed out it tests the 1MB prg capability for you. However that's not the case for extra PRG-RAM though. With that being a motive for people to make the leap to MMC5 it seems like a worthwhile addition. If we were to take it one step further it might be useful to have one of those bits designate a means to put PRG-RAM in $8000-FFFF. Possibly use bit 4 to swap out the last PRG-RAM bank with the ROM bank that is otherwise fixed to the 2nd to last bank? Then use bits 3-0 to specify which bank is at $6000-7FFF. Yes, a bit extreme but may as well build support for 128KB since it fits and is cheapest SRAM in large quantities. Don't need to have it in hardware if not desirable. Might be a good idea to use bit 5 to designate the bank in ROM as read only or r/w. ALL of this is back-compatible. If the sky is the limit and we're already on this path, there could be additions utilizing $A000 unused bits for added CHR capabilities.
Good luck to you guys (if this is still happening).
I just beat FFIV last night (yeah, I know, only took me like 22 years), so I'm thinking I might try III next. I tried putting this translation on my GBA, via PocketNES, but after patching the font, I find that all of the text is touching, vertically, so it's kind of difficult to read. Oh well.
Yeah I just got the 1MB chip last week. I'll post results when I make time to set things up in the next couple weeks hopefully.
Any word? This is a fascinating project!
I am curious if there are any updates on this project as well
A couple of years ago I got a chinese repro of FF3 in Aliexpress which is translated to English. I wonder which version it is. Any way to check it? I can also try and open the cart to see what's inside, in case you are interested.