Hi, I have an old Famiclone labelled as "LEVIS", or Mastergames. It is one of those SNES-style shells like the better known Super Com 72. It looks like a fully built PAL NES on the inside - seems to have the full hardware inside. It apparently works with stock PAL carts. We purchased one around 1992.
It has 255 games built in, on what looks like a standard 60 pin cart, soldered onto an unused cartridge slot inside the machine. Obviously it has far less games, something like 20 or 30, multiplied by making the games start at different levels or with different powerups or difficulty. So you get classics like Fiery Adventure Island 8 or Easy Road Fighter.
A bog standard famiclone in other words, but the machine holds sentimental value to me. I had the machine lost a long time ago, but I was lucky enough to find a matching unit on the market a few weeks back. It has the same type of 255-in-1 games, even the game order matches what I remember. More importantly it isn't a glop top but uses actual DIP chips, so I can dump the ROMs with my modest setup.
The cart inside the machine has a bunch of 74s (two 74174s, a 74153, and a 7402), and two ROM chips, which I dumped as 27c040s (512kbyte). One is the PRG ROM, and the other is the CHR one. If I open up the roms in a hex editor or a tile editor, I can clearly see the text and graphics that the games inside use. Based on the text inside, it seems the menu system supported more games originally, and has a setup for handling prefixes with the game names.
Anyway, I tried getting the dump working in an emulator, but I didn't have any luck. I most likely miss the correct mapper in the iNES header. The most I could do was to offset the PRG rom by 4000h so the menu program is at the beginning of the rom, set up the correct PRG and CHR sizes (20h and 40h), and set byte 6 and 7 to 30E0 (taken from a similar multicart dump, 1200-in-1 (J) [p1].nes). That way at least the menu works, but every graphic is garbled and most games don't work. Two games manage to boot that way (Wild Gunman and Tank), of course with totally broken graphics, but it is enough to confirm that the menu is at least there. Most games just warp back to the menu.
I've attached the two rom dumps. How do I get this dump working? I'm not familiar with NES mappers.
Pictures of the console and the hardware inside:
It has 255 games built in, on what looks like a standard 60 pin cart, soldered onto an unused cartridge slot inside the machine. Obviously it has far less games, something like 20 or 30, multiplied by making the games start at different levels or with different powerups or difficulty. So you get classics like Fiery Adventure Island 8 or Easy Road Fighter.
A bog standard famiclone in other words, but the machine holds sentimental value to me. I had the machine lost a long time ago, but I was lucky enough to find a matching unit on the market a few weeks back. It has the same type of 255-in-1 games, even the game order matches what I remember. More importantly it isn't a glop top but uses actual DIP chips, so I can dump the ROMs with my modest setup.
The cart inside the machine has a bunch of 74s (two 74174s, a 74153, and a 7402), and two ROM chips, which I dumped as 27c040s (512kbyte). One is the PRG ROM, and the other is the CHR one. If I open up the roms in a hex editor or a tile editor, I can clearly see the text and graphics that the games inside use. Based on the text inside, it seems the menu system supported more games originally, and has a setup for handling prefixes with the game names.
Anyway, I tried getting the dump working in an emulator, but I didn't have any luck. I most likely miss the correct mapper in the iNES header. The most I could do was to offset the PRG rom by 4000h so the menu program is at the beginning of the rom, set up the correct PRG and CHR sizes (20h and 40h), and set byte 6 and 7 to 30E0 (taken from a similar multicart dump, 1200-in-1 (J) [p1].nes). That way at least the menu works, but every graphic is garbled and most games don't work. Two games manage to boot that way (Wild Gunman and Tank), of course with totally broken graphics, but it is enough to confirm that the menu is at least there. Most games just warp back to the menu.
I've attached the two rom dumps. How do I get this dump working? I'm not familiar with NES mappers.
Pictures of the console and the hardware inside: