I am looking at getting into the repro hobby, 2600, NES, SNES, Genesis. I already have a bunch of the tools I need, soldering equipment, donor carts, gamebit, ect. What I dont have is alot of the eprom experience. I used to work in an import store that did chips for psx, dreamcast, ps2, ect. I ran the programmer there a few times, but the chips (which I don't know what kinds were used) were all preselected and the software was all stock, I never touched it. Anyway I am a quick learner with this stuff given the proper tutorial and I think I found enough info to get started and some here. My question however is this, I need an eprom burner, I don't have too much money. I was looking at this one.
TOP853 USB Universal Programmer EPROM MCU GAL PIC
It is on ebay for about 60 bucks, and I know that it will not do SNES EPROM chips, so here is what I am trying to find out. Will it do NES chips? If it doesnt it is rather useless to me.
Also I want to know if it is possible to do flash chips instead of eprom for snes carts, because it appears this can do the flash roms just fine. (though as I said, I am new to the eprom programming) I figure if that is the case than I could use this to burn flash and install them into the snes carts, little more expensive for the chips I imagine, potentially more unstale, but I can save on the burner.
Thanks for the help in advance.
Actually, SNES uses the same kind of ROM chips as NES. Really the only difference is the memory size of the chip. SNES may require a faster speed rating, but that won't be a problem unless you're using some antique chips. For chips in DIP-32 package, largest sizes are 1024kB for EPROM and 512kB for FlashROM. Larger Flash chips are always surface-mount, and will require an adapter to program (plus some creative soldering tricks to wire it up to a standard NES/SNES board). I don't know about any larger EPROMs.
maybe i should bail on the flash idea then. ok, I looked over the list of eproms and it appears it can burn them, but it cant do anything over 5v, which I hear may be a problem. What voltage are the chips, I see Willem has a usb burner for around 100 that can be plugged into AC and does 6.5v (it mentions something on the site about it doing higher, nice of them to actually give me an exact number) Does anyone use the Willem USB for nes/snes/genesis? I heard you need a 16 bit adapter for anything over NES, ill look into that later, I wanna start lite.
Thanks
I'd highly reccomend a Willem Programmer if you have the parallel port it requires. Excellent bang for the buck. If not, there are USB models floating around, but they cost more. Either way, great programmer.
If I'm not mistaken, EPROMs also require an ultraviolet light thingy to erase. What you'll want is EEPROMs (the extra E means they can be electrically erased). Or you could purchase the ultraviolet eraser device, but that adds to cost and if you don't have one on hand isn't really worth it.
The 16bit adapter is for 16bit eproms. Sega Genesis uses 16bit maskroms. NES and SNES use 8bit maskroms. Thus you do not need that adapter for those.
The other thing is any SNES game over 1 megabyte is going to be a bit of a challenge because you won't be able to do a straight forward chip swap as there are no 8bit dip eproms over 1 megabyte that you will find today. Often people will take 4 of the 1 megabyte chips as well as using another IC to select the correct ROM so you can stack them together to more or less make a 4 megabyte ROM. It doesn't look pretty though.
MottZilla wrote:
Often people will take 4 of the 1 megabyte chips as well as using another IC to select the correct ROM so you can stack them together to more or less make a 4 megabyte ROM. It doesn't look pretty though.
I saw one of these "stack" boards in the video about the making of
Donkey Kong Country that
Nintendo Power sent to subscribers.
What's the password?
Actually, from what I understand, EEPROMs (besides serial ones, which are really popular) are pretty much obsolete. Seems like parallel EEPROMs get built into microcontrollers like PICs and such, and that's about it as far as I know.
Since he mentioned making reproductions, in that case you don't really need to erase the chips (especially keeping in mind you can't fit an IC socket inside a cart case, at least not on NES and probably not on most systems), you might as well use OTP (one-time-programmable) EPROMs and permanently solder it in there.
Part number prefixes:
27xxx - EPROM
28xxx - EEPROM
29xxx - FlashROM
Though if I understand correctly, I think some FlashROMs also start with 28xxx, confusingly.