Wow, well this could definitely make a difference.  At less than $2.6k, a community release (or a single purchase > repro release) is definitely not out of the question.  Someone very well may take you up on it for that price.

Genesis stuff actually sounds somewhat easy, and I think that we'll see more Genny repros in the future.  I wouldn't mind doing some myself honestly.  SNES stuff is doable, but there tends to be a lot of rewiring and upwards of 4 EPROMs per cart.  It becomes labor intensive and expensive.  With GB the issue seems to be putting an EPROM on those little carts.

Just throwing this out there, but if the price of the cart itself ever ends up in the ballpark of what The Combat game sold for, I could all but guarantee a release.  Just a thought.

What a difference a  year makes:

http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/...

Price was $5k then, this is 50% off.  I still don't own any homebrews / repros and actually haven't even played one (other than NWC) but I'd still contribute a little to the cause. 

so what mapper and board does this game use?

It uses MMC3 as far as I know but I don't know about mappers or any of that...I know my copyNES has been finicky lately.

My bad Bunny, I'm an idiot. Disregard grumpy-gills Mark...

i would guess TLROM then, thanks for the info

If it's TLROM, you'd have about a BILLION options for donors.  TSROM wouldn't be bad either.  IF you boot it up in an emulator (FCEUltra) you can find out what mapper it uses.

MrMark: Yeah, that would help if I had an emulator, but I have none. I tried downloading some awhile ago, nothing takes on this computer...I'm just never meant to mess with these things...

Sorry to keep chiming in, and I'll let you dudes get back to the number crunching momentarily, but I have a question. When you refer to a 'donor cart' do you host some sort of 'cart drive' on NA to get cartridges for production, or is this excess fodder you have laying around?

They mean to cannibalize existing carts to make new games.

You could always let me test it out on an emulator Jason!

Or I could help you load it on one of your computers if you want.

I get that, but where do the carts come from? Perhaps if they held a cart drive here on NA they could save money that way. Do they need PCB's from certain games to host the new chips or do they only need the shell, replacing the PCB with one they've made?

It's a for-profit enterprise.

Building the cost of the donor cart into the price has the same net economic effect as people "donating" carts as donors (actually, building it into the price is cheaper since you don't have a bunch of extra one-off shipping charges)

Yes, only certain PCB's will work with certain reproductions.  I think the cart drive is a noble idea, but the cost of donors (about $2 a piece I would assume in this case) is negligible compared to what the price of the ROM (and possibly boxes and manuals if someone were to go in that direction) would be.

Dream:  Do you happen to have a picture of the bare PCB laying around?  Not looking for you to have to go digging, but it may give you enough info on what donors it would need by taking a quick peak at it.

Excellent points.

MrMark, I think bunnyboy knows what it needs and supposedly it was "not cheap" but I could be mistaken. No pics of the boards lying around of that I know. I do remember it being MMC3, though. That's all I can think of.

Off topic, if you guys are buying up NES protos, I'm shocked you never just got ahold of me for like a 10K pile of stuff. You want protos, I have them available. I'm not collecting them as much anymore and you guys are..kind of makes sense to me if you need some more protos you don't have...they aren't doing much good on my end since I'm all arcade these days...

yes, this is sounding very good....

Jeeze I go to work and come back to this LOL
ok where to start... (this is all in good humour mind you )






lets just say that it all works out in the wash without releasing any numbers from a previous release... it all balances out.


If anyone I have sold any NES  repro's here to has paid more then 23ish bucks each shipped I'd like to see them only problem with that is that word gets out and my inbox gets full...and right now I can't see me doing anything for anyone outside of who I have made agreements with till at least late summer... reason being is that I always have my eye's out for deals be it eproms or donors or whatever else.... patents is a virtue.






their  ripping me off because I PRAY for the day they buy a prototype that only requires one eprom to wire up oh wait... er... shhhhhh nevermind

pretty much I have methods that I have come up with that cuts my time down to almost half of what it would normaly take the old way...

90 games with 2 eproms per board 32 pins per eprom in this case, thats 5760 solder points not even taking into account the rewiring that is needed for it and  testing, cleaning, testing swearing soldering again , and testing some more lol

If you used those methods for Hoppin Mad, I have much faster ways for you than desoldering each pin!

kinda like how I said in the e-zine article I wrote right lol back in... october... or their abouts with pictures...

I haven't used this method but if you use a cake pan with fine sand in it and you put your board chip side up on it your able to control the heat a little better and the solder leaches to the bottom of the sand mixture

EDIT* I wasn't aboard for the Hoppin mad... that was all Matt/Mark Mark/Matt and .... Zzap, Qix, others? but  before my time

Guess I missed that article! In that case Ma(rk/tt) should have read it for Hoppin Mad, even tho it wasn't written yet

When I have seen the sand method it took too long to work because too much heat was going into the board instead of the chips. The board was damaged but chips took a lower heat than the toaster oven method, which was the goal.

well I'll mark that method off of my list to try sometime.. thanks for the heads up

Booo!  Hahaha!  I had a pretty hooked up desolder station when we did Hoppin' Mad, so it wasn't so bad, but when it shit the bed at the start of Kitty's Catch, we brought Ian on board for a few reasons:

1.  He does a billion times better work than Matt and I.
2.  He's much better in regards to rewiring and trouble shooting boards.
3.  He does it much faster.
4.  He's my buddy

We use the chip cutting method that Ian showed us at this point.  Matt removes the chips, I erase and program the EPROMs, we both modify the games cases and remove labels, etc, and Ian takes care of soldering and rewiring the boards.  It's much nicer to be able to spread out the work with 3 people rather than try to do it all ourselves.  It just takes WAY too long.

Nobody else seemed to respond to this, but I think it's a brilliant idea.  There are usually at least 10+ people interested in LE's, and I know if you setup 20 spots you'd probably have no problem filling them.  Give me more a little bit of notice, and you can count me in for one of the spots.  Only 19 more to go, and you've one your way to making some nice bank .