I did a sort of profile of how many games use which mapper. It's more of an estimate because I didn't weed out all the duplicates and some are mislabelled... but here is the top of the list:
Quote:
Mapper 004: 569
Mapper 001: 481
Mapper 000: 260
Mapper 002: 200
Mapper 003: 145
Mapper 007: 56
Mapper 011: 35
Mapper 019: 32
Mapper 016: 26
Mapper 099: 25
Mapper 005: 24
Mapper 018: 16
Mapper 066: 16
Mapper 033: 15
Mapper 079: 15
Mapper 045: 14
Mapper 071: 14
Mapper 113: 12
Mapper 245: 11
Mapper 023: 11
Mapper 069: 11
Other mappers had < 10 games. Again, note this is a rough estimate and is not really accurate.
I agree with everyone else, that start with the easy ones (0, 3, 2, 7, 11), then move to the slightly trickier ones (1, 9, 10, 69). Then get the other common, but very difficult ones (4, 5).
MMC3 is definately the most common. Not just Mapper 4, but a lot of different mapper numbers are MMC3 with slight variations... so MMC3 is all over the place. The kicker is, it's probably
the hardest mapper to emulate. Well... maybe MMC5 or mapper 90 is harder... but sometimes I don't know.
At any rate... I would hold off on Mapper 4 or any other MMC3 mapper until:
- you're pretty comfortable with adding new mapper support (ie: you've done it a few times already)
- you already have an established and working mapper IRQ system (ie: you've added support for a mapper with simpler IRQs, and it works. I recommend mapper 69 for this)
Then again... mapper 4 IS the most common by far, so you might want to get to it asap. *shrug*
EDIT: I suspect that mapper 245 up there is totally wrong. I think those are all misheadered ROMs. Oh well.