Bregalad wrote:
So, it looks like RetroZone stopped to sell plain game cases anyways.
Yeah once he caught wind that I was having a NES case mold made he stopped selling them and has been deferring people to me apparently.
I actually just got the first couple shots from the mold last week. There is still a little work left to buff/polish things up, but the first batch of cases is scheduled to be stamped out next week. Here's a pic of the first ones. Without the mold being buffed up, the ejector pins have to press extra hard to pop the case off the mold. So that's where the white marks are from, won't be an issue beyond these test shots.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18341918/nesdev/NES%20carts%20shells.jpgLet me know if you're interested in the dimensional specifics of them and I can get you some measurements. They're actually drafted from the 5-screw design as that made for a simpler mold design by leaving out the intricate tabs. I did adjust the backside labels to the next closest standard avery label size too. There was a slight mix up on the PCB dimensions, so they didn't come out to be an exact match of the original. They're pretty close though, and with a slight modification original boards can fit inside easily.
tokumaru wrote:
Bregalad wrote:
Does the company that produces Everdrive cartridges makes a new mold, or does they use existing Famicom games ?
They're new shells, but AFAIK they all have the word "EVERDRIVE" and a hole on the side for the micro SD card.
I picked one up from Krikzz, I don't see much issue with the EVERDRIVE text or SD slot. One could easily put a label over the EVERDRIVE to mask it if desired, and I didnt even notice the SD card slot at first look. It's actually SD micro, so the hole isn't that big. IMO you can safely ignore the fact it's even there.
I can share pictures and some rough dimensions of his cases if you'd like. I measured everything up and have a draft of the max PCB dimensions with all the holes and everything. There's quite a few screw post/studs penetrating the board. Something like 5 IIRC, that make placement of a highly populated board a bit annoying. But still severely better than donors, and they have 3 screws instead of tabs only thankfully.
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And, relating to PCB design, is it recommanded to connect "GND" components to only one, or to both GND pins of the cart edge ? It seems (I'm not too sure) Nintendo connects everything to both, but wouldn't that result in a nasty ground loop ?
I would say go ahead and connect both GND pins. I've never seen a board that didn't, and I'd be more concerned of potential issues from poor grounding than ground loops. Say for example your ONLY ground pin was dirty/damaged, you could fairly easily fry components on the board due to SCR latchup. Even if you have a good connector, hot swapping carts with only one ground pin leaves you much more suceptible to SCR latchup.
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Is it a catastrophe if there is not a bypass cap for every single chip ?
Far from a catastrophe from what has been seen so far. Many retrozone releases don't have bypass caps at all. Most Nintendo boards only have 2 bypass caps even though they have 4+ chips on the board. My practice has been to have atleast one bypass cap for every two components. When to components are so close to eachother that you would end up putting two bypass caps right next to eachother it really doesn't make sense to have more than one bypass cap. The only other way around that I suppose is mounting bypass caps on the bottom of boards which is costly from an assembly standpoint.