Man, I can't say how happy I am right now. I know many of you won't care about this at all, 'cause devcarts are such a common thing for you by now. But as an absolute hardware/electronics newbie, I'm really happy to say I'm almost finished with an NROM devcart.
My EPROM programmer arrived last week, and today I got my Flash ROMs (AT29C256) and a bunch of sockets. At first I got a really hard time trying to get the Nintendo ROM out, but I eventually got the hang of it and learned a lot (although I almost destroyed the board at time... won't be doing that again). Then I thought soldering the socket would be a bitch, but that worked out OK.
I then plugged the ROM I removed on another socket, and placed that on the socket I soldered. To my surprise, the game still worked! Wich meant the socket was successifully installed. That was a hell of a good feeling. It was the first time I used a soldering for more than 4 minutes, and I didn't screw anything up. It just worked. That never happens to me on the first try.
It was then time to program something on the Flash ROM (I didn't even bother to remove the CHR ROM, I wanted to see something else running, even with the wrong graphics). It was a bit hard to get the programmer working, but turns out I just had to use an older version of the software. I then burned a SMB1 image, and went to see what would happen.
There was, something that resembled SMB1's title screen, but it never did anything after that. Then I remembered that SMB1 uses CHR data in the title screen, and though that probably was the problem. Just to check, I inserted SMB's program into a Spy vs Spy (The cart I'm modifying) ROM and the emulators showed the same thing as the console.
Then I started to get real sleepy and burned the Spy vs Spy PRG, just for the heck of it. It ran OK and since it used the correct graphics it wasn't ugly.
I'll soon continue with all of this, but now I must sleep. It's 4:50am here and I have to work tomorrow. I really want to put something I made in the cart!
I want to thank the amazing people here at the NESDEV boards for beeing so helpfull. Specially Memblers (for the great idea of stacking 2 regular sockets, and other tech tips), No Carrier (who made me believe an absolute newbie like me could pull this off) and Celius (who warned me about the "bitch pin", oh man).
The only thing I didn't receive yet was a new 72-pin cart connector for my NES. I'm kinda afraid I'm not getting it, for some reason...
After all this rambling (sorry, but I'm really happy about this), I actually have a few questions on this matter:
1. When programming CHR chips, repeating the 8kb of data over and over will work well?
2. How many times can I erase and write the Flash ROM I mentioned above?
Thank you very much one more time, guys!
My EPROM programmer arrived last week, and today I got my Flash ROMs (AT29C256) and a bunch of sockets. At first I got a really hard time trying to get the Nintendo ROM out, but I eventually got the hang of it and learned a lot (although I almost destroyed the board at time... won't be doing that again). Then I thought soldering the socket would be a bitch, but that worked out OK.
I then plugged the ROM I removed on another socket, and placed that on the socket I soldered. To my surprise, the game still worked! Wich meant the socket was successifully installed. That was a hell of a good feeling. It was the first time I used a soldering for more than 4 minutes, and I didn't screw anything up. It just worked. That never happens to me on the first try.
It was then time to program something on the Flash ROM (I didn't even bother to remove the CHR ROM, I wanted to see something else running, even with the wrong graphics). It was a bit hard to get the programmer working, but turns out I just had to use an older version of the software. I then burned a SMB1 image, and went to see what would happen.
There was, something that resembled SMB1's title screen, but it never did anything after that. Then I remembered that SMB1 uses CHR data in the title screen, and though that probably was the problem. Just to check, I inserted SMB's program into a Spy vs Spy (The cart I'm modifying) ROM and the emulators showed the same thing as the console.
Then I started to get real sleepy and burned the Spy vs Spy PRG, just for the heck of it. It ran OK and since it used the correct graphics it wasn't ugly.
I'll soon continue with all of this, but now I must sleep. It's 4:50am here and I have to work tomorrow. I really want to put something I made in the cart!
I want to thank the amazing people here at the NESDEV boards for beeing so helpfull. Specially Memblers (for the great idea of stacking 2 regular sockets, and other tech tips), No Carrier (who made me believe an absolute newbie like me could pull this off) and Celius (who warned me about the "bitch pin", oh man).
The only thing I didn't receive yet was a new 72-pin cart connector for my NES. I'm kinda afraid I'm not getting it, for some reason...
After all this rambling (sorry, but I'm really happy about this), I actually have a few questions on this matter:
1. When programming CHR chips, repeating the 8kb of data over and over will work well?
2. How many times can I erase and write the Flash ROM I mentioned above?
Thank you very much one more time, guys!