Any simple way of "faking" or converting one? I know it was used only for Gimmick, Batman, & Dodge Danpei 2...
I ask if it would be possible to convert a Batman to a 'Gimmick' given that the
sound generation hardware was only in Gimmick.
With some hacky you can rework Return of the Joker to play Gimmick without sound of course.
Isn't the sound-generating hardware inside the chip? Anyone have a picture of a genuine Gimmick board?
Not inside FME-7, Gimmick doesn't use FME-7, it uses Sunsoft 5B which is only available in Gimmick cartridges.
Has anyone verified this? According to the
Kevtris site, there's a couple of unused pins on the FME-7 that might be for sound.
Of course...
http://picket.akira.ne.jp/Board/Gimmick.jpg
5B was released 3 years after FME-7, there's no mistaking that FME-7 isn't capable of sound.
Ok, so does this mean that the board is incapable of the sound that Gimmick is know for, or does this mean it is not able to be used at all?
You can rewire a Return of the Joker cart to play Gimmick (Japanese version, PAL release won't work right on a NTSC system) without the extra sound. I don't know what it sounds like without the other channels but it's probably pretty bad. Perhaps somebody here with lots of time and talent could NTSCify Mr Gimmick.
I take it wiring up an AY-8910 is out of the question? It would be pretty hard, but seeing as how an original copy of Mr. Gimmick goes for around $250, it beats the alternative.
I'd assume Sunsoft's PSG is substantially different than a memory mapped over the counter AY-8910, it's probably not worth thinking about.
Maybe the PAL "Mr. Gimmick" fetches $250 but the FC game "Gimmick!" shouldn't! I bought it in 2004 for something like $40 loose in Akibahara where things are generally overpriced. There's one complete on eBay now for $115 from a seller who sells everything for 30-400% more than it's obtainable for in Akiba (much less Yahoo Japan.)
kyuusaku wrote:
I'd assume Sunsoft's PSG is substantially different than a memory mapped over the counter AY-8910, it's probably not worth thinking about.
Actually, it is mapped the same as an AY-8910 I think. The only thing you'd have to do is memory map the AY chip using some address decoding. Other than that, I think it would work.
i have hacked Gimmick ROM into mapper 23 (VRC2)
please use IPS files only
sdm wrote:
i have hacked Gimmick ROM into mapper 23 (VRC2)
please use IPS files only
You mean you have a dump of a pirate Gimmick ROM that was hacked to work with the VRC
4, not VRC2 (only the VRC4 has an IRQ counter in it).
yes:) VRC4
sorry
i have also Dynamite Batman hacked to VRC4
[removed rant about 7-zip]
EDIT: I downloaded the 7-zip source code again and found a small standalone ANSI C version of a 7-zip-only extraction tool that works fine. If the documentation had been better, I would have found this last time I examined 7-zip.
On which platform does
p7zip not work? I imagine that it should work in at least Linux, *BSD, Solaris, and Darwin.
I imagine that the file was compressed with .7z because unlike .zip, .7z supports solid archives. A solid archive can make multiple dumps of the same title (e.g. PRG 0 vs. PRG 1, or multiple ROM hacks, or Super NES SPCs sharing the same samples) much smaller because a file can reference data from previous files. Switching to .tar.gz makes a solid archive, but Gzip uses a 32 KB window, which is way too small for solid archives to be much of a gain on any file bigger than an NROM-128.
Say, does this board use standard EPROM pinouts? The 128KB PRG ROM on my Batman:Return Of The Joker board is 32 pins, while all other 128K ROMs on NES carts are 28 pins. A glance at the traces also seems to indicate that the +5V lines to the chips match up with standard EPROM pinouts.
Should I just drop new PRG and CHR ROMs straight in there and see what happens?
Well, I just dropped the ROMs straight in, crossed my fingers and it worked! The NES-BTR board uses totally standard EPROM pinouts.
If only getting the sound to work was this easy....
Computolio wrote:
Well, I just dropped the ROMs straight in, crossed my fingers and it worked! The NES-BTR board uses totally standard EPROM pinouts.
If only getting the sound to work was this easy....
Yeah it appears that a "real" FME-7 chip is different from the one in Batman. Someone was supposed to send me a Gimmick cart oh, 3 years ago to find out... with multiple promises since then. But it's never appeared, so we won't know for a long time.
Heck we still don't even know if it supports a full AY-3-891x compatibility or not. So far, emulators just emulate square wave frequency and volume and none of the enveloping or other things the real chip was capable of.
I discover with my friend something interesting:)
My friend remove ROM's chips from oryginal Batman Return of the Joker FME-7 cart, ad write to flash memories original Gimmick! rom image (sunsoft 5B with additional custom music chip) - we test it, and music works excelent, like oryginal gimmick on emulator.
I think, FME-7 it is oryginal Sunsoft5B chip only renamed, but with custom music chip like 5B
Recorded music from real console - gimmick (5B) on batman (FME7) cart:
http://www.keepmyfile.com/download/0b00ac1537608
i never seen that info in web.
regards.
You've been fooled by the excellent capabilities of Sunsoft's composers.
This is plain vanilla NES audio.
If the FME-7 has sound, then it's on the nonconnected pins wich are unused on the NES board, so you cannot know unless you get some japanese boards with both the FME-7 and Sunsoft 5B and look if the circuitery is identical or different.
If japanese carts with the FME-7 have both audio pins tied together then definitely there is no sound on the FME-7.
but gimmick! on Sounsoft5B mapper has ben released in US NES (with custom music without audio pins
)
You're getting it all wrong. Gimmick has only been released in Japan (with custom audio) and in scandinavia (without custom audio). Yours have no custom audio either. The scandinavian verison of Gimmick probably uses a regular FME-7 and only the japanese gimmick uses the Sunsoft5.
Imagine this: You are coding on a mapper very similar to MMC3 but with MMC1 nametable mirroring and four switchable 8 KiB banks (at $6000, $8000, $A000, $C000). The PRG takes up only 192 KiB with all maps and all sprite behaviors present. So what do you do with the blank 64 KiB in the PRG ROM? Move everything that accesses $C000-$DFFF down to $6000-$7FFF, and then put a poopload of DPCM samples in $C000-$DFFF. For example, if you analyze the PRG of
Return of the Joker using
my DPCM ripper, you'll see a lot of bass samples, freeing up the triangle channel to do other things.
ufff. yes... he write Mr.Gimmick, not GIMMICK JAP on Batman cart... lol
Actually Gimmick and Batman-ROJ are not the only games to use the DPCM for melodic purposes, quite some later Sunsoft games does this using the MMC3 (Gremlins 2 comes to mind, wich have a great soundtrack). Actually any game on any mapper could do this, but the main problem is that this would eat a lot of the available space, say to have a decent palette of playable notes you should have 3 samples, those samples typically have to be long (unless you can implement a system to loop them, but you will have problem with the frequency you're using if not a hardware size of a DPCM sample), so 3 quite long bass samples can eat, say, 80% of the size of a fixed bank in a UNROM style bankswitched game (located in $c000-$ffff).
Also you'd have only ONE instrument available and all notes could be only played on one or two octaves. Plus, the samples have to be bass samples, because of the horrid DPCM low sampling rate and very low slew rate.
Yep, you can hear the fact that the ext.sound is missing in those last samples quite clearly. Though some songs barely use ext.sound at all.
Lord Nightmare
Pirate FME-7 board
- Pirate Batman(1) cartridge.
I test some original FME-7 games on it - all 128/128 kb works
That's hilarious. I wonder if they lost money making and selling those.
I see five 74LS670 chips, four 74LS191, a 74LS139, a 74LS163, a 74LS741 (hard to make out), and some sort of programmable logic device. Wikipedia
translates:
- 74*139: 2- to 4-bit Decoder
- 74*163: A 4-bit binary counter.
- 74*191: A 4-bit up/down binary counter. But I'd bet these counters are actually used as a binary counter, not just as a jury-rigged quad D latch like Nintendo's use of the 74*161, because Kevin Horton's FME-7 document mentions a 16-bit down counter used to divide M2 to generate IRQs.
- 74*670: Register file that we've discussed extensively in another topic about a conjectured custom mapper.
- 74*741: Octal buffer, three-state outputs, mixed enable polarity (to kill bus conflicts?)
How many CPLDs would it take to fit all these 7400 series chips?
You may be able to just barely squeeze it into a common Xilinx XC95108 or Altera EPM7128 if you cut the register files down like this board. For a full implementation it'll have to go into an obscure larger surface mount CPLD.
I think the top left chip is a dual flip flop (74LS74A), not a buffer. Since the PAL doesn't have registered outputs, I can't figure out how they implemented IRQ and mirroring in two bits rather than four. Perhaps they cut one-screen mirroring and the IRQ enable bit (always assumed enabled).
I really like this pirate's style, too bad they used a PAL for random logic, but I understand where they're coming from, it would probably take another 5+ chips without the PAL exceeding the PCB size and price of the PAL.
Edit: FME-7 will fit into a XC95108 CPLD if you cut register file bits for 128K PRG / 256K CHR, 256/128 or 256/256 (only if you ignore the bank at $6000), very good to know since it's the largest mapper next to MMC5 AFAIK. I think with a surface mount XC95144 all NES mappers but MMC5 could fit :D
kyuusaku wrote:
I think the top left chip is a dual flip flop (74LS74A
yes, 74LS74A
Quote:
That's hilarious. I wonder if they lost money making and selling those.
Today that would probably be the case but back then 74 series were cheaper than ASICs (unless you made at least 20k units or so) and FPGA weren't available.
It's in fact surprising a FME7 can be emulated with "only" 13 chips (okay maybe it's simplified). A 74xx version of the MMC1 would take almost about the same amount of chips (about 10 if I remember correctly) unless simplified.
It's also surprising they put the chips so close to eachother. They should have studied how to make they connexions in a very clever way.
PS : You should add this cart to Bootgods database if pirates are accepted (and I belive they are).
I also have 74xxx based pirate Don Doko Don 2 cartridge.
(pirate mapper 48/DDD2)
Bregalad wrote:
FPGA weren't available.
Technically they have been available since 1984 or something, but of course it wasn't economically feasible to put them in bootlegs. In 1993 when the bootleg seems to be made, the cheapest FPGA were $40-$50. CPLD (called EPLD) back then were much cheaper but wouldn't have had nearly enough registers for FME-7.
Bregalad wrote:
It's in fact surprising a FME7 can be emulated with "only" 13 chips (okay maybe it's simplified). A 74xx version of the MMC1 would take almost about the same amount of chips (about 10 if I remember correctly) unless simplified.
It's only because of the register files and the PAL, MMC1 in TTL will be very unefficient because of the many quirks.
sdm wrote:
I also have 74xxx based pirate Don Doko Don 2 cartridge. :)
(pirate mapper 48/DDD2)
Does it have a Taito IRQ counter clone? That would be nice to know the true implementation of :D
kyuusaku wrote:
Does it have a Taito IRQ counter clone? That would be nice to know the true implementation of
That doesn't have any IRQ counter :( It does do something interesting though-- it synthesizes a latch/register in the PAL for mirroring to save a chip.
Bregalad wrote:
If the FME-7 has sound, then it's on the nonconnected pins wich are unused on the NES board, so you cannot know unless you get some japanese boards with both the FME-7 and Sunsoft 5B and look if the circuitery is identical or different.
If japanese carts with the FME-7 have both audio pins tied together then definitely there is no sound on the FME-7.
The fact that someone has come up with a MOD for US NES consooles to play extra audio is it possible to make a MR Gimmick repro that has full sound now. If so would it require the (J) ROM or does the (E) ROM have all the info just not the hardware.
If you want Gimmik in a NES cartridge you'll need to buy the import and put it into a NES cart with an adapter and wire the audio to the correct pin on the adapter.
I've never heard of the FME-7 found in Batman RotJ having the Sunsoft 5b extra sound capabilities. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Bregalad was saying exactly this, no one know has looked and said if it is true or not. Maybe BootGod's site has PCB scans that could help.
The Euro version likely lacks any data or programming for using the extra sound channels as the PAL NES like the US NES doesn't have expansion audio on the cartridge port normally. The game would have been reprogrammed to use the normal NES sound channels only.
