I know it sound like a crazy idea but, after reading about Super Nes CD and the third party CD hardware for the N64, is "viable" to mod a NES console to read CDs, dvds, blurays? I mean i know the everdrive already does something similiar but it's juts a pipe dream. But in real life a CD "mod" could save tons of money. I didn't knew where to post this question but think it fits here.
NeoTorpor wrote:
in real life a CD "mod" could save tons of money
No, I don't think it could save any money, really. Like you said in your post, flash carts can more or less already do this, and flash is more cost effective to use than CDs. (i.e. the cost of building an interface to a CD drive, and/or maintaining that drive, etc., with flash being reusable I think that cost is a lot more important than something like cost per GB of storage media.)
An interesting thing that Super Russian Roulette did was use a serial flash memory that can be fed directly to the DPCM sample unit to play very long musical samples (in crummy NES DPCM quality).
NeoTorpor wrote:
I know it sound like a crazy idea but, after reading about Super Nes CD and the third party CD hardware for the N64, is "viable" to mod a NES console to read CDs, dvds, blurays? I mean i know the everdrive already does something similiar but it's juts a pipe dream. But in real life a CD "mod" could save tons of money. I didn't knew where to post this question but think it fits here.
This has approximately already happened.
The PowerPak uses CompactFlash. CompactFlash can operate like a IDE hard drive. The difference between an IDE hard drive and an IDE optical drive is fairly minor.
The real problem
now is that optical drives are drastically more expensive than NAND Flash like SD cards. And it looks like you can't easily get IDE optical drives anymore.
@rainwarrior: I saw the game's video, totally funny as hell. Anyway, thanks for your reply, i didn't knew the cost versus optimization.
@lidnariq: I had the idea that optical drivers where cheap. The flash cartridges are more awesome than i thought. Thanks.
Now it's time to wait until the NES flash cartridges work with 100% of the games.
O.o
A NES CD mod would be something that the media would talk about for sure. There is that going for it.
nesrocks wrote:
A NES CD mod would be something that the media would talk about for sure. There is that going for it.
When retro 80's meets retro 90's
Flashcarts only work with 99,9% of the games, what a shame
I didn't own a CD till the 90s. Maybe 94.
Funnier, would be to mod a NES to play a vinyl record, and output audio through a added speaker.
Or to wire one of those old Apple II tape drives, to stream data to the audio.
Here's a picture of a tape drive.
https://apple2history.org/history/ah03/
If anything, a tape drive that uses actual tape (instead of the physically flat yet logically tape-like QD media of the Famicom Disk System) would bring a new meaning to when grandmothers used to call Game Paks "Nintendo tapes". Compare
Wacky Packages "Stupid Moron Bros. 2" and
"Sega tapes" in Homestar Runner.
For the simplest tape/cd-player NROM implementation, you could have rom+dac+audio jack that loads data into the two flash/ram, and then switch address lines to flash after load.
calima wrote:
Flashcarts only work with 99,9% of the games, what a shame
Well it can't play chinese bootlegs, Harvest Moon NES and Princess Maker Nes.
dougeff wrote:
I didn't own a CD till the 90s. Maybe 94.
Funnier, would be to mod a NES to play a vinyl record, and output audio through a added speaker.
Or to wire one of those old Apple II tape drives, to stream data to the audio.
Here's a picture of a tape drive.
https://apple2history.org/history/ah03/Ahh please don't give me more kick ass ideas. It could also support laser discs.
tepples wrote:
If anything, a tape drive that uses actual tape (instead of the physically flat yet logically tape-like QD media of the Famicom Disk System) would bring a new meaning to when grandmothers used to call Game Paks "Nintendo tapes". Compare
Wacky Packages "Stupid Moron Bros. 2" and
"Sega tapes" in Homestar Runner.
Nes tapes. Hmm a mod that can read tapes, vinyl records, laser discs, dvd, vcd, cds, bluray.
yaros wrote:
NROM
Sounds like a good idea. Sadly i don't know much about electronics.
dougeff wrote:
Or to wire one of those old Apple II tape drives, to stream data to the audio.
Japan got that device.
I think the opposite is already done,
a DVD player that plays NES games.
I saw a satellite receiver that plays NES games too, but I couldn't find a video of it.
An NES CD drive would be a great mod to do!
Unfortunatelly a bit expensive...
Why would it be expensive? Couldn't it be done with a spare cd or dvd drive? We have tons of those doing nothing nowadays, so they are basically trash.
1- You certainly
could dig up an old still-working PATA CDROM drive, and hook it up something similar to the XTIDE board. HOWEVER. You cannot buy new PATA CDROMs, and SATA support is horrifyingly harder. If you really want to hook up legacy devices to other legacy devices ... I dunno, VHS seems like a better choice to me.
2- You also could do something like the the
Codemasters CD, which used some encoding similar to the various methods used for storing digital data on audiocassette.
I mean that the cost of the interface, at least to me that hardly can get a PIC for less than 50 bucks, would be terribly expensive.
What about an ATA/SATA adapter? Do they work fine for this purpose?
I mean, the device is basically exactly
this. Just on a 6502 instead of an 8088.
That web page says that PATA-to-SATA bridges work with it.
That's great!
Very simple design, seems a little "universal" interface.
With different (specific) control software it would work on any other vintage system, correct?
Looks like a very nice project!
Anything that can be coaxed to look like the 8088's address/data bus, sure. That's not really much of a barrier.
Thank you guys for your kind replies. I think a disc conection to the NES could help much to the nes homebrew scenario. Also it could be an extra aid to the flashcards, at least i still have the idea that a regular CD is cheaper than a flashcard. Thank you.
I'm not sure how it could help at all. Flashcards today are very cheap, fast, much more manageable, and allow you to randomly read and write data as you want.
It would be a cool gimmick/proof-of-concept though. But at the end of the day, it's not really much different from the already existing official disk system peripheral.
Other than that blank CDs are still manufactured and blank Quick Disks aren't. And that a 128K PRG RAM and 32K CHR RAM would improve the mean time between loads compared to FDS specs.
Not wanting to be a crying baby, but unfortunatelly my reality is a bit different.
Flashcarts here costs an arm and leg.
A NES CD-ROM or any other option that could be built cheaper would be awesome to people like me.
A NES CD-ROM drive would need all of the things that the Famicom Disk System needs.
- A cartridge containing a BIOS for the NES CPU to talk to and to connect the drive to the console. The FDS BIOS initializes the drive and contains all of the routines games use to read/write disks, and a CD drive would need analogous routines to boot and to read compact discs.
- A connection to the drive through the cartridge. On the Famicom, the RAM Adapter (which plugs into the cartridge slot) has a cable leading to the drive, and we can safely assume that the planned and cancelled NES Disk System would have connected the disk drive to the NES expansion port and that the cartridge would have used the expansion port pins on the cartridge connector to communicate. A CD-ROM drive would have the exact same needs for the two systems.
- RAM in the cartridge adapter. The disk drive is slow compared to ROM, and a CD-ROM drive would be similarly slow. The BIOS routines copy data from the disk to RAM, and the console reads code and graphics from the RAM in the cartridge.
- An electrical interface to the drive. The FDS RAM Adapter has a custom chip inside of it, and one of its jobs is to speak the serial protocol that the drive understands to read and write disks. The Famicom talks to the chip, not the drive, using memory-mapped registers. For an IDE or SATA CD-ROM drive, the console would need some custom chip or FPGA to talk to the drive.
Would a NES CD-ROM drive be an interesting piece of hardware? Sure. Unfortunately, building it would be a huge undertaking, on the scale of creating the Famicom Disk System. It would take a team of software and hardware engineers more time than hobbyists have to spend.
Fisher wrote:
Flashcarts here costs an arm and leg.
Where is "here", and why does it cost more there? both krikzz and retrousb sell worldwide as far as I know, for the same prices.
You can always get away dirt cheap by putting sockets in old carts, and use EPROMs/EEPROMs
Nioreh wrote:
Fisher wrote:
Flashcarts here costs an arm and leg.
Where is "here", and why does it cost more there?
Fisher, Zepper, and tokumaru live in the Federative Republic of Brazil, which imposes often prohibitive import tariffs on electronics as part of a strategy of
import substitution industrialization.
"Here" is Brazil, where the USD->BRL exchange rate is extremely unfavorable to us, the average person's income is much lower, and import taxes are abusive. That being said, I had a great experience buying from krikzz a few years back. With Retro USB, not so much.
Krikzz's shipping fees were pretty cheap (US$5 or so), and packages very compact and inconspicuous, so I was never charged any taxes for any of the 5 or so flashcarts I bought from him. The packages also didn't take 3+ months to arrive, as is common with some international shipping methods. I believe it took from 20 to 30 days for them to get here.
The PowerPak I bough from Retro USB on the other hand was held by customs, since the full value was declared in the package, so I had to pay a significant amount of money in taxes. This was not Retro USB's fault, they were just doing things by the book, but unfortunately that makes it unfeasible for the average Brazilian to buy their products.
So, if you can save a bit of money, krikzz's store is a pretty good place to buy flash carts from, even in Brazil.
Fisher wrote:
A NES CD-ROM or any other option that could be built cheaper would be awesome to people like me.
LightStruk wrote:
An electrical interface to the drive.
[...]building it would be a huge undertaking
Fortunately, it would NOT be a huge undertaking, but unfortunately, it would still be ridiculously expensive for our Brazilian colleagues.
The contemporary pirates already did this: they hijacked the FDS to produce both the Bung Game Doctor and Super Magic Card copiers, which supported some mapper that vaguely resembled GNROM or something that vaguely resembled VRC4.
But if we really wanted to do something along these lines, the first step would be for Fisher to look into what would be the cost of making his own XT-IDE card. There's some changes for an actual NES CDROM attachment, but that would be a good first step.
lidnariq wrote:
The contemporary pirates already did this: they hijacked the FDS to produce both the Bung Game Doctor and Super Magic Card copiers, which supported some mapper that vaguely resembled GNROM or something that vaguely resembled VRC4.
This would be
mapper 6. There were several games that were hacked (modified) to use this mapper rather than their normal/stock mapper. GoodTools will label these ROMs by putting
[hFFE] ("hacked FFE") in their filename.
Fisher wrote:
Flashcarts here costs an arm and leg. A NES CD-ROM or any other option that could be built cheaper would be awesome to people like me.
What do you pay for a 8GB SD card, compared to a box of ten 800MB CDR's???
I don't think that the discs could be much cheaper.
I don't think that a disc drive with cdrom interface could be much cheaper than a tiny SD card socket with SPI bus interface.
I don't have a NES flashcart myself - but if they are pricy - then it's because they contain ROM and RAM and software and mapper emulation and a huge edge connector and a clumsy NES cart shell and because they are niche products, not because they contain flash memory. Using cdrom instead of flash won't reduce that costs at all. The whole idea about cdroms is even more unfit for mass production, it could work out only when offering the drives as an extra expensive crazy collectors limited edition hardware prototype project.
Yeah, if there were going to be an opportunity for cost reduction it would be specifically by restricting what games it were compatible with. I was vaguely trying to point that out by comparison to the contemporary pirate copier hardware, but didn't finish the thought.
nocash wrote:
Fisher wrote:
Flashcarts here costs an arm and leg. A NES CD-ROM or any other option that could be built cheaper would be awesome to people like me.
What do you pay for a 8GB SD card, compared to a box of ten 800MB CDR's???
With ten CD-R discs, you could sell a physical copy of your work to ten people, so long as it fits on one CD. With one 8 GB SD card, you can sell a physical copy of your work to only one person.
To cut down on the cost of RAM and mapper hardware on the system card, one might limit the system card's mapper compatibility to only homebrew games that are ported to the CD. This could mean 128 KiB PRG RAM, 32 KiB CHR RAM, and a roughly MMC3-class mapper. Obviously
Magic Floor would be among the first victims, seeing as it's the only game for Super Disc.
nocash wrote:
What do you pay for a 8GB SD card, compared to a box of ten 800MB CDR's???
I checked and found that a
box with 25 CDs is R$25,90 + R$21,90 shipping, a total of
R$47,80 shipped.
A
8GB mini SD card is R$29,00 + R$23,90 shipping, a total of
R$52,90 shipped.
Almost the same price.
Since all (or almost all NES games) should fit on a single CD-R, if the interface to NES is cheap and simple enough to someone with a little electronic experience (like me) to built it at home that would be a good deal!
A
chinese everdrive knockoff is about R$699 shipped. I can try to buy direct from some distributor, but the risk of simply not receiving + the taxes are pretty high.
Again, I'm not wanting to be a baby cry here, but I sincerelly hope these prices and taxes become smaller in the future.
Don't buy Everdrive knock-offs, ever. They're not just inferior quality replicas, they have compatibility issues and won't function with a lot of mappers. For a price lower than that you can get an original one directly from krikzz.
Krikzz usually offers discounts on Black Friday, which's coming soon. Maybe that'll be a good opportunity to buy an original Everdrive.
I think that the most a hobbyist without advanced knowledge of electronics could make at home is a cartridge that can handle discrete logic mappers. Anything more advanced than that will require FPGAs, CPLDs and other parts that'd introduce a great deal of complexity (and cost!) to the project.
The problem isn't the cost of storage. (An 8 GB SD card and some simple glue logic isn't all that different from the cost of a CDROM drive and some only slightly more complex glue logic)
The problem is mapper support. If you only want to support a limited set of games, this isn't too bad. Action 53 wouldn't be a bad place to start; it's really fairly similar to the the mapper 6 copier hardware definition used by contemporary pirates.
But the more flexible your hardware, the more expensive. The FPGA used in the everdrive n8 (apparently EP2C5?) is 16USD in qty 1 and there doesn't appear to be much of a volume discount. You might be able to use a cheaper FPGA, if you're up for designing the fusemaps for all the mappers you want to support.
Yeah, the mapper support is the most expensive/complex part. There's also the PCB, which probably won't be cheap for small quantities. I strongly believe that if you were to design and build your own cartridge that was as versatile the Everdrive and the PowerPak, you'd end up spending more money than those cost.
Another option is building 2 EPROM emulators (one for PRG and the other for CHR) and buying a lot of cheap NES games of varied mappers to which you can connect the emulators. Ad a few switches to each cart to control things like mirroring, WRAM, etc. and you should be able to run a lot of NES games, and even other systems if you can get donor carts for them as well.
What's the cheapest EPROM emulator one can build?
I have another idea: how hard is to mount a flash ROM on a cartridge and make it flashable without needing to remove it?
I think according with the mapper the circuit may be more or less complex, is it?
Doesn't Kazzo already support that on may popular mappers?
Edit: Oh, I forgot flash ROMs have a limit on how many times they can be rewritten.
SRAMs should be more durable.
tokumaru wrote:
Yeah, the mapper support is the most expensive/complex part. There's also the PCB, which probably won't be cheap for small quantities. I strongly believe that if you were to design and build your own cartridge that was as versatile the Everdrive and the PowerPak, you'd end up spending more money than those cost.
Another option is building 2 EPROM emulators (one for PRG and the other for CHR) and buying a lot of cheap NES games of varied mappers to which you can connect the emulators. Ad a few switches to each cart to control things like mirroring, WRAM, etc. and you should be able to run a lot of NES games, and even other systems if you can get donor carts for them as well.
What's the cheapest EPROM emulator one can build?
512kB SRAM, and something like 10~12 74HC parts. In another thread I posted the (partial) schematic of the one I (used to) use, the whole thing is controlled with just a few I/O pins of the parallel port. The control section could be replaced with a $1 USB MCU these days. Not sure if 32-pin DIP-to-IDC adapters are around anywhere, the 40 pin ones are cheap though. Would be nice if it was done with NES MaskROM pinout, normal IC sockets are difficult to rewire (better to mod the board).
Fisher wrote:
I have another idea: how hard is to mount a flash ROM on a cartridge and make it flashable without needing to remove it?
I think according with the mapper the circuit may be more or less complex, is it?
Doesn't Kazzo already support that on may popular mappers?
Problem is, with the "traditional" boards, the mapper registers and FlashROM are overlapped. So it depends if you can safely trash the mapper register(s) while writing flash.
GTROM and UNROM 512 are both programmable in system. And NOR flash, the kind you need for execute-in-place, might last tens of thousands of rewrites. But if you're rewriting the entire cart, you still need some sort of device, like a Kazzo or a modified Game Genie, to receive the program and write it.
The cost of media seems like a big red herring to me. It's pretty much irrelevant how much a CD costs.
What matters is how much a device that can play it costs, and that's not even on the table.
Nobody is going to mass produce an NES/Famicom CD player add-on.
How much are the parts is a little bit relevant if you wanna build it, and I'm sure it'd be a fun project for somebody, but honestly the labour you will spend on this is worth at least the cost of that imported Everdrive. (Probably much more. I definitely wouldn't even want to attempt it for that wage.)
If you want a cheap way to distribute an NES ROM, you're using it right now already.
(...though TBH I'd love to be proven wrong when someone comes up with a cheap DIY NES CD kit that becomes super popular.)
Better yet watch someone come up with the ATAPI 2600.
Okay tepples, you got me to LOL IRL at that one.
That in fact might catch fire and run for mass production.