Hey Guys,

First off let me say I'm not new to desoldering, soldering, or EPROM programming, until recently my main collection of video games were Vintage Arcade machines, however my divorce, and loss of my house has made it so I can no longer collect arcade machines like I use too and I lost a ton in the divorce. ANYWAY with that being said, I have a Japanese Famicom HVC-101, and a bunch of games I would like to play on it, however I don't read or speak Japanese in any capacity, so what I'm looking to do is convert some of the games I have to english with the translation patches that are out there, starting with Final Fantasy I, II, and III. 

So first of let me say I know about http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/advanced.php which is a fantastic site, and I know depending on the cartridge, and its mappers, you either have to replace the prg rom only or both the prg rom and the chr rom. So here are my two questions:

1. How do I split the translated rom that I have patched to prg and chr
2. How do I determine where I split the rom for prg and chr bins that I will be burning to EPROMs. 
3. Extra question are the sizes on that site in KiloBytes or KiloBits?

Just want to say one additional thing, yes I know I could get an Everdrive N8, which I actually have coming but for homebrew purposes, I just really don't like emulation, I like playing games on the systems with all dedicated hardware both for the console and cartridge. It's one of my weird qwirks but it's who I am. I've always wanted to play Final Fantasy II and III on a famicom with the cartridge however with it translated to English. 

Also if this has already been answered here please point me to the correct thread, I have done several searches and I see several threads on getting donor carts putting translated patches on donor carts for the NES, I'm just looking to reuse famicom cartriges and just change the masked roms with eproms to play the translated games on them. 

Thanks
Grant

Famirom is designed for splitting roms. It knows where to split and will pad accordingly if you need to use oversize chips. See signature for details.

bootgod lists bin sizes in kilobytes. for the games you want to focus on you're looking at sizes in the 128KB-512KB range, which corresponding to EPROMs of 27C010, 27C020, 27C040. EPROMs, are labeled in terms of bits, so 1 megabit, 2 megabits and 4 megabits respectively.

Okay that is great information there, my next question though, for lets say Final Fantasy I, how I have to replace the 256Kb prg rom, because the chr is 8k and looks to be ram not rom, I don't have to replace that one correct?

Thanks
Grant
 

right, just the prg. chr-ram stays.

Okay awesome, another question because the chr is ram and not rom, do I need to still split the rom file to burn it to an EPROM?

Thanks
Grant

yes. nes roms have a header that needs to be stripped off. so you'll end up with 1 new file for the prg.

Awesome thank you so much for the information! All this is completely different from writing EPROMs for arcade machines! Though I will say its nice to only have one ~ two EPROM(s) versus 6 ~ 15 depending on the game!

I didn't see this mentioned in your questioning, but remember that Nintendo Famicom (HVC) games with ROMs 1Mbit or bigger will have a custom pinout.

If you have a 27C020, you will have to do this:

Lift pins 1, 2, 24, 30
Solder pin 2 to hole 24 (A16)
Solder pin 24 to pin 16 (GND)
Solder pin 30 to hole 1 (A17)

That will allow a 2Mbit EPROM to work in place of a 2Mbit Nintendo Mask ROM.

For FFIII, do the same thing with a 27C040 but lift pin 31 and solder it to hole 2.

If you have a 27C2001, it will probably have pins 2 and 24 swapped.

Fantastic information!!! Thank you so much!

Aren't there some Konami games that have pinouts like eproms?

yep, if they have a VRC mapper they are drop in

If they're not 128k that is.

Why would 128k be different? I have an Esper Dream 2 I was thinking of putting a translated rom set on. The CHR rom is 128k while the PRG is 256k. Would the CHR rom be wired up differently?

Madara and Esper Dream 2 use standard EPROM wiring. Akumajou Densetsu uses Nintendo wiring on its PRG.

He means 128K / 1Mbit in a 28 pin package. In that case, there is no EPROM equivalent, so you must wire it like one does for UNROM boards. Some third party Famicom games did that.

I see. Thanks for the info.

We have a ton of good information being passed along here! I have another question for this group. Can I install a Final Fantasy I hack on a Final Fantasy II PCB? I've looked up the information the NES Cart DB and here is what I'm seeing:

FINAL FANTASY 1 FAMICOM:
PCB Class HVC-SNROM
iNES Mapper 1
Mirroring Mapper Ctrl
Battery present Yes
WRAM 8 KB
VRAM 8 KB
CIC Type None
Hardware MMC1B2

FINAL FANTASY II FAMICOM:
PCB Class HVC-SNROM
iNES Mapper 1
Mirroring Mapper Ctrl
Battery present Yes
WRAM 8 KB
VRAM 8 KB
CIC Type None
Hardware MMC1A

The only difference I see is the Hardware is MM1B2 for FF1 vs MMC1A for FF2. I don't know what that hardware means, I'm hoping someone here can tell me so I can figure out if I can run a Final Fantasy 1 rom hack on a Final Fantasy II PCB.

EDIT If I get another game that has the same PCB with the hardware of MM1B2, can I do the Rom Swap on those PCBs to get a Hack of Final Fantasy Running on a Famicom Cartridge?

Thank you so much!
Grant

those are different revisions of the mmc1 mapper chip. they should be compatible for this application. the main thing is that they are both SNROM boards, which implies they are functionally the same.

As always Lincoln, you hare a plethora of useful information! Thank you so much!
 

Yes, there's no known functional difference between the MMC1 revisions.

MMC1A (and MMC1 ?) doesn't have the "disable wram" function. Mapper 155 is for games that depend on that behavior. Like I said, not an issue here, but it's important to be aware of.

 

Okay just so I'm understanding this clearly, since Final Fantasy runs off the MMC1A mapper which doesn't have the disable wram function, running on it on late versions of the Mapper it doesn't matter, but inversely that would be an issue correct?

-Grant
 

Oh yeah, forgot about the WRAM disable. I was thinking of just functions used by official MMC1 games.

Virtually all MMC1 games were written to be compatible with the MMC1A, nobody has yet to find a MMC1 game that has compatibility problems. "WRAM disable", IIRC, has to do with setting a flag in the MMC1 register to purposefully disable the WRAM chip, as in its memory range can be used for something else. It's not used by games that need WRAM as far as I know.

For future reference, WRAM is also known as PRG RAM. I prefer the latter because it is more descriptive and fits better with the rest of the NES terminology (like CHR RAM, CHR ROM, PPU RAM etc).

Heck, if you look at your Final Fantasy boards, FF1 (the earlier release) is using a later produced MMC1 chip. Final Fantasy 1 was very popular, so it had additional print runs made after it was released.

It won't matter either way here, or for nearly all mmc1 games. There are a couple famicom games that do specific checks regarding that specific behavior, but most people won't ever bother with those.

 
That's a good tip. PRG RAM, WRAM and SRAM all mean the same thing for NES games. Can be confusing if you don't know that ahead of time.
   

Well, I'd say SRAM is different from the other terms because it is a real technical term, Static Random Access Memory. As opposed to things like DRAM or SDRAM, which behave very differently. WRAM means Work RAM and is just a superficial label, same with PRG RAM.