Some pics of my Gameboy and SNES bits and bobs

[Sonny_Jim]

I got bitten by the 'rip the mask ROM off and solder on a EPROM' bug a little while ago. Nothing too fancy but I felt like sharing :-)

First up it's a couple of GB Classic carts. Here's my first GB cart I made, an old Killer Instinct cart converted 'ghetto style'. I felt no shame in doing this as KI on the GB is probably the worst port I've ever played:



I ended up just Aradite'ing the fecker, the DIP switch is to switch between different games, proper ghetto:


I decided to try and do a better job next time, so I grabbed a Warioland II cart off ebay and got the tools out:


Stuck it back in the case and popped a ZIF socket on it, job done:



Next up is a photo of my current project, SNES carts. Again I feel no shame in cutting up an old 'Super Soccer' cart as it's a dreadful, dreadful game:


The grey box on the left is my Dataman S4 programmer emulating a 27c040 chip, plugged into the ROM socket on the 'Super Soccer' cart. It's a fairly old clunky device, it's limited to 4mbit and ROM's are uploaded via RS232. Still can recommend them, they have a fairly common fault where the internal battery pack fails and causes the device to stop booting up, even when connected to external power. For this reason they pop up on ebay broken fairly cheap, swap the internal battery and you are back in business.

Fairly pleased with this one as I nailed it on the first go. It was a trial run for my SuperFX cart which I'm intending to convert into a Starfox 2. Then the next step is disabling the CIC chip and adding in a 50/60Hz switch.

Wish me luck!

[Bad_Ad84]

I loved super soccer... played the shit out of that game with my brother when growing up.

I wanted to get my hands on a S4, but they dont sell them anymore :(

I have one of their 48Pro+ programmers.

Also, dont disable your CIC chip - fit a supercic to your console. Handles cic protection and 50/60hz switching.

[Mathias]

Excellent work, thanks for sharing!

[Sonny_Jim]

I have to admit Dataman support is top notch, even if they do have a tendency to tell people to return the units for repair when it's a fairly simple fix. I bought the emulation cable for the S4 from them a year or so ago which is pretty remarkable considering it's age. Also another good thing about the S4 is that even though it's only got 4mbit internally, it's still possible to program 8mbit chips by splitting the file into two chunks. Very handy for the Starfox 2 carts :-)

dont disable your CIC chip - fit a supercic to your console. Handles cic protection and 50/60hz switching.

Yeah, I've seen that. I've got a USBtinyISP programmer that I bought for another project (at2313 larson scanner pinball mod) that I'm fairly sure will come in handy for programming the 12F629 for the SuperCIC mod. Speaking of which, here's a picture of my pinball mod:


The bit of breadboard is a simple full wave rectifier and 5V regulator so I can power the mod using the 6.3VAC General Illumination circuit on the table used for the playfield lamps, just clip the crocodile leads onto the GI bulbs and off you go.

And also another bonus pic, back when I was doing my GB carts I bit the bullet and grabbed what I thought was an original Super Mario Advance for the GBA off ebay:


Imagine my dismay when I started playing it and noticed graphic corruption. Popped the little blighter open and found that some schmuck has taken an old GBA 'Star Wars' game and soldered on a new mask ROM. Cheeky gits!

[Bad_Ad84]

Dataman are just elnec resellers.

I find their support lacking if it doesnt involve them earning money from you. I am still waiting 6 months and counting for a chip to be added to the programmer support.

Regarding the pic - I have them for sale in a kit if your programmer doesnt handle it. I have been eyeing up a S4 on ebay for the last few days, which likely has the battery issue. Might pick it up if I can get it cheap.

[Sonny_Jim]

Ah ok, things might have changed at Dataman as it's been a few years since I've used their support. There was one guy there I used to speak to on the phone (Dave?) who was always super helpful.

The battery issue is fairly easy to spot, the unit will just refuse to power on at all and once you've replaced the battery pack (I've heard of people using RC car battery packs) it should boot with a default (small) eprom library. Also you don't need to get an exact match for the battery pack as you are able to set the charging parameters hidden away in one of the advanced menus.

Once the batteries been repaired, there's a 'trick' to getting the library loaded again. The manuals say that you need to burn a 27c32/27c64 chip with the library on it, but you can just use the S4 Windriver software to do it without having to burn a chip (press F9). The software also works fine under Linux with WINE as well.

I <3 my S4 :-)

[Bad_Ad84]

As I said - dataman are elnec reseller. So adding the chip is actually Elnec - who are romanian and with all my direct dealings are stuck up. Dataman cant really do much, other than just sound helpful and say its in the "todo list".

I can burn the library chip easily enough, with the previously mentioned 48pro+ lol

I might need to know what chip is in yours for the 4mb of ram though, as I recall they didnt ship with that and it was an optional upgrade.

[Sonny_Jim]

Sheesh, they want £45 for the RAM upgrade!
http://www.dataman.com/s4-4mbit-ram-upgrade.html

If you do find that you need to know the chip, let me know and I'll pop mine open.

[Bad_Ad84]

Pfft, they want £145 +vat for a tsop48 adapter. Which you can pick up on ebay for £20.

£45 is reasonable in comparison. But you see why I said I might need to know :)

[Sonny_Jim]

Unfortunately the PSU for my S4 packed up today, really bad timing as I need it for work. I bit the bullet and ended up spending another £31 with them, £10 of it on next day delivery, their cheapest shipping option :-(

I also got bored and built a HiRom cart from a LoRom cart and spent ages trying to figure out why it wasn't working, rechecking all my cut traces and wiring. It turns out that the S4 can't emulate any faster than ~120ns. Even though my 'Big list of snes games' listed some games as HiRom+SlowRom, in reality none of them would boot with the S4.

However, I found out that if I ran the emulation cable away from areas of interference and put an EPROM in the ZIF socket, some games would work. I've been told if I made the cable shorter this would cut down on reflections and I think the EPROM in the socket terminates it better, at a guess.