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Using SOROM to make SNROM not saving?

Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 11:57 am
by guitarzombie
Hey all, just a quick 2 cents in here. Im making a Sweet Home translated from an SOROM. SNROM and SOROM are identical except SOROM usings WRAM ontop of another WRAM for battery. For some reason the game isnt saving. I changed the battery and its still not saving.

Is there some sort of issue with the other WRAM? Im thinking I could just desolder it out.

Re: Using SOROM to make SNROM not saving?

Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 12:09 pm
by lidnariq
SOROM is not quite a superset of SNROM: SOROM uses CHR A15 to select between PRG RAM banks, while SNROM uses CHR A16 to disable PRG RAM.

Re: Using SOROM to make SNROM not saving?

Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 12:30 pm
by tepples
lidnariq wrote:SOROM uses CHR A15 to select between PRG RAM banks
Where false selects the non-battery-backed chip and true selects the battery-backed one. So the quickest, dirtiest way to make it always use the battery-backed chip is to cut the MMC1's CHR A15 output trace (pin 10) and connect the trace to +5 V on the far side of the cut. Another way is to hack the game's init code to write values to $A000 (and possibly $C000) with bit 3 (CHR A15) set to true.

Re: Using SOROM to make SNROM not saving?

Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 12:35 pm
by guitarzombie
Ahhh fiddlefuck. Ok learned something new! Itll just be easier to get a new donor. Thanks peeps.

Re: Using SOROM to make SNROM not saving?

Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2015 2:34 pm
by FrankWDoom
SOROM only battery powers the top 8K of ram. IIRC you can swap the /CE connection from the first chip to the second chip and disable the first chip.

Looking at the docs you might get away with it as long as the game isn't trying to disable ram and then write to ram with the expectation of being protected or writing the 8K chr ram select bits.

Re: Using SOROM to make SNROM not saving?

Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2016 1:33 am
by HVC-Man
I came across this thread with the same issue. I utilized the info here and at the NesDev Wiki to come up with a method of converting SOROM to SNROM. It's probably sloppy but it works good, SNROM games boot and they save.

SOROM -> SNROM Conversion (mapper 1):
Bend up pins 1, 2, 24, 30 and 31
Solder pin 2 to hole 24 (A16)
Solder pin 24 to GND (OE)
Solder pin 30 to hole 1 (A17)
Cut track from MMC1 pin 10 to WRAM /CE control
Solder WRAM /CE control to VCC
Solder MMC1 pin 11 to WRAM 1 pin 20 (/CE)
(WRAM 0 goes unused)

Here's a pic the help better describe what's going on.

Image

Re: Using SOROM to make SNROM not saving?

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 1:56 pm
by baddflash
Worked just fine for me, thanks saved me a lot of time.