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I've had A Super Mario RPG cart sitting in my closet for years that has pretty severe trace damage, so I decided to try and save it by buying a PGA Tour 96' cart for a couple of bucks as a donor to put the SMRPG chips onto. PGA tour worked and booted fine before I tore it apart, so it's a working cart. No idea if SMRPG was ever working at all-because of the trace damage I couldn't test it.

I ended up putting SMRPG's sram and rom chips onto the PGA Tour board and the game gets as far as showing the nintendo and squaresoft logos, then it transitions to a scene of a sky and some clouds. After that it seems that the game freezes up in the clouds while the rest of the intro song plays to completion. It always freezes at this part.

I've read people having similar problems trying to make Super Mario Armageddon repros, but I can't find a solid answer on what to do!

I am a super beginner at this type of stuff and have almost no idea of what I am doing. I thought this might be a fun project to take on! Any suggestions on what I should do?

It's because the PGA tour is 1L3B board (64k sram) and Mario RPG is a 1L5B (256k sram).


Edit: should have made it more clear-- the 1L3B is wired for a 64k sram ~ so moving the 256k sram from the RPG board to the other won't work.

I got it to work! Boots up and plays perfectly!

Lift pins 1 and 26 on the 256k sram chip
Solder pin 1 from the sram to SA1 chip pin 87
Solder pin 26 from the sram to SA1 chip pin 103

This Super Mario RPG lives on to play another day! The saves hold fine too!

The ram chips from the pga tour and SMRPG only have two different pins according to the datasheets, so I just wired the 2 pins from the 256k sram chip to where they go according to the super mario RPG PCB. I found out where those 2 pins from the ram were directed to on the SMRPG cart with a multimeter.

Kinda followed in this guys footsteps: http://www.dbwbp.com/index.php/10-elect ... -snes-cart

So happy I got it to work! hopefully this is useful to someone in the future!