List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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Great Hierophant
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List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by Great Hierophant »

In the past two weeks, I have been generating a list of licensed games and the mapper information needed for them to run. Unlike other lists, mine incorporates the latest submapper assignments and takes from the most accurate sources available, mainly the NES Cart Database.

My goal in making this list is to keep headers correct and accurate. I would also like it to be something of a backup if the NES Cart Database goes down again. However I did not blindly copy everything from NES Cart DB. Some information on it is out of date or inaccurate. When I could not find a board shot on NES Cart DB, I looked to no-intro's dat-o-matic site and sometimes on ebay for the rarer stuff.

My list includes everything needed to get a game running, how much PRG-ROM it has, how much CHR-ROM or CHR-RAM (or both) it has, the mapper, the mirroring (if hardwired, otherwise it is set to M or 4, treat 1 as M), whether it has extra RAM and if it is battery backed, non-battery backed or contained in the mapper (128 and 256 indicate the size of EEPROM, not SRAM) and if it has been assigned a submapper.

There are limitations to this list. First, I did not try to cover the Asian unlicensed and gray market. Pirate multi-carts, Hong Kong specials, South Korean unlicensed and even more mainstream Sachen Taiwanese is not included. That appears to be the NES cartridge equivalent of a never-ending story. I have limited my list to the most well-known games, namely complete licensed and well-known unlicensed from the US, Europe and Japan, in other words, "the canon". Where I could not find a board shot I highlighted the entries in yellow. I have also indicated instances where further dumping is required. There is the possibility of error in the European and Japanese Mapper 1 and 4 games without board shots. I used the latest versions of Nintendulator-NRS, Mesen and Nestopia 1.48 to try to verify the RAM usage. I even used Mesen's debugger to see if a game was using RAM in a way to suggest that RAM was actually present.

I'm only one person, so it is possible I may have made a mistake here and there, but I think the list is reasonably accurate. Getting a complete list of Famicom cartridges is a trial in and of itself, especially given the variant translations of the names. I used the NES Cart DB for the names except when a game had no entry, even in the "missing" section, then I used no-intro.

Updated to add a few variant demo/sample ROMs and to reflect that Mapper 157 only has an entry in the battery backed W-RAM column if the cartridge has additional EEPROM. The Datach base unit EEPROM provided is not added to the W-RAM column, its presence is implied by the mapper.
Last edited by Great Hierophant on Thu Apr 09, 2020 10:09 pm, edited 11 times in total.
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koitsu
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Re: List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by koitsu »

For those wondering: the file format (.ods) refers to an OpenDocument spreadsheet, which Excel, Google Docs, OpenOffice, etc. can read.
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Dwedit
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Re: List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by Dwedit »

Something like this spreadsheet could be generated by reading Bootgod's XML file.
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Great Hierophant
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Re: List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by Great Hierophant »

Bootgod's XML had the information I used except where it was either incorrect or not present. My spreadsheet was intended to separate the chaff from the wheat, in other words what is needed for emulation vs. what is interesting from the perspective of board manufacturing.
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Bregalad
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Re: List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by Bregalad »

koitsu wrote:For those wondering: the file format (.ods) refers to an OpenDocument spreadsheet, which Excel, Google Docs, OpenOffice, etc. can read.
Why would we be wondering ? Are you assuming we are all Microsoft addicts who never ever heard about the common alternatives ?

Oh and by the way, great list ! It makes its searchability more compact and convenient than in NESCartDB, especially since that site is very, very often down.
Great Hierophant
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Re: List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by Great Hierophant »

Now I am using version numbers to keep track of changes. This is the third post of the spreadsheet, so I'm calling it v1.2.

The biggest change is that I have moved Japanese names into a new column and added them where they were missing. A few errors were fixed in the process. I was also able to track down board shots of all the Hacker unlicensed games. I removed the yellow highlighting for the names because there are different schools of thought on how to render some of the Japanese names into English. Now, if there is yellow in the ROM categories, that means that I was unable to find a board shot of the game.

I'd like to turn this into a wiki table so we could all reference it and contribute. Those NES 2.0 ROMs could use some TLC :)
Great Hierophant
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Re: List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by Great Hierophant »

New revision to the list, now at 1.3. This time I included a relatively new feature of NES 2.0, controller support. I tried to be as comprehensive as I could be, researching from multiple sources. I hope I haven't missed anything. I also redesignated any unlicensed Mapper 3 game that supports more than the Nintendo-canoncial 32KB of CHR-ROM as Mapper 48. I think that's it.

For Smash TV, I noted that both the NES Satellite/Four Score or the Double-Fisted categories apply to the game, but NES 2.0 only allows you to select one option. I would suggest ditching the double fisted option for this game because the game allows you to use one or two controllers to control each character and clearly indicates it in the game options menu. Crazy Climber requires Double-Fisted control, but it may not be instantly obvious on running the game.
tepples
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Re: List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by tepples »

I thought mapper 48 was an MMC3-shaped mapper from Taito.
Great Hierophant
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Re: List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by Great Hierophant »

tepples wrote:I thought mapper 48 was an MMC3-shaped mapper from Taito.
So it is, I meant mapper 148. I have fixed the assignments, so please redownload. Thank you for pointing out the issue.
Great Hierophant
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Re: List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by Great Hierophant »

Updated with a tiny change for A Ressha de Ikou which uses the SOROM-like SZROM and to indicate that I have seen board shots of that game and Famicom Flintstones (highlighting removed).
Great Hierophant
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Re: List of NES and Famicom Cartridge Hardware

Post by Great Hierophant »

New year, new updates and fixes.
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