Current Problem PowerPak Games

Great Hierophant · Post by **Great Hierophant** » Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:54 pm

The PowerPak has the potential to run any commercially NES game/ROM, and runs about 99% of them perfectly (I am not including Famicom here). Testing the ROMs with the latest combination of the PowerPak (Boot ROM 1.11, Mapper Pak 1.30 & Resistor Fix), here are some of my results.

I have only tested NES and a few Famicom (Disk) Games

Dirty Harry - The War Against Drugs (U) [!p].nes
Paperboy (U) [!].nes

No input recognized from NES controller. The ROM Paperboy (U) [f1].nes works fine.

Karnov (U) [!].nes

Severe background graphical glitching.

Bandit Kings of Ancient China (U) [!p].nes
Castlevania III - Dracula's Curse (U) [!].nes
Gemfire (U) [!].nes
Laser Invasion (U) [!].nes
Nobunaga's Ambition 2 (U) [!p].nes
Romance of The Three Kingdoms II (U) [!].nes
Uncharted Waters (U) [!].nes

MMC5 is not fully implemented, shows a black screen.

Batman - Return of the Joker (U) [!].nes

Shows just a solid grey screen. Worked (mostly) with Boot ROM 1.00 and Mappers 1.00.

Hot Slot (Unl).nes
Severe graphical glitches past title screen.

Peek-A-Boo Poker (Unl) [!].nes
Severe graphical glitches in female full-screen portraits.

Metroid v1.01 (1986)(Nintendo).fds - Metroid v1.02 (1986)(Nintendo).fds
Any version of Metroid for the fds will either refuse to load a game, or will load to a severely glitched screen, with Samus unable to move. The graphics glitches start to show themselves when it asks the player to set side B.

Interestingly, Low-G-Man did not display any sound glitches at all during the first boss battle. Both Punch-Outs!! worked without glitches, as did the rest of the FDS games I tried. Games like Alien Syndrome and Death Race worked fine as far as I could tell. Games that Nestopia assigns Mapper 206 also worked with the exception of Karnov.

In evert case, I used NTSC versions of the games, as that is my region. All ROMs were from the GoodNES 3.14 set.

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 12:07 am

Let me make a wild guess...
Someone stuck a 4 page limit on CNROM games?

Great Hierophant · Post by **Great Hierophant** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 7:01 am

Dwedit wrote:Let me make a wild guess...
Someone stuck a 4 page limit on CNROM games?

If that is so, then I would guess that similar problems would also be encountered in Bubble Bath Babes (Unl) [!].nes, even though it is assigned Mapper 3. Four pages would be the canonical Nintendo limit.

kyuusaku · Post by **kyuusaku** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 8:08 am

Assuming the CNROM mapper used is the one in the sample mapper, yes it has a four page limit.

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 9:56 am

Official CNROM games may have a 4 page limit, but iNES Rom files using Mapper #3 still expect up to 256 pages.

Post by **tepples** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 9:59 am

Dwedit wrote:Official CNROM games may have a 4 page limit, but iNES Rom files using Mapper #3 still expect up to 256 pages.

How 256? I thought the maximum CHR length was 255 pages, and value 0 represented something like CPROM but with 8 KiB CHR RAM switching instead of 4 KiB.

As I understand it, the difference between official CNROM and clone boards is as follows:

CNROM

runs CPU D0-D1 and D4-D5 to 74HC161 inputs D0-D1 and D2-D3
uses Q0-Q1 from the 161 as the bank number
may run Q2-Q3 through diodes as a copy protection measure

Clone boards

run CPU D0-D3 through the 161
use Q0-Q3 as the bank number

Bregalad · Post by **Bregalad** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:41 am

Well I guess mapper #3 is limited to 8-bits, but the limitation in iNES header itself would imit it to 7-bits.

MottZilla · Post by **MottZilla** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:46 am

I hacked both Paperboy and Dirty Harry at some point to fix them. Basically some issue with left over value on the bus or something to that effect is expected or not and the opposite happens causing the game which expects the same situation as the original board to occur to believe no buttons are pushed. I do believe this problem was supposed to have been fixed.

MMC5 is known to be unsupported so far. Would be nice if it worked atleast partially.

Metroid on FDS worked for me at some point. Never had any problem as you describe.

crade · Post by **crade** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 12:19 pm

Crystalis seems to have some graphical issues as well.

Great Hierophant · Post by **Great Hierophant** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 6:27 pm

crade wrote:Crystalis seems to have some graphical issues as well.

Yes, I can observe a small amount of tile garbage here and there when walking on the map outside the first town.

MottZilla · Post by **MottZilla** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 6:34 pm

Are you certain that isn't normal? I haven't played the game in awhile but it seemed to run ok to me.

crade · Post by **crade** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 6:46 pm

I am certain it doesn't happen with the regular cart. The game actually isn't really playable if you try to go too far I think talking to the characters ends up illegible sometimes (and I happen to have the actual cart handy to compare)

crade · Post by **crade** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 6:58 pm

I just threw the powerpak to test again.. It's the shops where the early more serious glitches happen... you cannot tell what is for sale in the shops due to graphical glitches. Same dump works correctly in nestopia. I'm only on boot 111 and mapper pak 1.2 at the moment though

Great Hierophant · Post by **Great Hierophant** » Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:31 pm

MottZilla wrote:I hacked both Paperboy and Dirty Harry at some point to fix them. Basically some issue with left over value on the bus or something to that effect is expected or not and the opposite happens causing the game which expects the same situation as the original board to occur to believe no buttons are pushed. I do believe this problem was supposed to have been fixed.

. . .

Metroid on FDS worked for me at some point. Never had any problem as you describe.

Could you post an IPS-type patch file for each game?

As for Metroid, I get this with half of the images out there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO8m75qxLok

The other half I get a horribly garbled Brinstar starting screen and I can't move Samus around anywhere.

crade wrote: I just threw the powerpak to test again.. It's the shops where the early more serious glitches happen... you cannot tell what is for sale in the shops due to graphical glitches. Same dump works correctly in nestopia. I'm only on boot 111 and mapper pak 1.2 at the moment though

I did not test extensively, but I do not experience anything like that on the PowerPak. The small graphics glitches haven't really affected gameplay, but I can also confirm they don't exist with a real Crystalis game pak. [/code]

rbudrick · Post by **rbudrick** » Wed Nov 11, 2009 12:02 am

Perhaps a bad dump of Metroid?

-Rob