Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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ZeroDivisionGuy
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Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by ZeroDivisionGuy »

I want to emulate 32 KB of PRG RAM instead of 8 on FCEUX, Mesen or something else. How can i do that? What mapper do i need?
That RAM should be mapped from $4020 through $BFFF.

(I use only 16 KB of ROM, so the space beetween $4020 through $BFFF is free.)
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Ben Boldt
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Re: Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by Ben Boldt »

It will be unusual to find a mapper that uses $4000-5FFF for RAM or ROM. Refer here for mappers that support large PRG-RAMs:
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Cat ... ge_PRG_RAM

Is there any reason you want a 32 kilobyte contiguous chunk of RAM instead of doing bankswitching? That would probably open up your options.

MMC5 has 5 8-kilobyte banks in mode 3:
6000-7FFF Always RAM
8000-9FFF Configurable to RAM or ROM
A000-BFFF Configurable to RAM or ROM
C000-DFFF Configurable to RAM or ROM
E000-FFFF Always ROM

Also: 5C00-5FFF can be configured as RAM.

This would allow a couple close options for you:
RAM from $5C00-BFFF (25 kilobytes) and ROM from $C000-FFFF (16 kilobytes)
RAM from $5C00-DFFF (33 kilobytes) and ROM from $E000-FFFF (8 kilobytes)

I am not aware of any other mapper that can map RAM to such a large area. If you are okay with bankswitching, that can vastly increase the space and probably allow you to use simpler mappers. MMC1 would be a very good candidate but you would have to use RAM only in the range $6000-7FFF and bankswitch it to get the full 32 kilobytes.
ZeroDivisionGuy
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Re: Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by ZeroDivisionGuy »

Ben Boldt wrote: Sun May 16, 2021 9:41 am It will be unusual to find a mapper that uses $4000-5FFF for RAM or ROM. Refer here for mappers that support large PRG-RAMs:
https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Cat ... ge_PRG_RAM

Is there any reason you want a 32 kilobyte contiguous chunk of RAM instead of doing bankswitching? That would probably open up your options.
Yes. It's for testing purposes.
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Dwedit
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Re: Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by Dwedit »

If you want to create something that has never existed on any cartridge (RAM available at 4020-5FFF region), you can modify an emulator yourself. You can even expand the base console RAM from 2K to 8K, and remove the memory mirroring.

But what kind of project needs this?
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Myself086
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Re: Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by Myself086 »

Dwedit wrote: Sun May 16, 2021 3:09 pm But what kind of project needs this?
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=23010
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Dwedit
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Re: Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by Dwedit »

Sounds like you need to make your own mapper, using a customized version of the emulator.

But there's a reason why mappers that use the 4xxx range are basically nonexistant.

A cartridge decoding 4020+ to be RAM would need to look at 11 address bits, and run combinational logic (AND, OR, NAND, etc) on it to see if it is in range or not, then generate the 'chip enable' bits that the RAM chip would need to see.
If you were making something like this today, you'd use a CPLD chip to check 11 bits.

It would be a lot of hardware for an NROM-like mapper, but with RAM. Hence why nobody wanted to build cartridges that would check the 4020-4FFF page (one exception, the Famicom Disk System).

Decoding 5000+ would require only 4 address bits rather than 11 address bits. And even that was too much for most mappers.
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Quietust
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Re: Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by Quietust »

For what it's worth, the Famicom Disk System puts RAM at $6000-$DFFF (and its BIOS at $E000-$FFFF), and it also provides subroutines for commonly-performed actions like disk I/O.
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Ben Boldt
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Re: Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by Ben Boldt »

ZeroDivisionGuy wrote: Sun May 16, 2021 11:26 am
Ben Boldt wrote: Sun May 16, 2021 9:41 am Is there any reason you want a 32 kilobyte contiguous chunk of RAM instead of doing bankswitching? That would probably open up your options.
Yes. It's for testing purposes.
It might be worth thinking about how to design your OS with bankswitching in mind. That will make it much more expandable, which usually becomes an important thing with OSs. The OS or the resident program could be in charge of bankswitching; that's a design choice. If you use the MMC5, a scheme like this might be reasonable:
  • $0000-0800 (2k NES internal RAM) - dedicated to the OS.
  • $6000-7FFF (8k RAM) - dedicated for resident program's read/write RAM.
  • $8000-BFFF (16k RAM) - dedicated for resident program's program data.
  • $C000-FFFF (16k ROM) - dedicated to OS program code.
Each of these regions being bankswitchable with MMC5. Also the MMC5 provides graphics and audio upgrades and a hardware 8x8->16 bit multiplier to the NES. It would be a great choice for an OS meant to run in an emulator.

How do you plan to load software? Would you be thinking about the Family Basic tape drive? I don't think FDS can work with your application because that occupies the cartridge slot and already has its own OS like Quietust pointed out. Famicom network system has some potential if you were to create a special card and load your programs over a network connection. But we don't know enough about Famicom network system to be able to do something like that yet. (Hopefully we do someday though.)
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Jarhmander
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Re: Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by Jarhmander »

Ben Boldt wrote: Sun May 16, 2021 6:30 pmIf you use the MMC5, a scheme like this might be reasonable:
  • $0000-0800 (2k NES internal RAM) - dedicated to the OS.
    ...
Well, you can't make such "clean" memory segmentation, because both the OS and the programs needs to access zero page (indirection!) and the stack.
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Ben Boldt
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Re: Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by Ben Boldt »

Good point.
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aquasnake
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Re: Emulating 32 KB PRG RAM

Post by aquasnake »

Fukutake Study Box
fds system
MMC5

These are the PRG ram mapping methods you can refer to.
FDS is the simplest implementation of $6000 - $dfff.
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