Hack A Day , Bringing The NES To The Age Of USB

Discuss hardware-related topics, such as development cartridges, CopyNES, PowerPak, EPROMs, or whatever.

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SuperScriptKidd
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Joined: Mon Nov 18, 2019 7:26 am

Hack A Day , Bringing The NES To The Age Of USB

Post by SuperScriptKidd »

lidnariq
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Re: Hack A Day , Bringing The NES To The Age Of USB

Post by lidnariq »

I was hoping the original poster would come here and make a thread, evidently not.

TL;DR - it's a USB-flashable NROM cart.
SuperScriptKidd
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Re: Hack A Day , Bringing The NES To The Age Of USB

Post by SuperScriptKidd »

Awesome, wish I could reproduce it.
calima
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Re: Hack A Day , Bringing The NES To The Age Of USB

Post by calima »

Eh, Everdrive is far more useful. I think Memblers had something similar too.
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Memblers
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Re: Hack A Day , Bringing The NES To The Age Of USB

Post by Memblers »

If I had heard about it, I would have been tempted to order one just for the cool factor of Brad Taylor being involved. That's a lot of tech on there for NROM, but it sounds like simplicity wasn't originally part of the plan.

Yeah, GTROM was originally supposed to be for a low-end USB dev cart, that one could buy for $30-$35 or something. The main snag I hit with making it generally available in that form was Prolific shutting down Windows driver support (for work-alikes and even their own legit parts). It's usable, but you have to install an older driver (that Prolific doesn't want redistributed, but it's all over the internet regardless) and manually select it, it all kinda screws up the user experience. It's supported just fine in MacOS, Linux, and Android though (yeah I uploaded an NES program from my phone one time, that actually worked). So faced with making a custom board to replace the off-the-shelf one, I went with an MCU and that USB adapter redesign has been in development hell ever since. Something I really need to pick up again.

I really prefer putting the USB interface on the controller port, I think it's cool to have it work with any cart. The cheap USB adapters I've built work good with thefox's PowerPak serial loader, for example. Though it gets a little unwieldly to build if you want to pass a controller signal though, so you don't lose 2 player support.
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