Kazzo USB rom dumper / dev cart programmer

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

Moderator: Moderators

User avatar
infiniteneslives
Posts: 2104
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2011 11:49 am
Location: WhereverIparkIt, USA
Contact:

Post by infiniteneslives »

SkinnyV wrote:I just received my kit today and went straight to assemble it. Only problem I had was I soldered the cap without thinking it needed to be layed flat since the MCU is right on top:)
Sorry about that I shouldn't have assumed that was obvious to people besides myself. If you need an extra cap I'll send you one no problem just say the word.
Only thing is the led doesn't light up. I'm pretty sure I soldered it the right way though. Is it supposed to light when the switch is set to ON or to show transfer activity?
The led isn't in the current version of kazzo firmware. That's something you guys requested so I added into the hardware. So it never actually lights up if you don't touch the firmware. I've been playing around with the bootloader making my own simple firmware programs to do things like erase dev carts or overwrite single bytes and such. For things like that you can easily make use of the LED and I have for simple indication/debugging purposes. Make sure you put the LED in properly though. If you look inside the lens of the LED the fat internal lead is the ground side.

Also don't worry about any of the jumpers with the current firmware. I need to formally put everything together this weekend about what changes I made to the circuit so someone could figure out how to make use of them with firmware upgrades or their own firmware.
User avatar
Memblers
Site Admin
Posts: 4044
Joined: Mon Sep 20, 2004 6:04 am
Location: Indianapolis
Contact:

Post by Memblers »

I got mine tuesday and assembled it. I haven't had time to do much of anything at home lately, I need to catch up on stuff..

Seems to work somewhat OK, I got a lot of bad dumps but got good ones eventually. The bad dumps were almost always 100% different even when I didn't touch anything between attempts. On one bad dump, only the first 256 bytes were bad (software bug?). I'm surprised that the connector works, but it seems to. No shorts, even if I slide the board towards either side.

Pretty cool device, but it definitely doesn't compare favorably to CopyNES (except for it being a convenient little stand-alone device). It's virtually impossible to get a bad dump with CopyNES (you can play the game before/after dumping it - bad connections are a huge problem with NES, as we all know). I was also a little surprised by how slow this is - it took about 19 seconds to copy 128kB of PRG-ROM, which is about 7kB/sec. CopyNES (original version) I guess transfers around 30kB/sec, but I don't know how fast the USB CopyNES clone is.

Hopefully it could get better with some software updates.
SkinnyV
Posts: 427
Joined: Wed May 04, 2011 2:41 pm
Location: Montréal, Canada
Contact:

Post by SkinnyV »

Tanks for the offer about the cap, I don't think it is broken and if it were I have an electronic part shop 5 min away from my house that sell anything and everything. I was just too excited to assemble it that I didn't think of the space needed for the MCU:) I just started playing with it but couldn't find my old nes cart at the moment and all I had to test was a Vegavox music album cart from Alex Mauer, Super Mario Bros. and a famicom UNROM socketed cart that I use with EPROM or flash chip. I was able to dump duck tale from the Famicom dev cart without problem. Well, except for when I carelessly put my flash chip backward and it started to overheat like crazy with the smell of burned silicon and plastic but that was my own mistake and not something that could happen with regular cart:0 Surprisingly, the chip was ok, the data was all wiped out but it was fine after cooling off and being erased by my eprom programmer. As for the Vegavox and Mario cart, I might be stupid but couldn't figure out how to dump those as I couldn't find any script for such a board.
User avatar
infiniteneslives
Posts: 2104
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2011 11:49 am
Location: WhereverIparkIt, USA
Contact:

Post by infiniteneslives »

Memblers wrote: Seems to work somewhat OK, I got a lot of bad dumps but got good ones eventually. The bad dumps were almost always 100% different even when I didn't touch anything between attempts. On one bad dump, only the first 256 bytes were bad (software bug?).
What mapper are you dumping off of? I've never had an issue with different dumps without touching anything. Usually if I have a bad dump it's because of a dirty connection and a good blow and replug solves the issue.
I'm surprised that the connector works, but it seems to. No shorts, even if I slide the board towards either side.
Seeing is believing :) I know I there was a lot of doubt for most people to whether they worked as well as I claimed, but it's hard to deny when you see it yourself.
Pretty cool device, but it definitely doesn't compare favorably to CopyNES (except for it being a convenient little stand-alone device).
Yeah I had intentions to get a CopyNES for quite awhile. I like the kazzo because it's cheap and isn't proprietary like the USB CopyNES. And you don't have to hack up a NES to make it. But it does come at it's cost of speed and short comings in the mapper support.

One of the big things I like about it is by use of things like the bootloader you can quickly and easily interface a mcu with a cart. Mainly a plus for me since I've yet to get up to speed programming on the NES.
Hopefully it could get better with some software updates.
That's one of the big things I'd like to see as well.


SkinnyV wrote:As for the Vegavox and Mario cart, I might be stupid but couldn't figure out how to dump those as I couldn't find any script for such a board.
What mapper does the Vegavox use? Which version of SMB? There are several different mappers SMB was built with: NROM, MHROM, MMC1 (SFROM) which one you've got would dictate which mapper script you needed and the only one on that list with a script currently written is NROM. So we'd have to get a script together if you had anything besides the standalone SMB.
SkinnyV
Posts: 427
Joined: Wed May 04, 2011 2:41 pm
Location: Montréal, Canada
Contact:

Post by SkinnyV »

I figured it was NROM but if you are saying there is different version, I am not sure. To be honest I am too lazy to go get my gamebit to open it up since I have no interest in actually dumping it and was only using it to test the kazzo as it was the only cart I found at the moment. As for the vegavox, I'm pretty sure it's NROM too. To be honest I am surprised to hear dumping SMB could be something unsupported, I figured it would be the most trivial cart to dump. I couldn't find any NROM script in the available one though unless I missed something.
User avatar
infiniteneslives
Posts: 2104
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2011 11:49 am
Location: WhereverIparkIt, USA
Contact:

Post by infiniteneslives »

SkinnyV wrote:I figured it was NROM but if you are saying there is different version, I am not sure. To be honest I am too lazy to go get my gamebit to open it up since I have no interest in actually dumping it and was only using it to test the kazzo as it was the only cart I found at the moment. As for the vegavox, I'm pretty sure it's NROM too. To be honest I am surprised to hear dumping SMB could be something unsupported, I figured it would be the most trivial cart to dump. I couldn't find any NROM script in the available one though unless I missed something.
Yeah I was suprised about there not being a nrom.ad file included as well...

That's why I posted it ;)
infiniteneslives wrote: nrom.ad

Code: Select all

board <- {
mappernum = 0,
cpu_romsize = 0x8000, cpu_banksize = 0x4000,
ppu_romsize = 0x2000, ppu_banksize = 0x2000,
ppu_ramfind = false, vram_mirrorfind = true
};
function cpu_dump (d, pagesize, banksize)
{
cpu_read (d, 0x8000, 0x4000);
cpu_read (d, 0xc000, 0x4000);
}
function ppu_dump (d, pagesize, banksize)
{
ppu_read (d, 0, banksize);
}
User avatar
OldNESJunkie
Posts: 22
Joined: Sun May 31, 2009 11:41 am
Location: Nashville, TN USA
Contact:

Post by OldNESJunkie »

Well, I received mine today, but I feel like a tard since I cannot figure out how to use it, cannot get Win7 to install the driver from the Kazzo sourceforge page. I'm sure it's probably me, but any help would be great.

EDIT:

OK, with InfiniteNESLives help I was able to get this working on my laptop with Win7 64-bit without issue so far. My problem was the switch was flipped to bootloader mode, um heheh.
Last edited by OldNESJunkie on Sun Sep 11, 2011 6:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
infiniteneslives
Posts: 2104
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2011 11:49 am
Location: WhereverIparkIt, USA
Contact:

Post by infiniteneslives »

infiniteneslives wrote:
I got it installed on my Windows 7 64bit machine this evening. I ended up creating a driver for it with libusb inf wizard. But I'm having an issue dumping games. It stops in a different place every time but usually early on. I was able to get several dumps successfully but it's not stable. I'm not sure if it's an issue with the driver or what. It still works great on my netbook still. It's giving me a message: "device_read" "No error" but something is obviously wrong because I don't even get a partial rom image. IDK I'll have to play around with it some more.
I had to go here: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/libusb-win32/wiki to get the driver working like I said above.

But I was still having an issue where I was getting a device read error before the dump even starts or half way through. If I tried over and over I could eventually get a full dump. I don't know if it's an issue with my computer or what. I'm running windows7 on a 64 bit machine. I haven't had an issue once with my 32bit XP machine.
SkinnyV
Posts: 427
Joined: Wed May 04, 2011 2:41 pm
Location: Montréal, Canada
Contact:

Post by SkinnyV »

Thansk for the nrom script, the thread got so long I forgot you posted it before. I was able to dump Duck Tale (UNROM) and Vegavox (NROM) without issue. Now I'm trying to figure out how to flash a cart as the documentation say it should be possible to just program a flash chip that was soldered in a game cart. I can't seem to find the supported flash chip list though. I have a 256k winbond and 256k amic but as of now didn't managed to flash it using the kazzo. I'll continu to play with it though. I just wish I could write script to dump some of my pirate famicom cart. Can you do some mapper research with the kazzo like you can with copynes?
User avatar
infiniteneslives
Posts: 2104
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2011 11:49 am
Location: WhereverIparkIt, USA
Contact:

Post by infiniteneslives »

SkinnyV wrote:Thansk for the nrom script, the thread got so long I forgot you posted it before.
No worries, I have a hard time finding things I posted myself on this tread.
Now I'm trying to figure out how to flash a cart as the documentation say it should be possible to just program a flash chip that was soldered in a game cart. I can't seem to find the supported flash chip list though. I have a 256k winbond and 256k amic but as of now didn't managed to flash it using the kazzo.
This is the best resource for flash carts. If you google around or look back on this tread there are some japanese sites with NROM, CNROM, and UNROM flash carts but they aren't of much help explaining how it all works.

Translated:
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/ ... yo3yvzOtkQ

I used battery backed SRAM for my flash cart because it's simpler with the whole write command issues of flash memory. The flashdevice.nut file is where you can see all the flash memories currenty supported. That's the file you'd have to modify to add a option for your flash. Look through the ones there and you might find a different brand or something that has the same write commands and page sizes and such and just use that one if you're lucky.
I just wish I could write script to dump some of my pirate famicom cart. Can you do some mapper research with the kazzo like you can with copynes?
What game is it? Do you know anything about the mapper? Are there already dumps of that game out there?

I'm not sure what you mean by research. Does the copyNES have functions to investgate the operations of an unknown mapper? You could conceivably do something like that with the kazzo but you'd have to write all the scripts and programs yourself and share. There's nothing already set up like that to my knowledge.
SkinnyV
Posts: 427
Joined: Wed May 04, 2011 2:41 pm
Location: Montréal, Canada
Contact:

Post by SkinnyV »

By mapper research I ment a way of visualising or debugging to figure out how to dump the cart. The pirate cart in question were all made recently in 2011 and their mapper is unknown as far as I know. There's nothing too special about them except maybe for a 4 in 1 pokemon cart with what seem mostly bad gfx hack but also what appear to be a realy crappy HKO pokemon sidescroller and clone of dragon ball z super butoden (wouldn't be surprised if this one was dumped). Not much to be learn by opening them as they have the tiniest pcb I ever seen in a gamepak with only a single small glop top and nothing else but some of them still hold complex game like a 4 in 1 nekketsu game that normaly use different mapper.
User avatar
infiniteneslives
Posts: 2104
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2011 11:49 am
Location: WhereverIparkIt, USA
Contact:

Post by infiniteneslives »

SkinnyV wrote:By mapper research I ment a way of visualising or debugging to figure out how to dump the cart. The pirate cart in question were all made recently in 2011 and their mapper is unknown as far as I know. There's nothing too special about them except maybe for a 4 in 1 pokemon cart with what seem mostly bad gfx hack but also what appear to be a realy crappy HKO pokemon sidescroller and clone of dragon ball z super butoden (wouldn't be surprised if this one was dumped). Not much to be learn by opening them as they have the tiniest pcb I ever seen in a gamepak with only a single small glop top and nothing else but some of them still hold complex game like a 4 in 1 nekketsu game that normaly use different mapper.
Yeah sounds like you've got yourself a bit of a challenge there ;)
User avatar
byemu
Posts: 297
Joined: Mon Sep 05, 2011 5:56 pm
Contact:

Post by byemu »

Thanks for your pcb and sch!
And I made the pcb done.
But I don't know how to it works?
I need the detail,Can you Help me?
User avatar
FARID
Posts: 499
Joined: Wed Apr 07, 2010 1:14 am
Location: Iran
Contact:

Post by FARID »

byemu wrote:Thanks for your pcb and sch!
And I made the pcb done.
But I don't know how to it works?
I need the detail,Can you Help me?
I got curious, where are you from?
SkinnyV
Posts: 427
Joined: Wed May 04, 2011 2:41 pm
Location: Montréal, Canada
Contact:

Post by SkinnyV »

You need to download the kazzo driver and unagi/anago client from the sourceforge page:

http://sourceforge.jp/projects/unagi/wi ... o_intro_en


You can then use anago.exe to interact with the kazzo. It's a command line application so you need to feed it the correct command for what you're trying to do. Example, ''anago.exe d unrom.ad unrom.nes'' if you were to dump the rom from a UNROM cart.
Post Reply