nesdev.com

Yeah, you could use /RAM1CE as A15, and AND(/RAM1CE,/RAM2CE) as /BiggerRAMCE, if you could get your hands on a ≥64 KiB SRAM.

But NES-ETROM is already nicely set up for this upgrade (SL15/CL15), and I'm pretty certain it'd be easier to piggy-back an extra RAM onto NES-EWROM.

ideally yeah. but if I ever have the option to make a cart out of this, I'd rather not sacrifice a NES ETROM cart for reasons of cost and ruining something I'd otherwise collect. so it's down to modifying a lesser board, or famicom carts.

SimCity (Super NES) battery RAM is 256 kbit, same as SXROM/EWROM. (Source: SnesCartDB)

I'm guessing that's an ETEPROM board, rather than an ETROM that they socketed. So, not necessarily bigger than 2x8k. That photo came from an old eBay auction for a Laser Invasion proto, btw.

Oh, fair enough.

Thanks for the correction (and the helpful link to an SNES cartridge database).

The SNES has 128KB of onboard RAM, so the entire cartridge RAM can be dedicated to save data. On the NES it's most likely that one of the two cartridge RAMs is work RAM and the other is save data, just like all the Koei games.



Out of the MMC5 PCBs that support any WRAM, ETROM is the most common. EKROM and EWROM are only used by one US game each (Gemfire and ROT3KII respectively); ETROM is used by four (Bandit Kings of Ancient China, L'Empereur, Nobunaga's Ambition II and Uncharted Waters)

On ELROM, you could piggy-back a 32-pin 128Ki x 8 SRAM on top of (or underneath) the existing PRG-ROM, without too many random bonus wires... but it is an awful lot of fiddly rework, including a good deal of SMT work to get to the pins on the MMC5 that aren't broken out.

It's telling that this is GBC exclusive for the same reason that SimCity would have been expensive to replicate: it needs a comparative ton of work RAM.

So do we know if anyone has tried to get in touch with the person to see about dumping the game? Other than wanting to try game myself like most everybody else here, I'd REALLY hate to see it eventually lost forever if the eproms finally give out and it was never dumped.

Bump.

It's been dumped and preserved. I believe the data is currently in the backlog of Frank Cifaldi who will eventually release it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqqz_XTLajQ

Let's hope that this game stores its music data in 1 fixed bank. : P
Nintendo drivers aren't hard to rip, but it takes a while to arrange them properly.

_________________
http://mrnorbert1994.uw.hu/

FYI, Frank Cifaldi released the Simcity NES prototype earlier today.

.. It's just running on ordinary ET(EP)ROM, with just 16 K of memory??