NES Drive

thingswithmovingparts · Sat Dec 01, 2007 9:02 am

i'm sure it's been asked before but "NES in a PC" brought-up like 4400 returns in this forum.

i'm looking for a way to plug NES carts into my PC and play them on an emulator. has it been done? any ideas on how it might be done?

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 2:15 pm

Not very easy to do, I've only stumbled on to a design for ISA slots (newer PCs won't have those). What you want is called a NES cart dumper.

Bibin · Post by **Bibin** » Sun Dec 02, 2007 12:39 am

What you could do is make a NES clone fit inside the same space as a CD drive would, then somehow manage to route the output from that directly to a TV capture card that renders well in realtime on your PC.

Kyo · Post by **Kyo** » Sun Dec 02, 2007 4:19 am

Doesn't the yobo output RGB? technicially you could make a NOAC-to-Monitor adaptor

Fat D · Post by **Fat D** » Sun Dec 02, 2007 6:20 am

most PC monitors do not accept TV frequencies.
TV capture cards usually has a delay that is too high for decent gaming.

thingswithmovingparts · Mon Dec 03, 2007 3:58 am

there's gotta be a way to do it. From what i've read a dumper won't actually make the game playable directly from the cart, but it would probably be a place to start. I work on slot machines and some of them have what looks a lot like a naked ROM which the game is read from (even has 72 pins i believe). If an emulator reads .nes files which are basically just ISOs from the carts (right?) there's got to be some way to get the info directly from the cart to the emulator.

i wonder if a "Ram-Drive" could be hacked to this end.

jeroen · Post by **jeroen** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 1:51 pm

You have these things called mapper before you can do the project you need to understand them. Then you'll know why you can't just make a "cart reader"

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 3:01 pm

I'm curious why do you want to play directly from cartridges? Dumping the cartridge seems to be fully legal under US law, and most other countries' fair use, so I can't see that as a reason.

Fat D wrote:most PC monitors do not accept TV frequencies.
TV capture cards usually has a delay that is too high for decent gaming.

USB ones are too slow, but PCI based ones are plenty fast enough to play games on.

thingswithmovingparts · Wed Dec 05, 2007 8:37 am

tom61>
why? because i think it can be done. because it would be cool to have a built-in NES on my PC. just for extra geek cred. why do anything like this?

jeroen>
where can i find more information about a 'mapper'?

drjayphd · Post by **drjayphd** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 7:04 pm

tom61 wrote:USB ones are too slow, but PCI based ones are plenty fast enough to play games on.

Which makes this somewhat possible, no? If you can find a PCI capture card, tap into the A/V input, and wire that up to the NES clone, then it might be possible. Although I'd suspect that it would involve WAY too much customization, if you're planning on using original controllers. And I'd suspect you'd have to, unless you could figure out a way to control said clone with the keyboard. That might be an interesting project for someone with the facilities to, say, make a PCI card, but I'd think it's beyond the reach of, well, pretty much everyone here.

jeroen · Post by **jeroen** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 11:28 am

thingswithmovingparts wrote:tom61>
why? because i think it can be done. because it would be cool to have a built-in NES on my PC. just for extra geek cred. why do anything like this?

jeroen>
where can i find more information about a 'mapper'?

you don't just have one. Theres "billions!" (well maybe not but it's at least a 100) you need pretty good hardware/software knowledge to understand them. Try nesdev.parodius.com

arfink · Post by **arfink** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:38 am

Yeah, the nesdev guys can help you out. I learned all the knowledge I have about making custom game carts over there. It's not easy, let me tell you. This sort of PC based cart player would be rightly considered a full scale graduate engineering project. If you still want to do it after that, go ahead, and good luck!

andoba · Post by **andoba** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 6:06 am

Ass the smiley guy says, there're a hundred of mappers, so if you wanna make a cart reader, you've gotta reverse engineer all them and make it compatible with them.

The mappers are used for bankswitching the ROM since the NES can only read 65536 bytes of data.

If you don't understand the above sentence, leave the project.

mothatrucka · Post by **mothatrucka** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 9:29 am

Yeeeeaaaaah. Did you read the dates before you posted? I think this is resolved.

Bibin · Post by **Bibin** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 2:51 pm

thingswithmovingparts wrote:there's gotta be a way to do it. From what i've read a dumper won't actually make the game playable directly from the cart, but it would probably be a place to start. I work on slot machines and some of them have what looks a lot like a naked ROM which the game is read from (even has 72 pins i believe). If an emulator reads .nes files which are basically just ISOs from the carts (right?) there's got to be some way to get the info directly from the cart to the emulator.

i wonder if a "Ram-Drive" could be hacked to this end.

No, guys, it's way more complicated than that. Real nes cartridges have seperate CHR and PRG chips, which stand for Character Rom and Programming Rom respectively. These two must be merged into a .NES file. It's not quite as simple as it sounds.

Also, if anyone's interested, I'm doing this with the guts of a Sega Nomad.