Cart emulator progress thread

[JJ7745]

compared to everyone who is actually posting in this thread im prolly the most clueless
I like the work of this it will make many n64p's very nice :p
only thing i have to say about the pics is i like the colors

[Link83]

*EDIT* Searched Marshall's thread posts and he did not mention anything about the schematic builder (EG: EAGLE) he used...

I think it was mentioned in the 'old' cart emulator thread, so you wont find it now. According to the first post in this thread:-
"All the old stuff is put away for the time being. Not gone, just in safe-keeping"

[Haunted360]

*EDIT* Searched Marshall's thread posts and he did not mention anything about the schematic builder (EG: EAGLE) he used...

I think it was mentioned in the 'old' cart emulator thread, so you wont find it now. According to the first post in this thread:-
"All the old stuff is put away for the time being. Not gone, just in safe-keeping"

Ah thank you. I must have missed that

[bassmasta]

He moved to Altium because Eagle couldn't handle the design.

[Haunted360]

He moved to Altium because Eagle couldn't handle the design.

Thank you. I will be learning that now

[Haunted360]

One last question that I asked, but didn't get an answer...

What FPGA development board did Marshall use? Altera DE1 or 2 or......??

[marshallh]

Final (yes, final) proto working within 2 hours!

[Haunted360]

Just to good Marshall...

[jjhammerstein]

It looks like there are solder points for each pin on the cart connector, is that true? It would make trimming these down for portable use just that much easier.

[Haunted360]

Why would you trim it down? It is better to have a jumper cable off of those pins as the traces are going to be VERY small and you will risk damaging the board that Marshall has put his hard work into


Just hard wire a SD card slot into the portable so that the SD card 'clicks' in and out for the upload of ROM's.

This will eliminate the N64's edge / cartridge connector and thus making one hell of a small portable.

The only way to make the N64 as small as you are thinking, is by Kibble finishing off his N64 mainboard revision.

[Haunted360]

I sure hope it does for Marshall.

It MUST get onto Hack a Day and Hack n Mod. It also must be announced on Kotaku.

How do we get it onto there for him?!?!?!?!

[FLAPJACKDAN]

It says that the ever drive requires a CIC chip from a cart. Can someone tell me what a CIC chip is?

[bassmasta]

It says that the ever drive requires a CIC chip from a cart. Can someone tell me what a CIC chip is?

N64 lockout/security chips contained in each cart.

Spoiler:

Boot chips. The N64's lockout scheme employs quite a few different boot chips (called CICs) that reside in the game cartridge, and unless the CIC provides the correct response to the N64, it will refuse to boot the game that is inserted. So, without a proper CIC at all, the N64 will refuse to boot. This is also a problem, say, if you are attempting to boot your backup device with a cartridge that has a NUS-CIC-6102 bootchip, and the program that you are attempting to boot uses a different chip, such as a NUS-CIC-6105. Since the boot code in the 6105 program image does not work with the 6102, the N64 will not allow the program to run.

At the beginning, each game with a different bootchip would be cracked in order to work with a different boot chip (according to fab, Star Fox 64 was the first US game to use a different boot chip than the standard 6102), but as the games with alternate bootchips grew in number, this process soon became tedious, and sometimes the cracks would not work 100%, causing crashes or save problems.

The solution that N64 scene members and backup unit BIOS developers came up with is called the boot emulator. This is a program that is loaded into N64 RAM and executed before the emulated cartridge ROM is accessed. It needs a 6102 cartridge to run (since it has its own boot code), and the result of the boot emulator will be that the N64 is soft-rebooted, and the cartridge data is available to the N64 regardless of the bootchip it was designed for.

[seanmacdonn]

I'm excited for it, but what happened to the blue boards?

[jjhammerstein]

Why would you trim it down?

To make it smaller, obviously.
Do you not get portablizing?