How do you flash a chip?

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Dr. KillGood
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How do you flash a chip?

Post by Dr. KillGood »

I was looking at NES stuff and thought it might be fun to, at some point, make my own NES World championship cartridge.

How do you flash the chips to do this??
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phantom92opera
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Post by phantom92opera »

since eeprom is becoming more difficult to come by (depending on system, nintendo is 8 bit i think, so its not extremely difficult to find) you could use eprom which is a one time use and not rewriteable. the key would be to make a pcb that has all of the d/o or 'q's as theyre called on some data sheets lined up with a parallel port and then let a program take it from there.

the specifics can be found here
http://www.ezoflash.com/
bicostp
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Post by bicostp »

phantom92opera wrote:you could use eprom which is a one time use and not rewriteable
You're thinking of PROM chips.

EEPROM - Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory. Erases when you erase it with your programmer. Flash memory is a specific type of EEPROM.

EPROM - Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory. Erases when you let UV light through the little window on top. (Leaving them in the sun isn't enough, you need an EPROM eraser of some sort that puts out the right wavelength.)
phantom92opera
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Post by phantom92opera »

nah i know eprom is erasable its just too much trouble with UV so if buying eprom go with otu (one time use)
nitro2k01
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Post by nitro2k01 »

bicostp wrote:EEPROM - Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory. Erases when you erase it with your programmer. Flash memory is a specific type of EEPROM.
Usually when you say EEPROM you mean something that requires a high voltage to programmed (~12 V) whereas flash ROM can be programmed at Vcc (5 V or 3.3 V for newer flash)
(And yes, EEPROM is a superset of Flash, and not all EEPROM requires a high voltage to be programmed)

The fun thing about flash is that you can program it from the host. You could e.g. have the NES software write back to the cartridge.
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Last edited by nitro2k01 tomorrow, 1:48 pm; edited 1 time in total
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