NES and Famicom pinouts?

hypergorillahypergorilla
in The Brewery
This is my first foray into trying to put an english translation patch onto a famicom cart. Now I was under the assumption that if the pcb is the same type, they would have the same pinouts, such as an American NES UNROM would have the same as the Famicom UNROM (I'm pretty sure I read this somewhere)

Now is this wrong?

I was trying to make a cart for Takeshi's challenge and it's an UNROM board, I pulled out the mask rom and wired in the eprom and I get nothing but a grey screen.

Am I also wrong in thinking that the PRG and CHR chips are reversed on a famicom cart?  Cuz if they aren't, thats where I made my big mistake.

I know there's people out there making english translation famicom carts. Help please. What am I doing wrong?

Comments

  • GuntzGuntz
    Are you using an EPROM on that UNROM board? You have to rewire it a bit.



    UNROM (32 pin EPROM in a 28 pin socket):

    Bend up pins 1, 2, 24, 31, 32

    Solder pin 1 to pin 32 to pin 31 to pin 30 (VCC)

    solder pin 2 to hole 24 (A16)

    solder pin 24 to GND (OE)



    Yes you must keep in mind where pin 1 is on any ROM socket in a cartridge. Refer to this page, has a PCB scan:



    http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=1760
  • guitarzombieguitarzombie
    I believe they're identical.  You're making the normal, japanese txt version right?
  • LincolnLincoln

    Originally posted by: Guntz



    Are you using an EPROM on that UNROM board? You have to rewire it a bit.



    UNROM (32 pin EPROM in a 28 pin socket):

    Bend up pins 1, 2, 24, 31, 32

    Solder pin 1 to pin 32 to pin 31 to pin 30 (VCC)

    solder pin 2 to hole 24 (A16)

    solder pin 24 to GND (OE)



    Yes you must keep in mind where pin 1 is on any ROM socket in a cartridge. Refer to this page, has a PCB scan:



    http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/pr...



    I generally leave 1 and 31 up but this is correct. And it does look like the chips are on opposite sides, and also pin 1 (pin 3 on the eprom) is in the bottom left rather than the usual upper right.


  • hypergorillahypergorilla
    As far as I know I did everything right. I've made unrom carts before for american NES games and they've all worked fine, but the famicom one didn't. Thats why I was checking to see if I've done something wrong. And yeah, I leave 1 and 31 up and solder 32 to 30.

    This is my finished product. Maybe I just need to resolder something? I know the eprom was good and the cart was good before I got to it.
  • LincolnLincoln
    Appears fine there. Can you get a pic of the back?
  • hypergorillahypergorilla
    Here you go.

    I know it's not my famicom, other games work fine and I made sure the cart worked before I started messing with it. . Maybe I just killed something while I was assembling it.
  • hypergorillahypergorilla
    oooooooOOOoooooh! A possible oversight that I just noticed.  Even though the mapper is the same, I was just looking at the nes cartDB and apparently the pcb class is different. The game I'm working on is TAITO-UNROM, and it is the ONLY game that used that pcb, but all the other ones that share the same mapper are HVC-UNROM. Possible the tracks are different?  Could this be the reason it's not working? And if that's the case, since the mapper IS the same, do you think I would be able to just take the rom that I have and put it onto one of the HVC-UNROMs since those do in fact share the same pinout?



    takeshi - http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=1760

    all others - http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=1506
  • GuntzGuntz
    As far as I know, HVC anything is always ROM socket-compatible with NES equivalents as Nintendo handled all NES production. Some third party carts can be wired differently, yes. The mapper might be the same but the ROM socket could be different, sometimes depends on the size of the chip package and JEDEC standard being used or not.



    If you still have the original Takeshi's Challenge PRG chip, try putting it into a NES UNROM board that has a socket installed. If it doesn't work there either, then yes the Taito UNROM board is probably not Nintendo compliant.



    No I haven't personally tried this specific procedure, sorry. I do know that Taito-CNROM is ROM socket compatible with HVC and NES CNROM. I don't think that helps here though.
  • LincolnLincoln

    Originally posted by: hypergorilla



    oooooooOOOoooooh! A possible oversight that I just noticed.  Even though the mapper is the same, I was just looking at the nes cartDB and apparently the pcb class is different. The game I'm working on is TAITO-UNROM, and it is the ONLY game that used that pcb, but all the other ones that share the same mapper are HVC-UNROM. Possible the tracks are different?  Could this be the reason it's not working? And if that's the case, since the mapper IS the same, do you think I would be able to just take the rom that I have and put it onto one of the HVC-UNROMs since those do in fact share the same pinout?



    takeshi - http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/pr...

    all others - http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/pr...



    Looking at the bootgod entry, the PRG chip is 28 pin. I've only seen 128K chips in that package with the Nintendo pinout. So, I think it's safe to assume that's the case here. 



    I can't tell based on your first photo- did you jump pin 32 to pin 30?


  • hypergorillahypergorilla
    Yes i did jump 32 to 30.

    Anyway, I appreciate the added input. I'm going to try testing this out on an NES cart and see what happens. Hopefully that works out and I can consider this a learning experience. If it doesn't work, then I shall continue to be frustrated.

    Either way, I will post my results
  • LincolnLincoln
    If you end up writing if off I'd be interested in looking it over. I'd pay for shipping to get it here.
  • hypergorillahypergorilla
    Yeah I'm giving up on the famicom cart. I'm going to try just putting it on a NES unrom cart and see if that works. If it does, I'll use an adapter to play it on a famicom. The whole reason I didn't just put it on a NES cart to begin with is because its one of the few games that actually requires the mic on a famicom controller.
  • LincolnLincoln
    Want to send it my way? Because I don't have enough projects to work on already.
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