So, one day, on my journey across the internet I stumbled across the Angry Video Game Nerd. Props to him for being awesome, he inspired me to look into the idea of an NES, so google was my friend and I found a f***ton of ROMs and emulators, trying one of them made me even more eager to aquire a good'ol NES

I can get one cheap with three games (World Cup, Kung fu and what I presume is Tetris)

Sadly it seems a bit annoying to aquire different cartridges to get the full experience, so my thoughts drifted to a flash card/cart like the R4 on the DS. You put your ROMS on an SD card and enjoy.

After looking around for a while, I found one, the Powerpak. The price (135$) seems too outrageous for something that serves so simple a function. Then I looked around for mods that accomplish the same thing but could not find a proper one and I'm trying to avoid knock-off BS.

Then I thought of making my own, and registered on the Ben Heck forums.

I'm thinking the process itself should be simple enough, from what I gather, a standard NES cartridge has 2 roms inside. One rom is used by the CPU and contains the program and the other rom is used by the PPU (Picture Processing Unit) and contains artwork.

What to do with this I don't know, which is why I came here . Support would be greatly appreciated on my first serious electronics project.

To make this understandable for internet trolls:



kudos to MS Paint

I realize theres a software side to this, which will probably come as the crushing blow to this unlikely project.

Recommendations regarding the aforementioned knock-offs are still welcome though

Thanks in advance

I'm not tech savvy, but from what I know, doing an NES flashcart is far from simple. The big problem with it is that different games require different special chips that came in their original carts. The NES alone can't perform as well on its own without the help of these things. To learn more, read this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Man ... Controller

This is the reason why you can't make a reproduction of say, Super Mario Bros 3 in a Mario Bros cart. You need carts with the same MMC chips.

The powerpak actually has all of these MMC chips (part of the reason it's expensive). Another difficulty is to write correct "mappers" that make these chips actually work. MMC5 for example, doesn't work yet even when the Powerpak physically supports it.

I figured I was going to get bad news

Anyway, do you think an NES would still be a good idea? From where I live, Estonia, the easiest thing to do is probably order the games from the UK.

You must be delusional if you think $135 is a ripoff for something like that. You have zero idea of the incredible amount of time, effort, and trial and error went into it. Instead you chose to project your own value on it based on your extremely limited and flawed knowledge of the subject.

Take the cost of importing one game from the UK like you said. Now divide $135 / that number. That's how many games you end up buying before could've spent the money on a powerpak.

I don't mean to jump on you but it irks me as someone with a bit more than average tech knowledge to see people throw out other's hard work just because they can't comprehend it.

Yes I already realized that after the first reply, and I dont blame you

If you like the NES a lot, I'd say getting a Powerpak is worth every penny. It allows for cool stuff you can't have with regular carts:

- 97% of games in the NES library (licensed and unlicensed) work
- From the ones that don't work, the cool ones are relatively easy to get, the rest are crappy
- Integrated game genie, with no wear to your console, and 5 lines of codes instead of 1
- Battery save that doesn't dissappear with age
- With a special set of mappers you have savestate function with most games
- Can play a great deal of famicom and several european exclusive games
- Translations, hacks, homebrew, unreleased games like Bio Force Ape...
- NES music files can be played
- Famicom Disk System games are playable (no multidisk unfortunately)

If you're serious about NES, you must get one. For doing your own, even assuming you'd succeed (no offense, but I see it unlikely), you'll end up expending a lot, and would have to price it similarly to make profit.

They are right, thats the best your going to get.