Slimming down the cart size, essentially the portable too

bazz · Post by **bazz** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 7:07 pm

well you've probably seen NES carts taken out of the catridge, and the result is much smaller!!

Do you think we could reduce the sizes of these portables by removing the cart from its case, and then use some convenient way of spacing the cart into the connector (I'm sure I could think of something that would gap it). Just an idea to make these puppies slimmer. More efficient, I think, but dunno.

Post by **bicostp** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 7:09 pm

You'd kinda have to do that to all your games, and they would be difficult to use in a real NES.

Wait-a-minute, you could always make an easily-opened hinged adaptor cartridge to adapt the ROM board to fit in an NES again.

Lucretius · Post by **Lucretius** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 7:12 pm

Go for it Bazz. Just make sure the case you build sticks and stays in the slot of the portable and won't fall out.

bazz · Post by **bazz** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 7:42 pm

bicostp wrote:You'd kinda have to do that to all your games, and they would be difficult to use in a real NES.

Wait-a-minute, you could always make an easily-opened hinged adaptor cartridge to adapt the ROM board to fit in an NES again.

Good idea.

lucretius wrote:Go for it Bazz. Just make sure the case you build sicks in the slot of the portable and won't fall out. :Razz:

That's what I meant by the whole gapping thing.

Lucretius · Post by **Lucretius** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 8:03 pm

Yea...I'm kinda motherly..."don't forget your lunch"..."make sure the new NES cart you're makin' fits the portable you're workin' on"...you get the idea...

bazz · Post by **bazz** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 8:14 pm

haha I gotcha, I guess it don't hurt

FDSMAN · Post by **FDSMAN** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 8:37 pm

maybe you should select your NES carts for your portable, take them apart and put the boards on many cart connectors and put those on switches? i dunno

bazz · Post by **bazz** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 8:41 pm

No to simplify that even more!!! You could solder the actual chips into your portable and ya has switches i guess? lol. If you solder the chips in yourself there is no need for all the connectors. Maybe you can write an program that switches through the games itself? Not sure on that. :/ If I went that route I'd probably just do a Mega Joy.

FDSMAN · Post by **FDSMAN** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 8:54 pm

yea, but the simplest way to do that would probly be using a pic to route those messages

Dave · Post by **Dave** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 2:09 pm

Yea, you could have like a little box with a bunch of nes cartridge chips in it then just plug it into the nes with some ribbon cable to the nes's cartfidge slot.

soundwave · Post by **soundwave** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 3:17 pm

Dave wrote:Yea, you could have like a little box with a bunch of nes cartridge chips in it then just plug it into the nes with some ribbon cable to the nes's cartfidge slot.

Yeah, I was just thinking of something like that, just have a little hole in the back of your portable with two chip sockets, just plug in the chips to what you wanna play.

EDIT -- 3 sockets, rather.

EmreNU · Post by **EmreNU** » Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:27 pm

Just plugging in the chips wouldn't work because there are many different ways that NES carts are made. There are different "memory mappers" that games use in order to be able to access more memory - for example, the first games to come out for the NES were mapper 0 and were very small (e.g. Donkey Kong Jr = 24kb, Super Mario Bros = 48kb) while later games such as SMB3 clocked in at 392kb and used Mapper 4. So, you could have a cart that is from a mapper 0 game and plug that into the cartridge slot and then you could plug in chips from mapper 0 games, and do that for other mappers. But that's a lot of work

Plus, plugging ICs into sockets is not the easiest of things to do; I've jabbed my fingers with those sharp pins and broken a few AND gates

bazz · Post by **bazz** » Thu Apr 28, 2005 4:21 am

maybe you could just cut roughly the whole top half of the cartridge right off. Then either plug the gap on top or leave, as the screws on the bottom should suffice holding it together.

G-force · Post by **G-force** » Thu Apr 28, 2005 9:20 am

bazz wrote:maybe you could just cut roughly the whole top half of the cartridge right off. Then either plug the gap on top or leave, as the screws on the bottom should suffice holding it together.

That would work. You could just glue a piece of plastic over the gap.

I thought of doing this but I couldn't stand the idea of cutting up my Ninja Gaiden cart, I love it too much

bazz · Post by **bazz** » Thu Apr 28, 2005 12:44 pm

I hear ya, but I know I don't console as much as I used to, I'm too busy so I need a portable