Hello everybody, I am on a small quest to find out replacement parts for the 4kbit and 16kbit EEPROMs that are commonly found inside n64 carts. I understand by looking around that these chips are serial EEPROMs made originally by Rohm: BU9850 is 4k and BU9851 is the 16k. It would be great if anybody knew the exact pinout and specs for these ICs as they don't have unlimited life and it would be good to know whether some more "modern" parts from other manufacturers can be used instead. Cheers, Jollyroger
Hi Calpis, the first thing I did was to compare the pinouts as reported from some documents that explain the entire cartridge bus, and the eeproms they use seems to have a different pinout than the standard i2c and ISO serial eeproms. While the 24xxxx have the same DIP-8 package they follow the ISO standard and thus they are not pin-to-pin compatible with the BU9850 and BU9851 used in the carts, I will keep looking... Cheers, Jollyroger
As far as I know, they're proprietary, and not only is the pinout changed, the internal ID is unique - the N64 SDK has a function for reading the type of EEPROM installed, and each one will return a different identifier.
Fair enough, I guess I am going to have to sacrifice an old cartridge then, does anybody have a broken Super Mario 64? ;-)
