I know this isn't technically dev related, but I figure this would be the best place to ask. I snagged a copy of MRC (crappy racing game, for nostalgic purposes only - it was the first game I ever bought new with my own money as a kid) and it has no sound. Zero. Silent. Boots just fine, however! I see that the N64 cartridge pinout has pins 24 and 49 as L and R audio. Personally I didn't figure that any audio hardware would be kept inside a cart... Anyway, 24/49 seem to be NC and go nowhere. My initial thought was a connectivity problem, hence me finding the L/R audio pads and subsequently finding they don't go anywhere. Just a crapped-out ROM perhaps? [insert every troubleshooting procedure from cleaning to multiple consoles to other games to a replacement cart etc]
I don't know of any N64 carts that contain audio circuitry. I bet it's going to turn out to be sth obvious like a loose cable, or your dog/cat/slaveboy sitting on the remote's mute button. Tried any other games?
As haphazardly noted above, yes. All other games are fine on this console. Also checked two other consoles. I've already received a replacement MRC cart but I still wonder what is going on with this "broken" one.
For starters, I would trace all of the pins on the working cart and then compare it to the non-working one.
Well, the rom breaking in such a peculiar way would be very unlikely, but not impossible. Got a way to dump it, so you can compare it to a good one?
Check pins: I can do that, maybe tomorrow. I can even pull my oscilloscope (where'd that thing go?) and compare. Might do that. I don't have many means of dumping the ROM except desoldering and, *perhaps*, that ROM would be compatible with my crappy programmer/reader. Is it possible that a single line from the ROM itself is dead? If I didn't make it super clear in the initial post, I'm really just curious as far as this cart/thread goes. Seems odd to me, booting flawlessly but missing every bit of sound.
Yeah, that's pretty much the only thing I could imagine. Like, all the audio samples are bunched together in the upper half of memory, and the highest adress line went bad. Then again, if that was the case the game would try to "play" data from the lower half instead, probably giving you random noise - not silence...
LR audio lines were only used (as far as anyone knows) by the capture cart and Wideboy. The soundbanks in the USA release span from 0x60C6A0 to 0xA05720. There are two other files that fall after 0x600000: the last half of 0x5F8B50 and 0x601CF0. Both exclusively contain images, no idea on where they're used. At any rate, it isn't impossible that all audio could be missing, supposing that their error handing won't die when trying to parse a NULL ctl filled with address halfwords. After looking at the filetable though I'm not 100% certain the existing 12MB dumps are complete. They cut off in the middle of a registered file, partway through an image; only the first 0x520 of the 0x800 of a 64x64 ci4 image is present, and the palette is cut off too. These are the registered files in the file table for USA (NMRE) that fall after the end of ROM: Code: 0xBED270 bin # image bank, incomplete 0xC63F80, loaded to 802900B0 0xD20CF0, loaded to 801A8C80 0xD9E7A0, loaded to 80226730 0xDC4A00, loaded to 80226730 0xE14E60, loaded to 8024C990 0xECEA80, loaded to 8024C990 0xFB4E30, loaded to 8034CE20 0xFEA010, loaded to 8024C990 0x1002C50, loaded to 802655D0 Theoretical end of ROM at 0x1063E60
