NES RGB board-10/19 release, 90.00 AU

It will help, if you'll add your order number here.

 

Sorry about that, I was order 19. I got a shipment notification 9 days ago. I'm in Indiana, just south of you.

 

Got bad news, it turns out that all of the second batch boards are defective; Tim used an SRAM chip with the wrong pinout and it's causing bizarre color issues. More details here: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=47617&start=1140

 

OMG, that is unfortunate... Although I can replace chip with proper one.

 

Damn... You'd think he would have done a test with one of the boards from the batch before sending them all out.

 

The address lines being mixed up doesnt actually make any difference. Long as the datalines are correct, it should work - which is probably why he used them. He wouldnt have made such a simple mistake as missing like 10 incorrect pins.

 

I'm also surprised he hasn't sent a mass email out, tell people not to install yet and wait for more information.

 

Id imagine a software update can fix the issue. Dont know if there is the ability to do that though without additional hardware.

On the plus side, if its just a software update - he wont need to rework all the boards. Just reflash and ship back out

 

Thanks for the heads up about the defects. I would have been beyond pissed to find out the hard way.

 

This showed up on the shmups site this morning.

 

I got my NESRGB in yesterday and spent the day installing it. It's now 8am and I'm still up playing with my NES!


A few things:


1. What an amazing picture! I loved my RGB PPU NES, but man, this is even better. No jailbars, no artifacts, just crystal clear razor sharp graphics. I'm playing on a 51" Samsung plasma (with a beautiful deep black, which is great for NES games) with an XRGB-mini Framemeister. I'm also running an Everdrive N8. This is the perfect setup for an NES gamer. I'm in heaven.


2. I feel very bad for Tim, this will be a clusterfuck of a situation to figure out logistically.


3. On the flip-side, I'm pretty shocked he hasn't at least emailed his customers yet and there's no mention of this on his site. If I didn't happen to visit the shmups forum then I wouldn't have even known there was a problem until I hooked up my board, discovered it first-hand, spent a few hours frustratingly tracing all my connections, and then finally emailing Tim for support...


4. Depending on the game, the glitch could be completely unnoticeable/non-existent, to just a minor nuisance, to a really annoying issue, all the way to unplayable (platforms not visible, etc.). To describe it simply, it turns light gray the background and any visual elements relying on the color of the background. It most often occurs with black backgrounds, but not always. Interestingly enough, it can make some elements that are supposed to be invisible--black sprites on a black background--and make them visible by overlaying the black sprite on a light gray background.


5. As for my setup, my cable was a 6" 8-pin mini din cable and a 6" 3.5mm cable from eBay, I hacked one end off of each and combined them into a SCART connector on that end. So basically, like Tim's cables except I made my own (and without the charge pump). On the NES I of course used the 8-pin mini din connector and 3.5mm jack. I didn't bother with a jack for S-video. I didn't feel like cutting a hole for the palette switcher so I just shorted the standard NES palette pin to ground. I will probably do this correctly when I open up the NES next time to fix the NESRGB. I at least want the switch so I can use composite if I need to (in case I want to use my NES away from my XRGB-mini for whatever reason).


6. I think the instructions could use a little help, there were some things that weren't difficult to figure out but could have been better explained.


7. Hopefully, this glitch situation gets figured out easily. I have some of the original SRAM chips on their way from Mouser right now, but I'd ultimately rather update the code on the board instead if that will fix it, if it will be possible to do myself. The chips are smaller and will be more difficult to solder than I originally expected.


8. Expansion audio! Yes, I got expansion audio working perfectly on the NESRGB. This is expansion audio coming directly from an Everdrive N8 (the NES version, not the Famicom version). Previously on this NES I had expansion slot pin 3 connected to pin 9 using two 22kohm resistors (you're supposed to use one 47kohm resistor, but I didn't have any laying around and figured 2x22kohm would suffice). There were instructions posted to remove the pin 3 to 9 wire, and solder pin 9 to a spot on the NESRGB board with a 22kohm resistor. I tried this. It works, but I don't know why the image posted earlier suggested to ditch the 47kohm resistor for a 22kohm one. 22kohm makes the expansion audio mixed WAY too loud. The expansion audio drowns out the in-system audio and plays loudly on my speakers even at low volume settings. I replaced the 22kohm resistor with 2x22kohm resistors and it sounded close to what it should. You can hear it in the video here.


So I suggest sticking with the 47kohm resistor and instead of connecting exp. pin 3 and pin 9, connect pin 9 to the this point here:





You can bridge those two resistors, they're connected together there already anyway.


9. And finally, pictures!


The victim:





(the orange wire in the picture above is a wire grounding a pin of the lockout chip to disable it.)


The bottom side of the victim:


(the orange wire in the picture below is for my original expansion audio mod.)





The tool used. Simple desoldering iron I bought from Radio Shack a while back:





PPU replaced with socket headers:





Composite PPU added to NESRGB board:





Had to lay down those capacitors for the NESRGB board to clear. Pulled the legs out a bit and added some additional solder to the joint to make sure the connections were still fine.





The board, now placed in its socket. Note that at this point I attempted to power the board up to make sure the PPU and the board were still all OK. I figured since no palette was selected, it would go into bypass mode and work. That wasn't the case--even in bypass mode, the NESRGB board must be powered for the NES to function. It wasn't until I wired the regulator up that I could get it to bypass.





Everything wired up! You can see that I have the expansion audio wired up as well (the white wire):





The back side of both connectors:





The finished product:





The finished product, plugged in:





Mega Man III title screen. Uh oh... something's wrong!





But... dem pixels, tho!






Super Mario Bros 3.









And here again is a video of me playing Akumajou Densetsu. The camera has a hard time with a bloom effect in the opening, but once you get into the game you can see how beautiful the picture is with the NESRGB.

 

Finished my installation yesterday, reprogrammed Altera to newest firmware (version 1.3, can be downloaded here: http://etim.net.au/nesrgb/background_fault/).
Some pics:






I used higher quality Mini-DIN cable, routed audio through there, somehow I don't like to drill a lot if holes in console .
Also I didn't installed separate voltage regulator, I am powering NES with lower voltage power supply, so I don't have much heat there.
Overall I am very happy about signal quality.
BTW: amplifier board is inside SCART connector, be sure to order SCART cable, if you want to use it.

 

^ very nice!
rewiring the audio is in my list too, there are 2 free pins on that cable

 

That's a shame that it all went pear shaped for Tim, I think I will wait for Rev 2 or the like (no choice atm as all my stuff is packed).

His FM boards and GG to TV boards went through a few revisions as well, but all sorted in the end.

Poor guy, as he can't test every game.

 

It's all been sorted out now, Tim fixed the background issue through a software update so the second batch is pretty much good now (except for those who haven't updated their boards yet). You'd pretty much have to wait now because the NESRGB is sold out and I don't think Tim has said yet when the third batch is showing up.

 

I got my replacement sram chips from Tim, so everything worked out. We are grown people here I am sure, surely a couple of weeks more waiting wasn't that much of a deal...

 

Well, shit happens. On the other hand it's very minor problem, comparing to overall board complexity. And probably if you have skills of installing device yourself, you will be able either to re-solder another memory chip or upgrade altera firmware.
I did reprogramming myself, and I was against the idea to have Tim shipping to me either memory or USB Blaster, I think he lost some money to buy programmers and additional memory chips, and also postage expenses.

 

I repaired my board by ordering replacement SRAM from Mouser.

If anyone is interested in how the kit performs with the XRGB-mini Framemeister, here's some directly-captured footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztEghs-AvEs


It's Mega Man 2, Bubble Man and Metal Man stages. NES with NESRGB, 240p RGB out -> Framemeister, 720p HDMI out -> elgato Game Capture HD, uploaded to YouTube. Make sure you watch in 720p for it to look correct.

 

I just spotted this thread. =( Can I still buy one? I'd want to put one in a Famicom2, since those are by far the best NES systems made in terms of compatibility and such. (And with this mod, the cheap hardware in the NES2 and Famicom2 that resulted in faint vertical lines on the screen is bypassed!)


Cute trick - modify the palette to be extremely distinct so that your chip can easily determine which of 13 colors the PPU is trying to draw despite the distortion from composite video encoding, then replace it with your own RGB signal (since you know the real palette for the 13 colors).

Does it support the color emphasis bits and monochrome mode, which were things that the PlayChoice 10 PPU didn't?


I noticed that this guy is Australian. Does it work with NTSC?

 

It works with NTSC and PAL. There are jumpers on the board you need to short depending on which TV standard your NES is.