Our objective should be to make NES largely unnecessary for gaming use. A good flash cart solution goes a long way toward making AV Famicom the overall superior console.
^ Amen to that. I plan to get a A/V Famicom, Playchoice10 PPU, and either the NES Powerpack with adapter or the upcoming Famicom flashcarts from either RAM Factory or the Everdrive line. I'm leaning towards either the Powerpack or the RAM Factory models since they have Famicom Disk System built in.
That and a consistent supplier of ready made pin converters who support Castlevania 3. Most cheap out on it.
Not necessarily. People will try to bend the pins out more to make better contact which may help when the pins are already dirty. Again "cutting the lockout chip" doesn't magically make it work better. When you cut the lockout chip it means that 4 of the 72 pins can now be as dirty as you want. However the other 68 pins are not excluded when the lockout is disabled. 10 pins in the middle are unneeded as they goto the expansion slot. But that's still 55+ pins that if dirty will still cause you problems. Cutting the lockout chip just means that when you put in a really dirty cart, instead of getting a constant reset/blinking light, you'll have program crashes and/or glitched graphics. This certainly isn't a real improvement. And when talking about a flash cart, if you are just going to stick that in your system and forget about it, the original NES is fine. I've had my NES PowerPAK in my console for years and it still works great. People really have made up quite a story about the original model being so bad. It actually works quite well, you might need to do some cleaning but that's true of ALL cartridge systems. People just blame the NES because of the way the CIC would cause the blinking and because it is among the oldest consoles. But the SNES and Genesis suffer from these dirty connection issues too. Oh and if you want to support "Castlevania 3" with an adapter to play NES games on Famicom systems you can easily open up the adapter and use wires to correct their messed up connections.
So true, I just followed http://consolemods.freeforums.org/nes-to-fc-adapter-compatibility-fix-powerpak-audio-wiring-t27.html and got Castlevania 3 working. In my case I noticed that I have to make sure I insert the cartridge to the right (I can see the leftmost pad touching 2 contacts if I don't do it). When I mess up the global result is messed up graphics, but when i do it right it all works as expected ;-)
http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?StartRow=1&catid=7&threadid=92557 Looks like new Powerpak is coming out too. Along with HDMI NES mod.
A 240p option could be nice. Then external scalers won't have to re-scale an image already line doubled to 480p. Hey as long as it gets across the message to more people the pitfalls of composhit.
So after a few years of PowerPak being the only game in town, we now have NES/Famicom flashcarts coming out of the woodwork Everdrive, InviteNES, PowerPak 2, and there's a guy on famicomworld, 80sFREAK, working on his own one too!
Funny how suddenly we have 4 NES carts in the works after the original PowerPAK has been the lone wolf for a while now... Someone is gonna have to do a shootout when they all become available. My money is on the PowerPAK 2. After all, there is already a basis to start with instead of just schematics and drawings...
i already have an AV Famicom which i think is the best model. But playchoice-10 ppu is hard to get. that hdmi nes thing just blew me away. i really can't understand why people say it is useless. it is not like we have an easy way for component or RGB on NES, so hdmi would be a great improvement over composite. of course if that new ppu doesn't have compatibility problem. about the flash cards, i think i will just buy everdrive nes next month. first, it is a famicom cart so no need for shitty converters for me, second i know krikkz will continue to improve it. nearly every other flash cart out there leaves the improvements to community, no real support from the manufacturer after it hit the shelves.
The most obvious compatibility related issue, is SDTVs support neither HDMI or 480p. Those people will have to wait for a different solution.
agreed, though i prefer my hdtv for all my consoles both retro and current gen. Main reason is it is much larger than my CRT tv and my home theatre is connected to it. also it is in the living room, easier accessibility. there are a few more people working on custom made playchoice 10 ppu solutions. this might be a better solution for people who prefer CRT. also a quality RGB cable is getting really hard to find, where cable quality rarely means anything in hdmi.
To me, it seems silly to completely bypass analog RGB out in favor of HDMI. (Maybe this mod also does that? I didn't get a chance to read the entire thread about it) I would very much prefer to play NES on my CRT rather than my HDTV. If it were purely HDMI, I think I'd honestly rather stick with composite on my CRT.
it's plain stupid, yes when you scale and add scanline and .. 16/9 and stuff you'd be better playing with a hooked pc visual isn't original neither you have a perfect controls (i imagine scaling can't avoid lag on them) there's another project going on which simply take the same concept but gives you vga and hopefully scart-rgb rgb means crt and that's the way you want to play a 240p console the first one who say "i don't have space/i want to play on my 3k$ lcd" etc is gay è___é
What's wrong with modifying an old console that used to output to a region specific pallete and turning it into a usable digital signal? I would think that would be desirable, what am I missing?
i am completely against it if it is an Analog to Digital converter (like a built-in wiihdmi etc). though what i understood is, it is a replacement ppu giving native digital signal. no filtering, no 16:9,no scaling (except line doubling for 480p, i know 240p is better but it might cause compatibility problems) i have no problem with that. picturewise it will be better than RGB. you can still use the composite on CRT, find a playchoice 10 and use RGB on CRT or a box which takes hdmi in and outs composite, RGB etc and plug it to your CRT. going the digital way is great. you can record, take screenshots etc. without losing any quality. you can increase the cable length again without losing quality. The compatibility issues i mentioned above was game compatibility or palette compatibility. can this digital ppu emulate an analog ppu perfectly? for all games? we know playchoice 10 ppu has some palette issues
I think the idea of an HDMI mod on the NES would be cool. I would prefer an RGB mod but nowadays we live an at an age where SD-TVs are not being made anymore, so why waste money on improving to an obsolete technology when you can create support for many decades to come? I wish there was a switch to make it run on native resolution and on a 15DIN conector but we'll see how it goes. I am very happy that the NES is getting this much love.
