Nintendo 64 Transfer Pak

I had It Might Be Nes before, and it was a pretty nice little emu - nothing beat playing Gunsmoke on the PSX. :smt043

This NES emu on N64 sounds interesting SweaterFish - do you have any links to it? Moreover, how would one run homebrew stuff on the N64? There aren't any GBA/NGPC-style flash carts for it, are there?

 

just take an eprom...load it with the emulator and solder it to a n64 game board.

 

Here's the link to HCS's NEON64 page:

http://hcs.freeshell.org/neon64.cgi

As for using the emulator, any backup device will work of course. I have both a Z64 and a CD64, I can't recommend the Z64 enough, it's a pretty cool item to add to your N64. There's also the V64jr, that's essentially just a flash cartridge, it doesn't take any separate media of its own and needs to be connected both to a computer and to your N64 simultaneously in order to function. There's many schematics on the internet for building your own versionb of thaqt or doing what cahaz suggests. I think a full backup device is a much better idea, though, and if you look around, you could find a pretty good deal on just about any of them. I got my CD64 for $4.00.

Actually, though, if NEON64 is all you're really interested in, it can be run just from an N64 Gameshark (one of the ones with a parallel port on top). NEON64 is the first N64 homebrew program with that ability and I'm not sure exactly how it works, there might be information there on the NEON64 page, or if not, you could ask around at www.dextrose.com, HCS posts there regularly.


...word is bondage...

 

I found NEON 64 last night and downloaded it, and in the zip they provide complete directions as to how to get it working through all the different devices, even Gameshark. Apparently it's done by making some patches to Super Mario 64 in RAM - now just to be safe, this isn't going to corrupt my Mario cartridge, is it?

Now is a Z64 the one that takes Zip Disks? I'd kindof like to get my hands on one, but they all seem to be in the range of $50-$80. Do you have any suggestions as to places to look to find a good deal on one?

Thanks!

 

YOu can't modify anything on the ROM cartridges because you literally can't. They are read-only, thats it. That program does something with the RAM of the N64 which again, might corrupt the gameplay but not the game itself. If the trick doesn't work then just turn it off then back on and try again. The Z64 you can still buy at the manufacturer's website. I don't know if they ship overseas but I think it costs around that price range you mentioned.

 

Re: The COOL thing to do...

Thanks! Have you actually looked through the code? It's quite a task for me to make any sense of it a few months later, I can't imagine what it would be like to try and comprehend... I didn't think to use the stack for my function calls, for example. It would probably be a whole lot better if I rewrote it but I've moved on to other things, and it took me 3 years to do in the first place.

I've made some slight improvements from the version I have online, mostly to prevent crashes in games that switch PRGROM a lot (Zelda and Elite come to mind), if anyone wants that I can send it to you.

 

I'm definately interested in it if you'd not mind sending it to me. I haven't had the chance to play the emu, but thanks for putting the time and effort into making one, especially on what seems to be a fairly homebrew-unfriendly system like the N64. :smt023

Just out of curiousity, are there any games you know of that I should stay away from on account of no mapper support or anything like that?

 

Castlevania 3 and any other MMC5 games aren't supported. Other than that, if it works in loopyNES there's a good chance it works in Neon64 (and in fact I have a few games working that loopy doesn't). The only games made unplayable by glitches are Gauntlet and Journey to Silius (gets incredibly slow), other than that most USA games will probably work. At one point I was compiling a compatibility list, but I never finished running the whole GoodNES set through it (and of course I didn't play all the games through to the end).

 

Re: The COOL thing to do...

Cool! It's open source? :O
I've been wanting to get into low-level N64 dev some years ago, but a dearth of documentation and code made me fled to PSX... I would love to revisit N64 once, even if it were for something simple as a Pong game or something :smt043
I'm currently at someone else's PC so I cant download the emulator archive... is the code in there or is it available somewhere else?

 

If you're interested in programming the N64 in assembly I have an "N64 starter kit" with a DOS assembler and commented source code available at http://hcs.freeshell.org/n64info.html
The source to v1.1 of Neon64 is online, when I've wrapped up this improvement I will release it as v1.2a and include source, but if you're just starting out you'd probably be better off starting with the starter kit.

And look at some of the czn crack intros at dextrose.com, that's how I learned most of it. They also contain all you need to assemble them, but are sparsely commented (often in French).

 

Sorry it took so long, I found another bug and had to fix it. Version 1.2a is now released, as well as the source and all tools needed to assemble it.

 

WWF Road to Wrestlemania and Wrestlemania 2000 or No Mercy were to be able to lock up together via the transfer pak.

And the code is still in the game and some people have hacked a semi working version of what you unlocked.

It's out there someplace I remember reading about it along time ago.