Hello! I want to make some repro carts for myself, mostly BS games and translated Japanese imports. My friendly local game store has plenty of cheap SNES carts to choose from, but before I drop money on EEPROM programmers and the like, I want to make sure of some things. Most of my information comes from looking at the boards on www.snescentral.com and random googling. Board decoder: SHVC/EA- x num rom chips x A=LoROM, J=HiROM x SRAM size. 1=16, 2=64, 3=128 x N=No Save, B=74LS chip, M=Battery save -xx revision I noticed this scheme start to break down later in the SNES life. Can ROMS work with SRAM larger than intended, for example a game that took 16k SRAM on a board with 64k? I hear Earthbound cannot. Can boards with smaller SRAM chips be outfitted with larger chips? Is there any way to convert a LoROM board to a HiROM board, maybe by rewiring the pins of the ROM chip? Is there a list of custom ROM board requirements? For example, what board, SRAM, and ROM size do the BS Legend of Zelda ROMs require? Can games originally on multiple ROM chips be split up to multiple ROM chips? Thanks!
You can use larger RAM I would think so You could rewire but it all depends on the board- some have cart pins that don't go anywhere so you have to solder straight to the edge connector, very ugly Run the game in the emulator, see if it's HI or LO, I don't think it would have any special chips Yes
Larger SRAM usually isn't a problem, afaik. Earthbound is a special case - it works, but seeing more SRAM than expected makes the anti-piracy routines kick in. Just make sure to patch those out and you're golden.
This site has been very helpful, thank you! I really want to make the BS Zelda games. To make Ancient Stone Tablets, do you have to have a 64 MBit ROM chip?
Unfortunately, I have no idea about the BS Zelda games - if the ROM is 64Mbit in size then perhaps the best thing is to use 2 M29f032 chips, I think MrPete1985's SNES reproductions tutorial has some information on how to do that.
