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Famicom/NES Dumper/Writer

Overview

This is a powerfull dumper/writer for Famicom/NES cartridges and Famicom Disc System cards. The goal of the project is to create an ideal famicom data bus simulator. It's using a very accurate M2 cycle simulation and FSMC (Flexible Static Memory Controller) to access PRG and CHR memory. FSMC is precisely synchronized with the M2 clock signal using a CPLD chip. Also, this device is very fast.

Photo

Photo

Photo

Photo

COOLBOY writing using GPIO pins

You can use it to:

  • Dump cartridges, so you can play copy of your cartridge on emulator.
  • Read/write battery backed saves, so that you can continue your saved game on emulator/console.
  • (Re)write special cartridges like COOLGIRL.
  • (Re)write ultracheap chinese COOLBOY cartridges. Soldering is required to work with old versions but it's very simple. New versions can be rewritten without soldering.
  • (Re)write UNROM-512 cartridges (Nesmaker)
  • Test your cartridges.
  • Read and write Famicom Disk System cards using FDS drive with the RAM adapter.
  • Do some reverse engineering.
  • Anything else that requires Famicom/NES bus simulation.

Schematic:

Schematic

Bill of Materials:

BoM

Firmware

You need to write firmware to two chips: the STM32F103ZET microcontroller and the EPM3064 CPLD. But actually you need only to flash bootloader to STM32 using ST-Link programmer. Using bootloader you can flash both firmwares: to the STM32F103ZET and to the EPM3064.

How to use bootloader:

  • Disconnect device from USB.
  • Short the ground and the IRQ pins using tweezers or scissors. image
  • Connect the device to the USB of your PC/Mac. The RGB LED should turn green. Try again if it's not green.
  • Remove tweezers/scissors quickly while the LED is green.
  • The LED should turn yellow. Try again if it's not yellow.
  • The device should be detected as USB drive/
  • Format it to FAT32 if it's not formatted yet. You need to do it only once.
  • Write SVF file with the firmware for the EPM3064 chip and BIN file with the firmware for the STM32F103ZET chip to this USB drive. You can write both at the same time.
  • The RGB LED should turn white.
  • Wait for some time: ~30 seconds for EPM3064 firmware, ~1 second for STM32F103ZET firmware.
  • The RGB LED should turn green on success, red on some error.
  • Reconnect device to your PC/Mac.

You can update the firmwares using the same way without any additional hardware (only tweezers or scissors :))

Driver

This device shound work without any additional drivers on all modern operating systems, as virtual serial port.

Software

https://github.com/ClusterM/famicom-dumper-client

Donate

https://www.donationalerts.com/r/clustermeerkat

https://boosty.to/cluster