Super Famicom Box - PSS cartridges questions + specs

[Impendo64]

Do you know how to program?

Mostly with high level languages and poorly in C & assembler ^^'. I'll soonly start some MIPS assembler courses online to start working on the N64 ^^'.

 

[Impendo64]

It's been a long time since I looked at this, and unfortunately I don't have my SFC box any more, so I can't check. I do remember that the main board of the unit (the one right at the bottom) contains what's basically a standard Super Famicom chipset and a couple of other chips - one is a Hitachi Z180 clone and the other is a Fujitsu OSD chip. The PROM for the Z180 is installed on a sub-board that also has some battery backed up RAM and a RTC chip. When you first turn it on, the text that appears is generated by the Z180 - you don't need anything running on the Super Famicom side of things (although it does need to be out of reset because the video is generated as an overlay and it needs the sync signals from the PPU2).

You could try asking Martin Korth - I think he was reverse engineering this stuff at one point, and he's very good at it...

Really interesting ! Thanks for the tip

 

[gorgyrip]

Mostly with high level languages and poorly in C & assembler ^^'. I'll soonly start some MIPS assembler courses online to start working on the N64 ^^'.

Please send me a private message.

 

[Trimesh]

OK, I've found some of my notes - it's not much, but it might at least give you something to go on.

The first byte in the GROM is the number of games on the board

The ROM information starts at 0x10 - it consists of <ngames> 16 bit entries pointing to the game data and <ngames> 8 bit entries specifying which chip select line the ROM for this game is on.

There is a checksum at the end of the ROM - it's 4 bytes long, with the first two being a simple sum of all the other bytes in the ROM and the second two being the the checksum ^ 0xffff (or maybe it's the other way around...)

Each game entry (normally at 0x1000, 0x2000, etc.) starts with a table of pointers - the first is a pointer to the game name and possibly some header information the second is a pointer to the tilemap data for the banner graphics. There is also a pointer to the CLUT (offset 8 maybe?).

Sorry it isn't much info - I was going to write all this stuff up, but basically lost interest once I found all the games were 1:1 identical to the regular retail releases.

 

[gorgyrip]

Sorry it isn't much info - I was going to write all this stuff up, but basically lost interest once I found all the games were 1:1 identical to the regular retail releases.

Starfox is a newer version (not that it matters). from http://www.dforce3000.de:
" Thanks to eagle-eyed Evan G of snescentral.com, I learned that I was in possession of a still undumped version of Starfox which was never used in retail cartridges, but only in a special cartridge for the Super Famicom Box hotel unit. I had hoped that Nintendo at one point fixed the issues Starfox was having with running on a Super FX in 21Mhz mode, but apparently they never did... The Super Famicom Box version still uses the same old Mario Chip Super FX in 10Mhz mode. No public release this time, as this ROM is only of archival interest, anyway. "

 

[gorgyrip]

Starfox is a newer version (not that it matters). from http://www.dforce3000.de:
" Thanks to eagle-eyed Evan G of snescentral.com, I learned that I was in possession of a still undumped version of Starfox which was never used in retail cartridges, but only in a special cartridge for the Super Famicom Box hotel unit. I had hoped that Nintendo at one point fixed the issues Starfox was having with running on a Super FX in 21Mhz mode, but apparently they never did... The Super Famicom Box version still uses the same old Mario Chip Super FX in 10Mhz mode. No public release this time, as this ROM is only of archival interest, anyway. "

And a question: why on the console it says 5v/10W and the power supply is 5v/5A?
I don't have a 220v converter so i'm using a psp cherger (5V/2A) without any problems.

 

[Trimesh]

And a question: why on the console it says 5v/10W and the power supply is 5v/5A?
I don't have a 220v converter so i'm using a psp cherger (5V/2A) without any problems.

This is purely a guess, but I suspect that PSU was one they already had for some other device and just decided to use it. Sure, there is no reason to use a 25W PSU with a device that only needs a 10W one, but it's not going to harm anything.

 

[HI_RICKY]

if don't care the TEXT and RF layer , base system use S-ENC A is easy RGB out put .
btw any chance get cart slot pin out ? looking relocation to SNES cart slot