Listen to the NSF Cart!
Yuu Maze Title Tune
Duck Tales Level Music
Journey to Silius Title Tune
Megaman 2 Bubbleman Stage
A Boy and His Blob Main theme



The NSF Cart. Now you can play NSFs on CopyNES without having to use a Winamp plugin or other NSF player on your computer! It will play back the NSFs on a real NES, so you can hear what they are supposed to sound like ;-). This particular cartridge has 128K of RAM to hold the NSF proper, and 8K of RAM for the 6000-7FFF WRAM area. This cart uses the standard NSF bankswitching at 5FF8-5FFF. The construction of my NSF cart is a disgrace, but I will show pictures of how I did it. I would've built it on some perfboard with a card edge, but Nintendo decided to use a funky spacing for the carts which negated that option. So, I was forced to improvise :-). I built it on a dead Zelda 2 board, after removing the MMC1 and ROM. The CHR ROM was left in, since there was no need to remove it. All the decoding and other chips are simply soldered on in any convenient fashion. The first RAM chip I tried for the bankswitch decoding was too slow, so I tacked on a cache RAM from an old 486 motherboard. I didn't dare remove the other RAM since the square of perf also had the data tristate buffer. I may post a schematic of this at some point in time. The circuit at least is sound even if construction of same sucked :-)

NSF Cart's Label


I used an old cart case for it and scrawled on it with a magic marker. If I had a real printer, some skillz, and a good editing proggy, I would've made up a cool faux label for it. But the case sorta goes with the guts of the cart at this point.

NSF Cart's Board, Top View


The perfboard at the top contains the tristate buffer and the RAM chip (which was too slow and wasn't removed). The chip jutting out from the side of the perf is the new faster RAM, with a cap tack soldered to the enable to prevent glitches from resetting the RAM contents. The upside down chip with the bypass cap on it is another duct-taped-on solution to an enabling problem.

NSF Cart's Board, Bottom View


Here's the unholy mess. The 5ffx decoder is made up of all the chips soldered to the bottom of the board. It is used to control the tacked-on RAM which holds the 8 bank addresses for the bankswitching, as well as address decoding for the 8K RAM that goes in 6000-7FFF.

NSF Cart's Board, Installed


This proves that it really does indeed fit into the cart casing. :-)


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