Ouch that's not good... and you're sure it's not just "dirty contacts"?

i acutally had better results on a different system.  it had a different type of board NES-CPU-11.  those graphical errors i showed before were gone on this new system i tested.

(cross posted everywhere)

I think I have found the root problem for the sprite glitches.  It is possible there is a software fix but it may have to be a hardware one.  In that case I will be doing a recall and instructions for those that do not want to wait for shipping.  I am still doing some testing but hope to have everything figured out this week.  I have seen some background white lines but not often enough to tell if this fix makes those right too.  If half of heads are missing in SMB3, this is the problem!

Even if you are not seeing problems it is probably a good idea to do the fix.  Slight manufacturing variations in the NES systems means the board may work perfect on one system, but have major sprite problems on another system of the same kind.  My test system is one that happens to work well so I did not know the problem was so big.

For those technical people, the problem appears to be a bus conflict during sprite DMA.  The PowerPak responds too quickly which corrupts the data headed from the internal RAM to the PPU.  By adding the resistors the cart will always lose the bus conflict and display correctly.  The PRG and CHR rom/ram data are unaffected, which is why none of the supported games would crash.

Expect a review when I receive mine... I've also planned a list of working and non-working games. I did think about using all the goodroms, but I'm too lazy and some roms might require header changes, so my list will be each game title working or not..

Well wait and see.... I may get a kick in the ass for the list, but I still believe it'll be useful

Just got mine today.

All you variation collectors oughta buy the 128 and 256 Meg versions   The sticker is different on the CF card.

Al

Actually it bothers me a bit that I wasn't able to get the first version of the NWC manual

Maybe contact bunnyboy and see if you can purchase just the CF card.
Same for the different manuals.  Its better than having the old ones go to a recycler/landfill site.

Al

Very well written.  And I agree about it kickstarting the homebrew scene.
When I first started to get into coding for the NES, I had no hardware background, so getting it working on real hardware was a huge obstacle.  (EPROM burner, solder/de-soldering, chips, donor carts, multi-meter, etc..)  Now a person can skip that part.

PS:
I just dug out all my NES (NTSC) systems.    I'll go through and test them and post which ones glitch and which do not.

EDIT-
All my NTSC systems show glitches to some extent.  This makes sense given the nature of the problem.  I recorded their serial numbers and did tests on my main (and spare) NES systems

I doubt this info has any value, but here goes anyways:

- N12239867 - sprite glitches
- N13010609 - almost no glitches
- N17657698 - lots of glitches
- N18291581 - just wont work. Only says Power Pak. I speculate I need a new connector.
- N19604366 - (CAN sticker) almost no glitches
- N20321970 - major glitches
- N23779497 - (CAN sticker) sprite glitches
- N25048994 - (CAN sticker) sprite glitches
- N30800334 (modded for CopyNES, CAN sticker)  almost no glitches

Al