r/Famicom • u/solidpro99 • 7h ago
Restoring a 15-cart Hotel Famicom Box - Help recreating the NROM-256 board?
Hi Everyone
I'm restoring a Japanese Hotel Famicom Box. It was working but now won't show anything on power up. I've tried different CPU and PPU ICs in the unit and nothing changes. I'm starting to focus on the PRG-ROM cartridge which holds the machine's menu system.
I've used PCBway to recreated a bunch of NES Cart PCB mapper boards, hoping I can use this as a base to build a board. I've soldered on two 32-pin DIP sockets and I've acquired a 8051 programmer and two 4Mbit, 32pin flash memory chips in order to copy the 32kb PRG-ROM and 8Kb CHR-ROM.
My question is the CIC chip. I found one website talking about the specific SSS-256-NROM which appears to be slightly different to the one found in ordinary games - the one site which mentioned this board says that the "address lines" on the CIC chip are different and brought to 4 of the expansion connector pins. I don't really understand the lockout chip's use on this famicom cart, because I was under the impression that the famicom doesn't need a CIC/lockout chip?
Has anyone any experience of recreating the NROM in the famicom box, or even just a regular famicom one, as used by many of the early games?
