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Catch the fish with the dismembered hand of god, and throw 'em into the basket!
After dorking around with the MMC1 for awhile, it was time to make the MMC3 mapper!
At first, the MMC3 IRQ timer wasn't working (and IRQs in general). DPCM was broken
too, so I fixed that since Super Mario 2 uses them extensively.
The Princess r0x j00!
do-do-do-dooo-dedo!
Unfortunately, I didn't record what it sounds like when the DPCM was all fuckered up.
It wasn't cancelling properly, so stuff was repeating way too slow :-)
Finally. SMB3 runs! This was quite an accomplishment for me and this project. I had
to work hard to get IRQs going, but there they are. Everything's working great at this
point and I sat back and played some Mario 3!
World 1.
You got a card!
The infamous "Coin Ship". To get the Coin Ship to appear, do the following:
In world 1, you must have a multiple of 11 coins.. i.e. 11, 22, 33, 44, etc.
00 does not work though for some reason. Then, you must get the same multiple
in your 10's digit of the score. i.e. if you have 55 coins, get a "5" in the 10's
digit of your score. Finally, hit the timer on an even number (since it adds 50
per time unit left). The Hammer Brother will turn into the ship. You can also be
cute, and if you have 55 coins, you can get a 0 in your 10's digit of the score and
hit the timer on an odd number so that it adds an extra 50 :-).
Since I was having fun, I wanted to go to World 4 to see the huge-ass blocks and things.
And here we are.
Damn, that shit sure is big!
Finally, I added rudimentary mapper switching via the console's BIOS ROM (internal to the
FPGA). So I started adding all kinds of multicart mappers since they were mostly pretty
easy. This is the first multicart mapper I got running. At this point, I hacked the serial
over so I could load games into the console via the USB at much higher speed. I then wrote
a Visual Basic loader and control system to load, run, examine, poke regs, etc. etc.
Quietust asked me to see if Battletoads ran, so I tested it and it had a problem with
crashing on startup for some reason. A quick PPU tweak and it was working good.
This is one of the more difficult NES games to get running.
LIGHTS! CAMERA!
ACTION 52!!!!!!111one!eleven11!
The Action 52's mapper works just like any other multicart mapper.
Holy SHIT! The game sucked me in!
And I gotta fight with THIS?
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