rgb nes fun

[Drakon]

honestly here's the playchoice



it's just an oversized rgb nes that only accepts playchoice games which are rare and expensive and exactly the same as the home versions and it has a limited library and *rant rant rant*

basically the playchoice system is not deserving of the wonderful rgb ppu it comes with. Then you have the nes



which has a cheap and pretty sweet library of games but unfortunately nintendo never released a model that outputs a picture better than composite.

So what's the solution? Luckily the arcade ppu chip (graphics processing thingy) works in a modded home system...



note: this cart connector was barely working before I chopped it into little pieces and soldered the good half onto the nes pcb





so doing this mod lets you go from this....



to this:



and the world was finally at peace..

[Metallica Man X]

That's freaken awesome!

Although, the picture from the RGB appears sharper, the colors look a little washed out to me.

[Drakon]

That's freaken awesome!

Although, the picture from the RGB appears sharper, the colors look a little washed out to me.

hey thanks a lot! Colours aren't really washed out I just had the colour saturation turned down on my capture card. Thank god I no longer have to worry about crappy cart slots and crud quality picture. Too bad these playchoice ppu chips are rare I think every nes/famicom should have this mod done

[Metallica Man X]

What all is in the circuit? Perhaps a little back engineering is in order

[3GenGames]

it's just an oversized rgb nes that only accepts playchoice games which are rare and expensive and exactly the same as the home versions

[If only you understood the difference between 6502 and Z80 and Zero Pages, you'd be crying that it's different then the home version! And it's a lot different then a REAL NES. a lot better at that! Hence why you don't put your NES games on it, you put the RGB in your NES.
(And rarer then Playchoice games is playchoice 10's)]



[I am disappoint. ]

Just saying, PC10 is A LOT different then the NES and has WAY more power, and RGB.


And when adding the RGBPPU, The pins are the same, no need for that much h4x0r1ng. Just bend up the 3 pins and run the RGB through the amplifier and to the output.

[Drakon]

okay how does the playchoice have more "power" ? I havn't played playchoice games but I thought the idea was that they're supposed to be the same as the nes versions. Isn't a playchoice meant to be a demo machine for nes games?

And yeah you can just bend up the rgb wires however you often wind up with a picture like this



I found a way to get rid of these lines by messing with how my grounds are wired and I'll build a chart for it once I'm done working on this commission job

aside from the ground wiring it is pretty straightforward just requires you installing a socket for the ppu chip and taking 4 grounded pins and disconnecting them and wiring them as rgb and video ground.

[3GenGames]

Playchoice has pretty much the same game hardware, but menus and such are in it, with the Z80 also being able to run a game side-by-side as it also has control of the CPU bus from info on the web, some games might have used this, I am not sure, it kinda is unlikely, but some stuff could be done on PC-10 can not be done on a NES. And also the VRAM is fixed into RAM by the looks of it, too. Leaving only enough pattern table RAM for two screens. NES carts later had way more then that by the end of it's "life"


Maybe next time if you do this kill a Tennis nintendo arcade board. and neaten up the soldering? Only hack up the pins you need, as desoldering holes on the CPU multiple times can be very bad for it's life.... :'(


Have fun with it though, sexy looking. Now stack two PPU's together and output RF at the same time XD

[Drakon]

Maybe next time if you do this kill a Tennis nintendo arcade board. and neaten up the soldering? Only hack up the pins you need, as desoldering holes on the CPU multiple times can be very bad for it's life.... :'(

Have fun with it though, sexy looking. Now stack two PPU's together and output RF at the same time XD

I heard from people who played with the rc2c03b ppus that I presume come from vs tennis or vs duck hunt that this ppu has garbled graphics on the one side of the screen. Neaten up the soldering? All I did was solder wires from the ppu connection points to a 40 pin ic socket. And I did wires because I wanted the ability to disconnect pins and connect them elsewhere for testing purposes. I didn't desolder the ppu I just cut the pins from the regular ppu since those composite ppus are so common and cheap. I also found a post where some guy tried your stacking idea.....it didn't work apparently.

[3GenGames]

Stacking won't work, you'd have to actually make them so that they don't have any bus conflicts, which actually requires some knowledge. And you should only have to re-solder a 40 pin IC socket to the NES board, drill out the three holes for RGB and cut the trace for the SYNC pin hooked up to RF so I've been told, and BAM. You do no damage to the RGB-PPU, you don't have a horrible hack job soldering and 40 wires to the PPU (Which if you want, at LEAST do a IDE cable) and it looks professional and not like a real hack. You only need to change three pins on this, run them through the amp, and your in business. The RGB pins on a RF PPU are grounded, which is why you drill the pins out.


Maybe try to neaten it up with that info and compare the pins next time to make sure you know that only 3 need changed, not a complete re-wiring. This is just some advice from the NESDev community through me and yes I might be sounding a little doucheish, but seriously, you should really neaten it up. When three pins need changed, you don't rewire 40. Okay? XD

[Drakon]

Stacking won't work, you'd have to actually make them so that they don't have any bus conflicts, which actually requires some knowledge. And you should only have to re-solder a 40 pin IC socket to the NES board, drill out the three holes for RGB and cut the trace for the SYNC pin hooked up to RF so I've been told, and BAM. You do no damage to the RGB-PPU, you don't have a horrible hack job soldering and 40 wires to the PPU (Which if you want, at LEAST do a IDE cable) and it looks professional and not like a real hack. You only need to change three pins on this, run them through the amp, and your in business. The RGB pins on a RF PPU are grounded, which is why you drill the pins out.


Maybe try to neaten it up with that info and compare the pins next time to make sure you know that only 3 need changed, not a complete re-wiring. This is just some advice from the NESDev community through me and yes I might be sounding a little doucheish, but seriously, you should really neaten it up. When three pins need changed, you don't rewire 40. Okay? XD

When I first wired it up I did just that I stuck the socket straight onto the nes pcb and then I got jailbars so I added wires between so I could test what happens when I connect grounds or power or whatever differently. If I did that with an ide cable I couldn't test wires individually. I never soldered anything to the ppu if you look at the pictures the ppu is sitting in a socket. I wasn't going for a "clean" look I was going for something that works well and is easy to test stuff with

[Drakon]

Stacking won't work, you'd have to actually make them so that they don't have any bus conflicts, which actually requires some knowledge. And you should only have to re-solder a 40 pin IC socket to the NES board, drill out the three holes for RGB and cut the trace for the SYNC pin hooked up to RF so I've been told, and BAM. You do no damage to the RGB-PPU, you don't have a horrible hack job soldering and 40 wires to the PPU (Which if you want, at LEAST do a IDE cable) and it looks professional and not like a real hack. You only need to change three pins on this, run them through the amp, and your in business. The RGB pins on a RF PPU are grounded, which is why you drill the pins out.


Maybe try to neaten it up with that info and compare the pins next time to make sure you know that only 3 need changed, not a complete re-wiring. This is just some advice from the NESDev community through me and yes I might be sounding a little doucheish, but seriously, you should really neaten it up. When three pins need changed, you don't rewire 40. Okay? XD

When I first wired it up I did just that I stuck the socket straight onto the nes pcb and then I got jailbars so I added wires between so I could test what happens when I connect grounds or power or whatever differently. If I did that with an ide cable I couldn't test wires individually because they'd all be stuck together. I never soldered anything to the ppu if you look at the pictures the ppu is sitting in a socket. No "damage" has been done. I wasn't going for a "clean" look I was going for something that works well and is easy to test stuff with. Since you can't seem to figure this out on your own the wires from the nes pcb are connected to a 40 pin ic socket sitting on a piece of breadboard. Then the ppu is sitting nicely in the socket.

[3GenGames]

From the looks of it, it's not. And the jailbars are from the amplifier if I recall some time ago on a thread on NESDev or Nintendoage. Okay, atleast you did that with a socket, which would be amazingly bad if you didn't. And actually, with the 40 wirse like that, it's more likely for something to fail.

[Drakon]

From the looks of it, it's not. And the jailbars are from the amplifier if I recall some time ago on a thread on NESDev or Nintendoage. Okay, atleast you did that with a socket, which would be amazingly bad if you didn't. And actually, with the 40 wirse like that, it's more likely for something to fail.

well from the looks of it you can't tell from the picture so please next time ask before accusing me of doing something I didn't. The jailbars are not from the amp I wired it up without the amp and still got them. I greatly reduced the jailbars by changing how things are grounded. What I did is very safe nothing's gonna fail.

[3GenGames]

Lol, that way to "find out what's wrong" is the opposite of the right way to do it. Just isolate it from the signals off the chip with some sort of scope and meters and debug it from there. There's 100% no need to do what you did, it's messy, wrong, and a pain to work with.


And eventually, something will probably short out and blow up something, so have fun. Evidence below. And the glue is another not-so-bright idea. Maybe working on quality of work and not just hacking to advance your skills. [I'd hate to see you rewire a NES cart to make a DevCart.32 wire per chip.]

[Drakon]

uhm nothing's shorting out everything works. If you don't like it then that's nice but I'm sorry to say that nothing got destroyed and everything works fine. I never once said I was trying to make something pretty or professional looking. I was just looking for something that would be easy to change the wiring with. This system has been running for a long time and it still works problem free.