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Back in the 80s, this was par for the course. Especially for Atari, Infocom, and Origin games.

Infocom was famous for the odd physical objects (called feelies) included with games:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feelie

The concept caught on, and all the good gaming companies were doing it:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Feelies

Actual comic books game with some Atari games:
http://www.tripoint.org/sq/ew/ewcover.html

Right, that's why there aren't ROM images in the repository. The emulators themselves are entirely legal, and it's well within the means of any hobbyist to dump their own ROMs.

http://www.tripoint.org/kevtris/Projects/copynes/

CopyNES: $125, plus the price of a working NES and a PC from the Windows 98 era (you'll need a parallel port for the CopyNES and a USB port to get your files onto a USB stick). Unless you have a lot of games that aren't coming to VC any time soon, it's cheaper just to buy games on VC for $5 each.

Afaict the trickiest bit with copying nes carts is actually identifying them. nes carts (unlike gameboy carts) use a huge range of mapper chips

If one restricts oneself to NES games (72 pin), there are only a handful of common NES mappers: NROM/CNROM/GNROM, UNROM, BNROM/AOROM, MMC1, or MMC3. Even most of the unlicensed games are clones of CNROM (Panesian), GNROM (Color Dreams), UNROM (Camerica), or MMC3 (Tengen). That's few enough for a dumper to take less than one second to try each mapper's handshake and see how the cart responds.

If you want to actually copy the cart rather than just make an image for use on emulators you will also need to either clone the mapper chip or find a donor cart with the same mapper chip to host your copy.

Plenty of mappers have been cloned already: PowerPak. For something more permanent, RetroZone has reproduction boards designed for NROM/CNROM/GNROM, UNROM, BNROM/AOROM, and MMC1 games.

Any ideas on how to build an NES copier?
http://www.tripoint.org/kevtris/Projects/copynes/

Afaict the trickiest bit with copying nes carts is actually identifying them. nes carts (unlike gameboy carts) use a huge range of mapper chips and don't have any header information to say which mapper is in use. So if you are trying to dump a cart that hasn't been dumped before you may well have to open it up to find out what mapper is in there.

If you want to actually copy the cart rather than just make an image for use on emulators you will also need to either clone the mapper chip or find a donor cart with the same mapper chip to host your copy.

There is also the security chip issue but afaict clones of that are readilly availible nowadays.

Swordquest never finished of course. But if you have a hankering for the three comics that did come out (Earth, Fire, and Water), the SwordQuest archive can help (plus they have solutions posted.)

I don't think there are many voluntaires that write device drivers for Windows in the first place

Would you say that if you were one? What should Kevin Horton, developer of the CopyNES development kit, or Memblers, developer of the Squeedo development cartridge, do?

They market the device as a handheld media box which can do video/audio/text and gaming including emulation.

Video/audio/text are thought to be adequately covered by existing widespread rippers and existing fair use laws.

If you have a stack of NES carts - is it illegal to use a ROM image?

If you make the backup yourself using a tool such as Kevin Horton's CopyNES mod, then it likely falls under the necessary modification exemption of 17 USC 117 and foreign counterparts. But if you download the ROM from (say) Edge Emulation, it's not (except in the rare case of commercial ROMs that have become freely distributable, such as Elite for NES). What color are your bits?

Do you think everyone just rips their own CDs for use in an iPod? Or uses iTunes?

A trademark such as "iTunes" is an adjective and must be used with a generic noun such as "music store" or "software" to avoid confusion. If by "iTunes" you meant "iTunes software": You don't need to use iTunes to rip a CD; you can rip .wav using any app and encode to .mp3 or .m4a using iTunes, or if you live in an area that does not recognize Fraunhofer's MP3 patent, you can rip .wav using any app and encode to .mp3 using LAME. If by "iTunes" you meant "iTunes Music Store": You don't even need to buy music through iTMS. Other music stores are available, such as mp3tunes and (if you live in Russia) allofmp3.

http://www.zophar.net/music.html

NSF files contain the extracted machine code for the music of NES games. There are specialized emulator programs, including WinAmp plugins, for playback. I'm still hoping that some genius out there figures out a way to add NSF support to iPods someday...

The inventor of the NSF format even made a hardware player using an actual NES CPU. This guy's too cool for school I tell you:

http://www.tripoint.org/kevtris/Projects/hardnes/i ndex.html

There are a few hardware projects out there, for increasing your enjoyment of your NES. One is a special game cart that lets you write ROM images to a NES cart, called the FunkyFlashCart, and then you can play ROM on a real NES. Because it uses flash for holding the ROMs, ROMs can be written many times to the cart. Similarly, it uses a CPLD in order to recreate the many different circuit-board types used in NES games. This is necessary because NES games lack a strong distinction between hardware and software common in modern games, i.e., NES games each include their own circuit board and ICs which must also be accurately recreated along with the game's ROM image in order to play the game. Note that the FunkyFlashCart is still under development, but will soon go on sale. No longer will you be stuck playing your NES games on a crappy inaccurate emulator!

Another interesting device is actually a hardware modification for your NES called the "CopyNES". It has recently been redesigned, upgraded, and put into another round of production. Basically it is a device for ripping ROM images from carts, but it is also a ICE debugger for the NES, and it can even transfer ROM images to a RAM cart in the NES via a parallel port. The CopyNES has many other features, a favorite being the ability to play NSF files on the NES. NSF files are music ripped from NES games. Hence you can listen to your NES tunes on a real NES, as opposed to a NES emulator with poor emulation of the system's actual sound. The CopyNES is basically a circuit board that is placed between the NES's CPU and the NES's motherboard. This is how it is able to accomplish the ICE debugger features, as well as universal cart dumping, as it can force the CPU to do whatever you want. Here is the original site for the CopyNES. However, it shows an older version of the hardware. The creator announced in this thread that he will begin selling kits to mod your NES with CopyNES, and he will also provide a slightly more expensive service so that people can send their NES systems in for professional modification.

Kevin Horton's done a couple of kickass players like this. He's got a NES player and several SID players. And while yr at it, there are a bunch of other awesome projects worth checking out on his homepage.

Kevin Horton's done a couple of kickass players like this. He's got a NES player and several SID players. And while yr at it, there are a bunch of other awesome projects worth checking out on his homepage.

Kevin Horton's done a couple of kickass players like this. He's got a NES player and several SID players. And while yr at it, there are a bunch of other awesome projects worth checking out on his homepage.

CopyNES to the rescue.

You mean aside from the Game Axe (mass produced), or Portendo (someone's personal project), or anything else I probably missed?

Whoah.. check out this page of the magazine:

http://www.tripoint.org/games/literature/atariage/ vol1no3/5.jpg ...and then this one, a couple of pages later...

http://www.tripoint.org/games/literature/atariage/ vol1no3/7.jpg

I wanna make a joke, but I don't wanna sound homophobic! Were the 80's really like that?!

Whoah.. check out this page of the magazine:

http://www.tripoint.org/games/literature/atariage/ vol1no3/5.jpg ...and then this one, a couple of pages later...

http://www.tripoint.org/games/literature/atariage/ vol1no3/7.jpg

I wanna make a joke, but I don't wanna sound homophobic! Were the 80's really like that?!

another popular computer related magazine from the past, atari age.

Why not use something like PocketNES http://nes.pocketheaven.com/ and run all of the game?

Because NES cartridge backup devices are very hard to come by. The only one I've seen is Kevin Horton's CopyNES.

It's a bit deceptive to refer to it as a portable system considering you need to plug it into a TV to actually to use it. By using the word portable I thought something along the lines of Puma the portable Atari 2600 where a Sega Game Gear has been converted into a portable Atari 2600 complete with its own display.

There is a whole site dedicated to Atari 2600 portable conversion projects that has been discussed in this and repeated in this Slashdot article.

I would doubt that the hacks he's performed for his own personal entertainment would cause problems, but being a non-american myself and not familiar with the DMCA I'm not certain. Some of the other projects on his site do draw certain parallels with DeCSS, for example, CopyNES.

FWIW, the real reason he doesn't want to even try to sell these is because it would be an unholy pain in the butt. This ain't no Heathkit we're talking about here. I've done EPROM mods for the 7800 and ColecoVision, and installed region mods for Saturn and Playstation, and this is way above that. I've also made three cart dumpers, the first was a socket adapter for an EPROM programmer, the next was a rigged TRS-80 Color Computer, and the third was a rigged 7800, and I dumped quite a few rare cartridges with them.

The trickiest part of designing this thing was emulating all the bank switching schemes used on the 2600. There were well over half a dozen different schemes used, plus this emulates the Supercharger, which had its own bank switching scheme. An FPGA was used here to give maximum flexibility with a minimum of chips.

The reason bank switching on the 2600 was so non-standardized is that there was no R/W line, so you had to use special addresses to trigger bank switches, and separate address ranges for reading vs writing any RAM on the cartridge.

And then there were the cartridges with custom chips, like Pitfall II, which had a chip containing the music data, copied to the volume registers at the start of each scan line, and the Supercharger's main chip, which had to be removed from an actual cartridge and insterted into the project. The Stella TIA chip also had to be salvaged from a real 2600.

On top of all that, he's got an 8085 and TMS9918 to control it, and to generate the audio signal for the Supercharger games. That's like putting a second custom video game system into it.

Also not mentioned above is that Kevin wrote a Tetris for the 2600.

Now all they need is a game as fun and addicting as Kaboom! to download. ;)