Make custom cartridge adapters for SNES that allow's other game consoles/handhelds to be played on the system.

[Olimar101]

I want to play some other handhelds and consoles but I don't want to buy the systems I rather keep fewer systems and more games and I wondered if I could make my own adapters for SNES. To make sure I AM NOT ASKING PEOPLE TO MAKE IT FOR ME. I would like to play the games on the rarer consoles/handhelds that I don't want to spend thousands on.

 

[Plazorn]

Theoreticaly, but it would be a ton of work. You'd have to write emulators for each of the said systems and hope the SNES even has enough power to run them. Currently things like the super gameboy allow you to play gameboy on the SNES, but that is all I know of. You'd be better off installing emulators on your computer or phone to play such games, downloading roms of the games you own. You name the system, and there will most likely be an emulator for it.

 

[weestuarty]

tbh its not really realistic as even the supergameboy has gameboy processors in it. If you want to use original games there are some multi cartrige consoles like retron5 etc or Mister FPGA

 

[Olimar101]

Yall are probably gonna HATE the systems/handhelds I want adapters for

1.R-Zone
2.Gamecom
3.Supervision
4.Mega Duck
5.Game Master
6.Gamate
7.Neo Geo Pocket
8.Neo Geo Pocket Color

 

[SylverReZ]

I want to play some other handhelds and consoles but I don't want to buy the systems I rather keep fewer systems and more games and I wondered if I could make my own adapters for SNES. To make sure I AM NOT ASKING PEOPLE TO MAKE IT FOR ME. I would like to play the games on the rarer consoles/handhelds that I don't want to spend thousands on.

Welcome new user. Pinouts for these cartridges are readily available online; maybe learn some PCB software while you're at it.

 

[Foxi4]

I want to play some other handhelds and consoles but I don't want to buy the systems I rather keep fewer systems and more games and I wondered if I could make my own adapters for SNES. To make sure I AM NOT ASKING PEOPLE TO MAKE IT FOR ME. I would like to play the games on the rarer consoles/handhelds that I don't want to spend thousands on.

If you don’t want to spend thousands on this endeavour then I’m afraid the road ends here. This isn’t something you can just make on the side. There are cartridges that do exactly what you intend to do (GBA to SFC Totek adapter, Super Game Boy etc.) but the nature of how they work precludes an amateur from replicating it without significant investment in R&D, a deep understanding of how the target system works and, most of all, the money required to get this done, and it ain’t cheap. They’re effectively *the entire target system* or a clone of it built on a cartridge-shaped PCB that piggybacks off of the SNES/SFC’s video output. You can’t just adapt a cartridge from one system and expect it to work on another without some hardware or software in-between the two. The SNES isn’t going to run machine code intended for another console even if it could read another console’s cartridge, that’s not how those adapters work.



Case in point, the Super Game Boy. You’ll notice that it has its own memory, its own CPU and so on. It is, for all intents and purposes, a Game Boy on steroids.

 

[RAHelllord]

You might want to consider buying an emulation device, either one of the cheap ones or if you prefer the cream of the crop shell out for an FPGA based one. Both the Mister and the Pocket support most of those systems already and work is being done on getting the ones that are missing onto these two, too. It's just a matter of time on the developer's sides.

Because what you want to do is basically reverse engineer a system, transform it into an addon board that can interface with a SNES, write the entire software to allow the SNES to run the other console, then stitch everything together by hand. Repeat all of that 8 separate times. Even the first step would basically require two or three separate high level college courses alone just so you can get started on that.

 

[Foxi4]

You might want to consider buying an emulation device, either one of the cheap ones or if you prefer the cream of the crop shell out for an FPGA based one. Both the Mister and the Pocket support most of those systems already and work is being done on getting the ones that are missing onto these two, too. It's just a matter of time on the developer's sides.

Because what you want to do is basically reverse engineer a system, transform it into an addon board that can interface with a SNES, write the entire software to allow the SNES to run the other console, then stitch everything together by hand. Repeat all of that 8 separate times. Even the first step would basically require two or three separate high level college courses alone just so you can get started on that.

Some systems make this kind of thing easier than others, particularly if the cartridge slot exposes access to whatever graphics processing unit or video output the console uses, but ultimately the only thing you’re really doing is taking a console that is already perfectly useable and making it unusable without plugging it into something else for the purposes of achieving a TV Out. This is not a feasible project for an inexperienced techie or someone with no access to FPGA’s/the ability to spin custom silicon. You’re 100% correct when you say that just going the emulation route cuts out the middle man. In fact, it cuts out the need for cartridges altogether.

 

[Evilengine]

It could be easier to make adapters for pc via USB?..

 

[Foxi4]

It could be easier to make adapters for pc via USB?..

Yes and no. In theory, in both cases all you really need to do is read the data on the cartridge, store it somewhere and have the ability to run that machine code somehow. The advantage on PC is that emulators are readily available (one less thing to code) and you have a lot of horsepower to throw around (you don’t have to optimise or cut corners), plus USB is standard and there are libraries through the nose to work with (less learning, more copy-paste) whereas on the SNES you’d have to code something that works on the SNES *or* create hardware that the SNES can readily interface with (have fun learning the entire architecture). In practice both of those are not easy projects. I imagine building something like the Epilogue would be easier (dump cart to memory -> transfer over USB -> run in emulator), but still not realistic for a beginner.

https://www.epilogue.co/

Like I said, devices like this already exist, but there’s a reason why they’re not plentiful - this is professional grade stuff. People pay good money to buy stuff like this because it’s *not* easy to make and the target audience is very small. If you rally want to work with hardware, Mister exists. Go that route, save yourself the hassle.

 

[enarky]

All of it is limited by the SNES cartridge bus. For anything that connects via cartridge bus and does its operations completely on a cartridge the whole image readily rendered needs to be transferred to the SNES to display 60 times a second. That is barely fast enough to transfer the Game Boy four bit per Pixel image in 60 FPS, it's not fast enough for anything that requires more bandwidth like any of the consoles mentioned above. There is no way to do this on the SNES, maybe a console with a faster cartridge bus, like the N64.

 

[Foxi4]

All of it is limited by the SNES cartridge bus. For anything that connects via cartridge bus and does its operations completely on a cartridge the whole image readily rendered needs to be transferred to the SNES to display 60 times a second. That is barely fast enough to transfer the Game Boy four bit per Pixel image in 60 FPS, it's not fast enough for anything that requires more bandwidth like any of the consoles mentioned above. There is no way to do this on the SNES, maybe a console with a faster cartridge bus, like the N64.

I mean, you say that, but the GBA adapter exists, with higher colour depth and pixel count than the OG GB. You can fudge things and it’ll work, the point is that it’s kind of a silly idea to begin with. There are better ways to do this, none of them involve a shoehorned SNES.

 

[enarky]

I mean, you say that, but the GBA adapter exists, with higher colour depth and pixel count than the OG GB. You can fudge things and it’ll work, the point is that it’s kind of a silly idea to begin with. There are better ways to do this, none of them involve a shoehorned SNES.

That only uses the SNES as a glorified power supply and base to stand on, with its own video out. I'm completely with you there, btw, it's only that I'm convinced it's not even technically feasible if you want to use the SNES for anything else than supplying power and controls.

 

[Foxi4]

That only uses the SNES as a glorified power supply and base to stand on, with its own video out. I'm completely with you there, btw, it's only that I'm convinced it's not even technically feasible if you want to use the SNES for anything else than supplying power and controls.

That’s a pretty good observation, I haven’t considered that. It *is* just using the SNES as a power supply and for controller inputs, you’re right. I’m not exactly sure what the throughput of the cartridge slot is. I assumed it was fairly substantial given all of the extra chips that can be embedded on cartridges for co-processing purposes, but I don’t actually know that and haven’t noticed the spare AV out. That’s even more lame than I thought it was. Seems like busy work for something that can be done better for cheaper.

 

[tech3475]

That’s a pretty good observation, I haven’t considered that. It *is* just using the SNES as a power supply and for controller inputs, you’re right. I’m not exactly sure what the throughput of the cartridge slot is. I assumed it was fairly substantial given all of the extra chips that can be embedded on cartridges for co-processing purposes, but I don’t actually know that and haven’t noticed the spare AV out. That’s even more lame than I thought it was. Seems like busy work for something that can be done better for cheaper.

I haven't tried it on real hardware, but apparently there's enough bandwidth for an FMV via MSU1.

Obviously not the best resolution looking at one example.

IIRC Star Fox, etc. work by just writing the 3D graphics to the PPU as 2D, although I can't recall if bandwidth was one of the issues, other than speed, memory, etc.

Overall, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a way of doing it, especially the low resolution 8 bit consoles......but it's just not practical, just buying the PCB alone would probably cost as much as an RPi.

 

[Kwyjor]

Yall are probably gonna HATE the systems/handhelds I want adapters for

1.R-Zone
2.Gamecom
3.Supervision
4.Mega Duck
5.Game Master
6.Gamate
7.Neo Geo Pocket
8.Neo Geo Pocket Color

You can spend ten minutes playing with some of those on a PC, and thereby convince yourself that you never want to have anything to do with them ever again.

That only uses the SNES as a glorified power supply and base to stand on, with its own video out.

There are definitely things like that for other systems than the GBA already.

 

[Foxi4]

You can spend ten minutes playing with some of those on a PC, and thereby convince yourself that you never want to have anything to do with them ever again.

There are definitely things like that for other systems than the GBA already.

It just seems like a roundabout way to use the SNES controller on consoles other than the SNES, and gaining a TV output. It’s not 2000-and-late anymore, we have better ways of doing that now.

I haven't tried it on real hardware, but apparently there's enough bandwidth for an FMV via MSU1.

Obviously not the best resolution looking at one example.

IIRC Star Fox, etc. work by just writing the 3D graphics to the PPU as 2D, although I can't recall if bandwidth was one of the issues, other than speed, memory, etc.

Overall, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a way of doing it, especially the low resolution 8 bit consoles......but it's just not practical, just buying the PCB alone would probably cost as much as an RPi.

That was my impression. The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

 

[enarky]

I haven't tried it on real hardware, but apparently there's enough bandwidth for an FMV via MSU1.

MSU-1 video is very low FPS and highly compressed, it gets decompressed on the SNES side, AFAIK (might be wrong, though). Bandwidth is not that much on the cartridge port of the SNES, here's a more in-depth discussion on nesdev.org forums on why Super Game Boy Color isn't possible.

 

[Kwyjor]

Remember that "SuperRT" thing from a while back that allowed raytracing on the SNES?
https://gbatemp.net/threads/develop...-through-the-custom-made-superrt-chip.578979/