Kismet
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Posts posted by Kismet
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On 1/18/2021 at 8:15 PM, eightbit said:
I am not completely understanding what you are saying here. So, you said that the NT Mini Noir "melted" your Castlevania cartridge. But then you tested the melted cartridge again today and you were not able to reproduce the melting? How does the cartridge work OK now if it is melted?
Can you please upload some pictures of this melting issue?
EDIT: Nevermind, I found your post here:
No, I cannot say I have ever heard of that before. Perhaps the chip in the cartridge is just failing?
This sounds like perhaps the ROM chip itself was failing for an unknown reason (consider the age of NES and SNES era hardware, and this isn't an unreasonable assumption), one of the redditors mentioned they had blue PCB capcom carts fail as well, and another mentioned the CIC lockout being disabled could cause it.
It would be kind of amusing if capcom had invented a kill switch to kill the cart if played without a CIC with the assumption that it's an illegal copy, but that seems like too much effort. Capcom did make suicide tricks exist on their arcade boards, but for a cart? Unheard of.
In my opinion it's most likely the EPROM itself and maybe Capcom used non-5V EPROM's or had a mixture of them. Without someone going out there and finding a few more of those exact carts and trying them on the same Super NT, we probably will never know. I'd assume that the firmware voltage switch could prevent any further overheating.
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3 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:
I just realized that I basically stopped using the Mega Sg completely when I got my Nomad in January. Even in its stock configuration with its horrible screen and trash battery life while unplugged, it is still my favourite way to play Mega Genesis Drive games. I do still use the Mega Sg on rare occasion for CD games, though, as I'd rather have CD audio than no CD audio. Also for games that don't fit in the Nomad, like Mad Stalker.
In any case, one of my friends told me yesterday that he has been hearing reports of the new Nt mini corrupting the SD cards in Everdrives. Interesting. Hopefully my Nt mini actually ships before the end of the year, but even if it takes a few months, that's fine as long as it works properly when it gets here.
Overscan?
Not the overscan, that I expected. Like the moving platforms in 1-4. I'll have to check some other stuff, but it just kinda jumped out at me that I don't remember it that way.
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On 11/28/2020 at 9:44 PM, dashv said:
I would also really like to see a full screen soft crt option for all the analog consoles similar to the mister.
I'd rather not. Even if seeing square, clean, pixels was not the developers intended way of seeing the game, adding scanlines, blurring or barrel warping is not what everyone remembers. Heck I played the NT Mini Noir today (88$ import fees, good god) with my vintage SMB3 cart, and two things didn't seem right:
1. The audio sounds... worse? I have the vintage NES here as well, but maybe I'm just remembering the audio having more bass because when I played it in 1991 or so it was always sent through the stereo with the 12" woofers.
2. There's a lot of visual artifacting that I don't recall being a thing on the vintage console either, let alone 1991.
I don't have that many real carts laying around to test at the moment.
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8 hours ago, SegaSnatcher said:
Realistically speaking, where should Analogue go from here?
I just got my shipping notification, almost exactly 10 months after it had been paid for. I think Analogue should probably move closer to the original Zimba 3000 proposed earlier on in the thread, a console that can do everything with just a cartridge adapter, any controller can be used with a controller adapter/usb. I've bought three consoles so far, and my only nitpick in the build quality so far has been that the Super NT's loses gripping power to the cartridge, which I kinda solved by sticking cardboard down the side of it to firm it up.
Clearly the cartridge slot is a weak point, and having something that can be replaced would extend the life of the console as well.
8 hours ago, SegaSnatcher said:
What we currently know is that they are working on dual projects, the Pocket and Duo. They also finally shipped their final run of NT Noirs.
Kevtris has also stated publicly that Analogue has hired more engineers which in turn will take a huge weight off Kevtris and allow him to make even better use of his resources, we can already see the benefits that brings with the ability to develop many projects concurrently.
However, we are getting closer and closer to hitting the limits of what they can implement given the FPGA chips they can realistically use. It seems like PS1 is about the most powerful console they could realistically implement in terms of the overall man power required and the chips available at the budget they are willing to consider. Besides PS1 what other FPGA consoles do you think they should/would consider developing? Do you think they should start getting into Classic Computers and Arcades? Do you think all hardware going forward should have third party support option like the Pocket?I kinda hope they just build the Z3K with the pocket as the base point. "Here's a SoC with a FPGA that you can program", like after the recent Nintendo crackdown on emulation with the Super Smash Bros tournament, it seems like the path forward here is figuring out how to make two to four consoles in two to four different locations act like one console. I see two ways for that to happen without resorting to software emulation (and subsequent crackdown on the inevitable pirated games) :
a) FPGA consoles that the controller I/O can be redirected over the internet, and the video stream can be compressed by a hardware ASIC and sent.
b) a dedicated hardware device that you can plug your controllers into on one end (leave streaming to twitch/youtube,) and on the other end into the remote console. Think of this as "friends codes" without a server. Plug in the ethernet and the second,third,fourth player cables to the console, and on the player side plug your controller into it. Configure it with the built in web-server.
The interesting thing, is that since the SD resolution consoles (everything from the NES to the N64/PS2) is rather small, a lower-complexity codec with lower latency could be used, or the user could switch it to a lossless codec (eg ZMBV) and record it to the SD card, or stream it remotely.
At anyrate, it's one of those questions that will remain unanswered without a change in copyright law, is how to get people in remote locations to be able to play the same copy of the game for multiplayer reasons. The actual laws of physics prevents being able do this in any practical form.
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On 8/4/2020 at 4:35 PM, Sho said:
I'll get a first time slap on the wrist and forced to refund the full amount to the buyer. What this means is that eBay/PayPal won't refund them the 10%/4% cut they take ("Seller's Fees") from the sale. They'll be out 50-60 ish bucks depending.
If they don't have the buyer's money in their PayPal account, eBay will just have them sent to collections. eBay will also do a courtesy refund to the buyer in this sense and wash their hands of it (it's a tax write off for them in the bigger picture). If this isn't a first time offense of the seller, they'll have their account suspended or banned and that's that.
That's not how it works.
When eBay ends a listing, the listing fees are credited back to the person who listed it. If the listing already ended due to a winning bidder/buyer than it's a dispute between the buyer and seller, and if paid by paypal, falls under Paypal's policy.
https://www.paypal.com/us/brc/article/presale-policy-and-reserves
QuotePayPal’s preselling requirements.
If you’d like to presell items in an online store, keep in mind you’ll need to guarantee delivery within 20 days from the date of purchase and also let your customers know they’re buying a presale item.
If they paid the seller by some other means contact the payment provider to say no item was received.
If the seller tries it a third time, they are banned from eBay for life.
Do not bid on pre-orders, because you may just end up out the money, and do not list pre-orders because you're committing fraud.
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7 hours ago, Kaide said:
Ugh, so I knew this would probably happen, but didn't bother to set an alarm, so I was busy messing with something else and getting started with work while they sold out.
Oh well. I refuse to pay scalper pricing. I either get it at MSRP or I don't get it. ??♀️
I got an e-mail a while back about pre-orders starting today at 8am. I think that was the "notification". A notification this morning would have been worthless for a lot of people.
I never got an email about the pocket, which is disappointing. I'm still waiting for the NT Mini Noir to be shipped, so it's probably not the best idea to have two expensive projects in limbo.
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On 4/24/2020 at 11:51 AM, CZroe said:
I guess "clone" could carry negative connotations but "hardware" seems to balance it out when compared to many of the emulator consoles out there. I would only use it when explaining the advantage of FPGA and what distinguishes it from emulation systems.
Clone has the same connotation as "counterfeit", so any kind of Cloned hardware will be seen as inferior, and thus that's why you wouldn't call it that, even if it's technically true, because it's also technically true of inferior counterfeits based on cheap mass-produced parts.
For the FPGA consoles, the most logical and safest thing to call them is "Modern (8/16)-bit game console, plays all licensed games like you remember them"
As far as amount of error precision one would accept, it's acceptable, in most cases, for minor audio or video glitches that are a direct result of a full digital signal. As a weird example, when I was setting up the HDMI capture (and the capture device wasn't picking up the 1080p signal) I noticed that there's some faint noise in the black area of about 1/3 from left side of the screen that was only picked up because I accidentally did "flood fill"in the paint program's still image of the dark area of it. It's completely unnoticeable otherwise, and if the FPGA is emulating it, it's reason enough to believe that there's a reason for it.
The background was flood-filled with RGB:255,0,255 to make it readily apparent. I'm not sure if other games do it, but it was discovered entirely by accident.
As far as scanlines go, I know some people want them, but I don't because to me, all the scanlines and scalers look worse than integer scale, and I'd rather have the image aspect-ratio correct on a high resolution screen, and have the result window-boxed than try to make it look like a CRT in any shape.
In software emulators, typically the scaler/shader is applied after the game output, and the consequence is that it's trying to do a one-size-fits-all at the cost of 1-2 additional frames of latency on an already laggy render pipeline. You just won't get around that unless you can jettison the operating system, and short of something like retropie building it's own close-to-metal OS for it, a lot of these ARM SoC's are no better than what you can run on a desktop OS.
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On 4/3/2020 at 2:05 PM, Kismet said:
Not to start complaining but I have two issues come up with the SuperNT
1. Firmware 4.9, 1080p (50 and 60) no longer works through the Micomsoft SC-512N1 (FPGA HDMI PCIe 2.0 capture card), it used to. And the strange thing is, the capture card is showing a sync lock at 1080p.
2. Mechanically the cartridge slot is allowing the SD2SNES and Super Gameboy to wobble and it's making it fail.
My guess the problem with 1 is that something has changed. Capturing from the card just shows "no signal", meanwhile the monitor attached still works. Unless this is a driver issue with the card, I'm not sure why 720p would work and not 1080p. The current driver is 1.1.0.188.5, 2020.02.03.
The problem with 2, is something I mentioned way back at the beginning when I got a defective Super Gameboy, it doesn't fit in the cartridge slot quite right, allowing the edge connector to wobble, easily. This also happens with the SD2SNES, so even moving the SuperNT causes it to lockup.
So after some fiddling around, I found that if I stuck a piece of cardboard (eg cereal box cardboard) down the back of the cartridge slot, with the SD2SNES cart in it makes the sd2snes just snug enough to not wobble. This is a US model SD2SNES. The same issue was had with the Japanese Super Gameboy 2.
However, I also found that there is a strange "alarm" sound from Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon Another Story ( 5F776488E366B6D6B44F6E8A01D9953D ) that happens on the real cart, and the SD2SNES, during both "press start" screens while it plays Moonlight Densetsu. It should sound like below.
But sounds like this:
https://filebin.net/xssoeh4zoxegxnzr
I'm playing through the rest of the game listening for anything else that sounds bad, but haven't encountered anything else yet.
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Not to start complaining but I have two issues come up with the SuperNT
1. Firmware 4.9, 1080p (50 and 60) no longer works through the Micomsoft SC-512N1 (FPGA HDMI PCIe 2.0 capture card), it used to. And the strange thing is, the capture card is showing a sync lock at 1080p.
2. Mechanically the cartridge slot is allowing the SD2SNES and Super Gameboy to wobble and it's making it fail.
My guess the problem with 1 is that something has changed. Capturing from the card just shows "no signal", meanwhile the monitor attached still works. Unless this is a driver issue with the card, I'm not sure why 720p would work and not 1080p. The current driver is 1.1.0.188.5, 2020.02.03.
The problem with 2, is something I mentioned way back at the beginning when I got a defective Super Gameboy, it doesn't fit in the cartridge slot quite right, allowing the edge connector to wobble, easily. This also happens with the SD2SNES, so even moving the SuperNT causes it to lockup.
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23 hours ago, Drunk_Caterpillar said:
Someone on Reddit is claiming that Kevtris answered some question in Discord. The only takeaway so far is that the current version of the Jailbreak can be installed on the V2, which kind of confirms that no new hardware is present in the machine. If interpolation wasn't possible on the V1, we're probably not getting it here...
If anything, the FPGA would have to be the same generation, but that doesn't mean it has to be the same model. So it's probably still a Cyclone V 5CEBA2U15C8N. A2 and A4 have the same pins, and so does A5 with the U BGA. Vs the Super NT 5CEBA4F23C8N. So presumably if they were able to source the exact same FPGA they might have just used the same FPGA again, but if not, there would be some kind of minor redesign to fit a FPGA that is a slightly different model with the same number of pins.
With that said, unless they needed to order a certain number of FPGA's to get a bulk discount, it would seem a bit weird to stick a model with more LE in it since the per unit cost still have to be more for a better chip.
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On 2/14/2020 at 2:48 PM, Jagasian said:
You should report the bugs. There is a chance they are just glitches that occur on OEM SNES consoles.
There are bugs that happen if the hooks are enabled on a SD2SNES in some games, which also happen on a real SNES, for example Seiken Densetsu 3 will flip out a lot.
I haven't run into bugs in FF3 using the real cart, but I haven't sat there and played it through.
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1 hour ago, dj_convoy said:
Just what we need; drama from a new source. I certainly don't mean you cats discussing it; I just mean needless drama about porting cores over. Analogue isn't going to hold a gun to anybody's head, and it's up to the authors of the cores or others who understand them if they get ported or not.
This should be good, fun news, not more typical "evil corporations arrrggghh" stuff.
The problem I see is that OSS falls into two very broad software camps:
GNU-GPL-Stallman, where anything and everything not GPL is evil. This is what some of the MiSTer people sound like.
BSD-PublicDomain-Preservation, where the core issue is making the software available perpetually without barriers(eg legacy hardware, operating systems, system exclusives, etc)
The world benefits regardless of which camp produces software. The GPL crowd however actively villainize anyone who doesn’t use the GPLv3 license because their goal is to have the source code stay public, regardless of security, investment or other incentives. That tends to work out good for preservation of game engines and software tools, but is antithesis to creative content like game assets and scenario code/script since it means anyone can recompile it, making it impossible to retain control over compatibility and data mining.
On the other side, where software and hardware are allowed to have a mix of open (BSD/MIT/PD) and closed code, means there is less effort to get a project to market. But at the same time there are bad actors out there that actively pillage the public domain to sell you things you can get for free if you simply knew how to compile it.
Where MiSTer and Analogue come in is that the latter is building a platform of a known quality and lower barrier to entry than even the rubbish counterfeit game consoles and copier devices have ever been able to do. It may feel like sour grapes, but unless people want to pay around $1000 to get the experience of a 30 year old hardware it’s unlikely that FPGAs will come down in price short of Intel deciding to build its own FPGA retail platform.
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On 10/16/2019 at 1:16 PM, Atariboy said:
Where's that FPGA stand compared to the main FPGA and what's used in the Mister project?
I'm assuming it's significantly less powerful, but hopefully some neat homebrew projects can still take advantage of it.
I'm Assuming that the second FPGA is basically "the DAC" if it were compared to the Super NT or Mega SG. So it might be invoked when plugged into the USB-c dock, but not in the same way, since I'd assume that a usb-c dock that Analogue makes would be an actual USB-C dock that happens to support game controllers and the "DAC" analog output.
Typical USB-C docks used in the enterprise are either powered or unpowered, and have 2 Displayport (or HDMI/VGA) outputs, 5 USB 3.1 ports, Realtek Audio and Ethernet controllers, analog audio output/input and some have sd-card slots. Don't be fooled though, there are THREE kinds of docks. "Displayport" docks, "Displaylink (software GPU)", and Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt docks allow 2 monitors at 4K, standard USB-C DP docks only support two 1080p monitors even if they have 6 ports on them.
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On 8/8/2019 at 11:16 PM, phoenixdownita said:
Me very confused.
The oddball refresh rate is due to how the original console was wired wrt clock sources, Kevtris is replicating that, if you want exactly 50Hz to use the DAC to go to OSSC to go to HDMI, you already have it in the actual MegaSg/SuperNt HDMI, unless you really really like OSSC scanlines or such but that defeats the purpose.
It seems we want all eight combinations:
HDMI at 50, 60 and the original 50ish and 60ish (last 2 just in case your HDMI set might support them)
DAC at original 50ish, 60ish and then perfect 50 and 60 (last 2 so you could say you could do:
HDMI -> DAC -> OSSC|XRGBMini|RetroTink2x -> HDMI for whatever reason you may want to do it)
Maybe kevtris will enable all of them just so he can sleep at night.
Seems to me the logical thing would be to have the "HDMI" part of the DAC report itself to the SNT/MSG/Future-console-here via the EDID and have the FPGA devices output the native output straight to the DAC device. If connected to anything else, then just report the capability based on the NTSC/PAL switch.
You shouldn't need an OSSC/XRGBMini with the DAC. But people do strange things in the name of wanting a consistent experience.
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14 hours ago, Toth said:
How does it work if the Mega SD isn't passing the info through the actual CD connector? Like on the PSIO it requires a modification inside the Playstation like to intercept the signals moving around inside the Playstation. I assume that isn't the case here but it is still not just software emulation, right? It is actually emulating the Sega CD hardware even though it isn't routing through the connector?
The Mega SD goes in the cartridge slot, and similar to the SNES, many of the pins on the expansion connector are also directly on the cartridge bus. Like there is a reason for that, you'd normally have a BIOS/Save memory in the cartridge slot.
A game like Shining Force CD can't even be played as intended without a save-game backup cart since the internal SegaCD save memory is not enough for the four games on it.
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I wonder how much input lag game designers just factor in now days due to displays and Bluetooth? There must be a target as people would get pretty frustrated if they designed games with 0 in mind.
Well games that use a bulky 3D game engine (eg Unity, Unreal, etc) probably have no control over the input latency. Since the PC is a crapshoot, you can't really design a game around tight input. Game consoles have their own hypervisors that likely introduce their own latency on top of the latency from the controllers. Then you have straight bluetooth controllers which would have an additional level of latency from the bluetooth stack that the straight USB would not have.
The input latency wouldn't be that much compared to the render latency that is beyond your control. Some computer screens and television screens have a "game" mode that bypass the color correction, frame interpolation and energy control features (on some TV's this results the picture being brighter, but the colors blown out.) The issue however is that a 60hz panel has a frame buffer so it can do all the SmartTV features so you'll end up with an additional frame of latency so it can do this compositing. If it has to be upscaled to 4K, that's can also be another frame of latency. A 120, 144 or 240fps panel might be able to use it's interpolation feature to do a "freeze and hold" and reduce the latency so instead of 16.7mz sync, it could be down to 8ms or 4ms. But who knows if that's actually what they do.
But as far as the game dev's are concerned, they're not going to test every model of TV and computer screen with every console, so if the game is laggy the blame is laid at the TV manufacturer.
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Agreed, this feels like the emulation version of the boy who owns the ball we play with, and who wants to be able to take it and go home if the others don't do what he wants.
I think that's the only thing that was really stolen here (if the story is true) and while it's not entirely right, I find it hard to sympathize with the "victim" as a result.
That said, a story like this will make him more likely to be remembered, after all. We are storytelling apes, suckers for a good story.
The cabinet owner should write up a screen play/film draft and see if he can sell it to anyone.
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Good story. I know we discussed this in the context of Marble Man.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/after-a-lost-atari-rom-leaks-retro-fans-ask-was-it-stolen/
I'm on Team Dump It While You Can And Never Mind The Collectors. Your opinion may well be different.
Well there's multiple angles, but I hold the view that if you didn't make it, and don't have the right to copy it, then you don't get a say in what happens to it. Regardless.
option 1, The ROM was stolen somehow. I, J random person on the internet, might seek it out, see if it works in MAME, play it for 10 minutes, and then forget about it. This is what happens to the vast majority of game ROMS, be them EEPROM's or Blueray discs. The collectors collect things, they see the value in having it, bonus if it works. They want to be the person who "has it".
option 2, The ROM was RE'd from some existing code. eg someone produced a counterfeit. This is probably not the case since the collector is upset and seems to "know" it came from their cabinet.
option 3, The ROM was backedup at some point , years ago, and the leaker IS the collector, and just wants to deflect attention from themselves.
Like of the rare arcade things I'd be interested in, the Marble Madness sequel is the one I would probably want to see emulated. So why Akka Arrh and not Marbleman?
If a tech really did "steal it" , how did they get enough time to do so? Regardless of the number of chips, how would they have known WHAT the chips were to have the right hardware to dump them? So my money is on the collector is the leaker, and he either had it dumped personally by someone, and then released it himself, or that "someone" who dumped it, kept a backup and released it themselves for whatever reason. The fact that the account connection is 2005 suggests that this could have happened 14 years ago, and the user was just waiting for a reason to.
Like here's a wild possibility, what if someone dumped it 14 years ago, created a draft post on the forum, and then never posted it? And whoever posted it was maybe instead had their account hacked?
Who knows.
I'm kinda of the mind that if you're holding onto something that can reasonably restored, it should be restored, an arcade cabinet still has value regardless of the game it runs, but you're absolutely kidding yourself if you think you have any rights to the game software. For all intents, if Atari wanted to sell it themselves, the only thing stopping them is a finding the original software and a purpose-built emulator.
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My Genesis is a Model 1 VA6 that was s-video and FirebrandX audio amp modded by -^Cro§Bow^- early in the year. It runs through a RetroTINK 2x to HDMI on the TV. Just for kicks, I though I'd do a quick comparison of the RetroArch emulation of Sonic the Hedgehod and the modded Genesis to see how they looked and sounded. Folks, it ain't even close.
Of course it's not even close, you're comparing the original hardware with specific output tolerances to a software emulator that has to be tweaked on a per-device basis. The developer certainly doesn't have 1000 different smartTV models laying around to test.
This is one of the things that most software emulator dev's don't want to understand. If I, the end user are to use something, it needs to work, out of the box, and if it's to replace an existing device, it needs to meet or exceed the capabilities of the device it replaces. Nothing in Retroarch, except maybe 8-bit systems will ever come close to the original hardware in a software emulator environment. And never so out of the box. It's very likely the configuration is setup "out of the box" to run on a Raspberry Pi which has a fixed HDMI codec on it, rather than on a SmartTV device which is running it through a compositor (eg the TV can add UI layers, or PiP the video.)
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The only way 5x vertical wouldn’t cut off some of the picture is if it supports 1200p and you have a display that supports it as well (preferably a 1200p display). It isn’t a huge deal since much of the least picture would have been lost to overscan on an original CRT anyway.
I just run everything at 5X. On the Master System games, there's usually still an inch of overscan space that winds up being a solid color anyway. On MD games, there's usually stuff in that space, (eg Starflight has framing graphics) but the games were designed with overscan so that information doesn't disappear. Sonic 2 is fine, but if you put it in 2-player mode, the time is half cut off on P1's half screen.
Sonic 2 (Mega Drive)
Starflight (Mega Drive)
Phantasy Star (Master System)
Ghostbusters (Master System)
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Kinda like what Emu-DX did when emulating arcade Donkey Kong?
That is a crime, that is horribly ugly, I sure hope that's just a proof of concept.
That undoubtedly uses look up tables to replace graphics at load time. eg "draw $1234 at $X $Y" , a NES, SNES, SMS, MD and any other 8-bit or 16-bit console/arcade could probably do the same thing on a per-title basis, but really, this is madness, you're basically not drawing the machine's frame buffer and replacing it with a "HD" frame buffer. Of course in the N64 emu's (where this kind of thing has been going on for a while) what they do is straight up replace the textures sent to the host GPU and leave the emulated GPU alone. 8-bit/16-bit consoles don't do texture loads so this scheme requires instead tracking the PPU/VDP data.
Like in my mind this seems like something that someone would do as a proof-of-concept as as way to run old games on high resolution hardware to try to appeal to people who don't want to look at the blocky vintage graphics, but like, to quote my dad "why are you playing an old game?" (playing a pixelart game made in 2010.) If that's really what people think the appeal of pixelart is, then sorry no.
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Same here. I literally just want to see what it looks like. It’s not like we were preserving perfect pixels in every perspective with normal Mode 7 anyway.
I was always impressed in GBA SNES sports where the rotation effect somehow looked better despite the lower resolution. The rolling Chomp Rock in Yoshi’s Island, for example.
AFAIK, Emulators have had "high res mode 7" way back in the ZSNES DOS days. The issue would be ensuring this would work with all carts (particularly expansion chip games) and it would deviate from the goal of having an accurate FPGA re-implementation.
Though I'm also of the mind that I think if it were to possible to do a "Super PPU" , it would probably be in the same vein of "allow more sprites" features in the NES core of the mini NT.
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I have hardwood floors in my place and the shocks have been BRUTAL.
I have hardwood floors and haven't had any zaps at all in this place.
At work though, I get static zaps all the time around laptop touchpad buttons. Haven't recently but that's due to a change in the humidity, as it's typically only a winter condition.
I'm thinking if the zaps are brutal these might be a grounding issue. My Mega SG is plugged into the Super NT's USB power supply which is plugged into a surge protector which is plugged into a UPS (The UPS inverter circuit is toast however) though.
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Wouldn't the simple solution to having the CD audio input be enabled by default be an "auto" option that has a threshold that's just above the noise floor? Enable passthrough on a per-sample basis if the signal goes above the noise floor, have some hysteresis to keep it enabled long enough to not shut off while anything else is playing.
The ideal thing would be to have per-cart settings saved, and knowing in advance which carts have certain audio or video features would then allow the user to just load those settings for that cart, instead of all of them. In the case of CD-audio, I have to wonder why not just detect the bus connection and turn it on,
The same could be said for the SuperNT since the SGB and the SD2SNES are the only carts that have cartridge audio connections.
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FPGA Based Videogame System
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted
This seems to be the only direct evidence. Suffice it to say, I don't think the CIC actually ever interfaced with the ROM itself, I'm more inclined to say it has to be some kind of intentional or accidental manufacturing design that might have only been discovered by people using game genies.
Fun fact. I wanted a game genie when I was a kid, and it turns out that there are a whole series of game genies that didn't work with my SMB3 cart, which meant we went to more than one store to find one version of the game genie that worked with it. So my early experience with this suggests that there are different versions of the NES game genie. It's likely that the developers of the game genie might even have known about this, since they probably didn't want to be responsible for melting games (yet the GG itself warps the cartridge slot.)
Anyway, the evidence suggests:
a) Either a chip on the cart is dying, resulting in this effect when the CIC is disabled
b) The ROM chip itself has a design flaw that results in more current being pulled if the CIC isn't pulling any current.
At any rate, I probably wouldn't risk the cart, though I feel the NT Mini's greatest value is when it's jailbroken so that legitimate vintage carts can be copied to the device, so maybe just do that.