Late last year, news broke of impossibly rare artifact from the age of the Nintendo Entertainment System. SimCity was the classic simulation game for PC and just about every other console, and it was written for the NES but never released. Now one guy finally got around to digging out his copy, which was dumped at the Portland Retro Gaming Expos and finally put on the Internet. It’s an unfinished game but it’s mostly playable, even if it is a bit more primitive than the PC version.
[Matt] wanted to build his own copy of SimCity for the NES, so that’s what he did. It’s a project that took months of work and a ton of research, but finally there’s a professional-looking cartridge version of SimCity.
With the ROM for SimCity loose on the Internet, that part of the build was relatively easy. You can still get EPROMs or EEPROMs, UV erasers, and a good programmer will run you fifty bucks through the usual vendors. There are even places on the Internet that will split up the emulator-compatible ROM file into two files for the character and program ROM in each NES cartridge. The trick here is finding the right cartridge with the right mapper. It turns out there are only four games that you can simply drop SimCity ROM chips into and expect everything to work. All of these games cost a small fortune, but their Famicom versions are cheap.
After carefully desoldering the Famicom game, soldering in the new chips, and applying a fancy professional label, [Matt] had his cartridge version of SimCity for the NES. It’s for a Famicom, though, but you can get adapters for that. Check out the video below.
If it’s unfinished, what’s the chance of some intrepid moder “finishing” it?
Anything is possible with time and skill.
It’s no problem to wack a Famicom PCB into an NES cartridge, they even did that for some commercial releases. Early copies of Gyromite actually contain an adapter board you can use for exactly that purpose:
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/23/how-to-tell-if-a-copy-of-gyromite-has-a-famicom-adapter-in-it
Yup! I got an adapter version of Wild Gunman for this exact reason. Turns out these later boards were pretty big and adding the adapter makes it too y’all for even a generic NES cart without some modification (which would’ve made the video too long).
Or you know, you could get a third-party board and dump the rom onto it.
Sure, after you reverse engineer the mapper chip and reimplement it somehow. That’s why the donor is needed.
Unfortunately the SimCity ROM requires an MMC5 board, which none of the suppliers of new PCBs have come up with yet.
considering the concept was born and fleshed out for the C64 you all act surprised it can run on a 6502 with limited ram
chrilen these days