About

CopyNESW is a 32-bit Windows application designed for interfacing with Kevin Horton's CopyNES, a Nintendo Entertainment System that has been modified to add a parallel port suitable for dumping cartridges, saving and restoring battery-backed RAM, uploading programs to RAM/Flash cartridges, and real-time debugging. Nearly all functionality of the original MS-DOS QBASIC client has been implemented (in one form or another), and it can be used natively on Windows 2000 and XP (and possibly Vista).

News

February 4, 2007

As I have ceased involvement with the NESdev community, I have released the source code for the Win32 CopyNES client so that others can continue to update the client. A download link can be found below.

July 12, 2006

The plugin select dialog has been updated to remember the last plugin selected.

June 17, 2006

The CNRAM plugin listed below has been updated to fix a bug in which it failed to unmap the CopyNES BIOS from memory.

June 16, 2006

Added support for Memblers's UNROM Flash cartridge to the RAM Cart command.

Also made the RAM/Flash cartridge type selector use the global plugin select dialog.

March 4, 2006

Support for custom parallel ports has been added - simply select the port name, then override the address in the configuration dialog. In addition, a program restart is no longer required when changing the port configuration.

I have implemented support for custom plugin categories - if you receive an error when attempting to use the "Run Plugin" or "Write WRAM" options, edit MAKEBASE.BAS (from the standard CopyNES distribution) and make the following changes:

1. Find the line DATA "*"," ",0,"Test & Dev Use".
2. Replace it with the following lines:
   DATA "*"," ",2,"Test & Dev Use"
   DATA "xxxx","xxxx.bin",998,"Custom Plugin"
3. Locate the "WRAM Readers" and "Nintendo: Famicom" groups.
4. Between them, insert the following category:
   DATA "*"," ",1,"Save RAM Uploaders"
   DATA "xxxx","xxxx.bin",998,"Custom writer"
   DATA "NES-SxROM","sxram.bin",999,"SxROM (MMC1) SRAM writer"
   DATA "NES-TxROM","txram.bin",999,"TxROM (MMC3) SRAM writer"
   DATA "NES-ExROM","exram.bin",999,"ExROM (MMC5) SRAM writer"
   DATA "NES-HxROM","hxram.bin",999,"HxROM (MMC6) SRAM writer"
5. Save the file and run it in QBASIC to recreate the file MAPPERS.DAT.

Downloads

• CopyNESW Beta, the current build of the Win32 CopyNES client (last updated Sun, 04 Feb 2007 23:21:27 +0000).
• CopyNESW Sources, for anyone interested in adding their own functionality.
• CNRAM plugin, required for the 'CNROM' RAM cart option - copy CNRAM.BIN into the plugins directory (defaults to PLUGDONE).

Instructions

1. Download the QBASIC client for CopyNES (from official site linked below) and extract it to a convenient directory, being sure to restore the directory structure.
2. Download the CopyNESW client and extract it into the COPYNES directory.
3. Run COPYNESW.EXE. The menu should appear with only a small number of options enabled.
4. Click on the 'Options' button and select which parallel port to use.
5. Upon pressing 'OK' (and each time you start the program), a version detection dialog should appear for about a second. If you are using an older CopyNES (with version 1 BIOS), the delay will be longer (3 seconds) and the 'Microbug' option will be disabled. If you receive a warning about bidirectional communication, change your parallel port settings in your BIOS - ECP mode is supported (assuming your parallel port is compliant), though EPP mode may also work.
6. Read the CopyNES QBASIC documentation - a great majority of it is relevant to the Win32 version, and the rest should be fairly intuitive.

Links

• Kevin Horton's Official CopyNES page
• USB CopyNES, whose client is based on CopyNESW.