Gamestation / Rumblestation Mapper Info --------------------------------------- K.Horton 11/07/2000 V1.0 -------------------------- I have assigned this mapper #46 (that's 46 decimal) What is it: The Gamestation (or is that Rumblestation?) is a clear blue hand-held Thing in the shape of a Dreamcast controller. In fact, it appears they just used the shell from a Dreamcast controller and plopped an NES on a Chip(tm) and integral multicart into it. The RF modulator is inside the battery compartment! Unlike most of the "NES in a controller" dealies, this one is actually legal and is loaded with 15 of the hottest Colordreams games. :-) Also, unlike most of the others, it is cheap. A mere $25 at your local JC Penny's store. There seems to be some confusion as to what to call it- the box is marked "Gamestation" while the unit and the menu are marked "Rumble Station". The unit is of course NTSC, and has handy A/V jacks out the back along with the RF modulator situated in the battery compartment. It also has a very odd "feature" on it that I can't figure out. Since it is the body of a Dreamcast controller, it has a place for a "rumble motor" in it. The motor is mounted, and every time you hit the A or B button, the motor runs, causing the whole works to vibrate! Not soon after I took it out of the box, it came apart and I cut the damn wire to the motor!! -------------------------- The guts: Internally, there are 2 circuit boards; one board has the pads for all the buttons and the 7805 5V regulator; while the other board is the actual NES gut. On the NES gut, there is a glop-topped NES on a Chip(tm) mounted to the board, 4 TTL chips (LS377, LS161*2, LS20), and 2 glop-topped ROMs on little carrier boards which are surface-mounted. I had *fun* reading those damn ROMs in there too. Used a hot-air gun to desolder them from the board; attached some split up ribbon cable to the "pins" which was attached to a 32 pin DIP plug. I tried reading them in the EPROM programmer, but the ROMs were too slow, so I read them 256K at a time through CopyNES, plugged into a socketed VRC6 board. -------------------------- How to work it good: Like the last couple mappers I have RE'd, this one is two cascaded mappers. Since these are Colordreams games, it has the usual Colordreams mapper for each game: Writing anywhere to 08000h-0FFFFh sets the bankswitch register. 7 bit 0 -------- xCCCxxxP The "C" bits select an 8K CHR ROM page, and the "P" bits select a 32K PRG ROM page. Each game has 64K of CHR ROM space and 64K of PRG ROM space. "x" bits are not used and can be ignored. The value of this register at powerup is random. Also, the ROM is not disabled during writes so there can be bus conflicts. --------- In conjunction with the above mapper, there is a "game select" register which selects which 64K PRG / 64K CHR bank that the NES will "see". You access this by writing to 06000h-07FFFh. Since nothing is mapped here, there are no bus conflicts. 7 bit 0 -------- AAAABBBB The "A" bits control which 64K CHR ROM page is in use, and the "B" bits control which 64K PRG ROM page is in use. There are a total of 16 64K/64K blocks for a total ROM size of 1Mbyte PRG and 1Mbyte CHR. Upon powerup or reset, this register is CLEARED, so the first 64K page of each PRG and CHR is used (which holds the menu, of course). --------- Mirroring is fixed and is set to vertical for all games.