GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[MRKane]

Thank you for the good will! Hopefully I'll be able to use our tecchies room at work (and the gear in there) which might make removing the present chips a little more elegant.

I've not been able to track down 4MB chips that match the specifications, but am open to suggestions there! The other thing would be finding out which expansion packs have the two chip slots - there's not much information out there on it.

I expect this to be yet another dead console and about as much of a mess as when I tried to make a left-handed controller for the N64 (which was "just" swapping the A & B buttons over).

The components are shipping at the moment, and given I'm at the bottom of the world this could take a while!
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[MRKane]

Of course we need an update!

I picked a mate of mine up from the airport, and his job is actually military grade electronics, he was only too happy to put the ram in as he was keen to see what happened himself. A while later and with a board that was professionally done I tried to power it up, and it didn't work. Testing the power supply I found THAT didn't work. Getting my backup...it didn't work when it had a few moments ago in a different console!

So...thinking the ram was causing our issues we called it a night, only upon doing some research there's a tiny note in one forum that apparently putting a cartridge in the slot without the casing on blows the power supply every time. Where was this note on the modding forums!!!

Next step: repair one of the PSUs or find another one...
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[MRKane]

Ok, turns out the PSUs have a resettable fuse (and I find this out only after we'd pulled one to pieces) and upon putting everything back together, attaching all of the other components etc. fired it up without a cartridge and it blew the PSU again but not before a *tiny* flicker of life.

I'll play devils advocate and go back over all of the ram with a loupe or similar and try to find any possible reason why this could be happening, but otherwise this is looking pretty close to a failure I'm afraid.
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[Trevor]

Doh...

Did you try booting cartless?

I guess it wouldnt help much since there is no data to see if its working or not...

hmm... I guess you can only re-read all posts related to ram and make sure the pinouts are the same.

I am really excited to see if this project succeds.

trev
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[MRKane]

I've checked and re-checked the sheets, and the details and everything seems square. It's the breakers being thrown even without a cart could only point to a short circuit somewhere within the system...which has (despite it being illogical) to be to do with the fixing of the ram.

We're going to pick over it with some of the gadgets from my work and also check the tracks and pads. I've 100% confidence that this ram should work - not sure if it'll impact performance - but there's got to be something tiny that's amiss.
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[AL64inthedark]

Trevor wrote:

I am really excited to see if this project succeds.

Yeah, me too. I don't understand most of what is said. But if something work I'll want to do it for better performances.

[MRKane]

Well a 10x Loupe and a naturally not working 10-220x digital microscope later I found the tiniest of bridges going from the power in to the ground (which was naturally RIGHT BESIDE IT) that was right under the chip itself. Ended up flooding the area with soldier and wicking it back up and then we got it powering up but not working! Small major victory anyway!!!

So two hours of pin checking later I've filled all holes, picked up any loose spots, gone through cleaned and polished everything but she's still not starting up.

I've checked and re-checked my data sheets (assuming that the ones I've got for the N64 ram were correct in the first place - anyone got some that I might not have?) and everything seems to be in order there, so simply put I've got to have done something wrong. Will get the aforementioned mate to check it over probably after christmas.

This is the part where I say: if anyone has any ideas for replacement ram parts - feel free to lay them on me! lol
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[Trevor]

Oh wow, glad you found the short, however with it failing to start I hope you havnt fried the ram, rcp or cpu... that might explain the lack of running...

Of course, any further ideas im sure are welcome.

I was actually getting butterflies when I read the start of your post. Im still hopefull

It really would be a dream to just be able to say "I have an N64 with 16Mb Fast RAM" even better if the RCP could be increased stabely (with game header reduction)

Trev
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[MRKane]

Well guys! Results! I got it going on Friday but given that I live offline couldn't really post anything.

Right off the bat I want to say that it's unstable as hell and would freeze, power down or generally just not work about half of the time. I'd personally put this down to the amount of tampering that I did trying to get it to work. Also didn't help that the flux I was using was old and rather aggressive - I noticed that it began to lift the substrate if left on the board too long.

Next thing I want to say is that the only thing I could video with was an iPad and it really didn't give good results.

Testing on the two main consumptive games I had (Turok 2 first level with explosion, and Goldeneye Cradle) I'd have sworn that things were *slightly* less stuttery and responsive - although I couldn't pick any difference in the videos I took. When walking around Cradle it seemed as though there was less movement between frames (you know how you can turn in that level and you'll be turning some 10˚ per frame). Multiplayer mode in areas with plenty of alpha (Caverns) felt a little smoother also - but again that could be wishful thinking from me. Naturally the worst (PD) couldn't run with just the jumper.

Now the really interesting stuff happened when I put the expansion pack in...
Hangs and crashes became rife with the expansion pack in the console, and happened about 80% of the time (for instance I gave up on Turok). HOWEVER: Objects/Rooms in GE and PD would frequently flicker and if anything the end result of this was that it was worse, and it gives us a clue that something IS different at least. Thing is that a system can only run as fast as it's bottleneck, which could in this case now be the expansion pack.

Oh, and Mario Kart ran swimmingly...but then again it always does.

Looking at this critically: I don't think I can chalk this up as a "success" with the console being essentially broken (and if I do this again I'll use a different one) - but for science we've got something here! Initially I'd suspected that programmers might have used the closest ram as VRAM or buffer but it'd look as though the objects/rooms in GE and PD draw themselves when called (can someone please verify that) and things are done fairly different from the direction PC computing went in. If it is something along these lines then it's pretty good evidence for there actually being a difference and not just my imagination.

The real test would be if there was a game that I could get a frames per second display happening in - I do have a Gameshark if there's anything anyone knows of.

Where to from here? Well the 4MB N64 chips have 36 on the end of the name so I'm guessing they're 4Mx9 36Mbit and dropping two of those in would be the obvious test, but for the life of me I've got no idea which chip I could use for that sort of replacement - thing is unlike the 2Mx9 they just don't really seem to be out there.

I guess it's time to overclock one of these puppies and try tinkering with the ROM header next.
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[Trevor]

Yeah, The problem with the expansion pak is probably due to different timings.

Im thinking prahaps that the RAM was of a different speed, even though it was supposed to be the same.

Unlike PC where it will sniff the RAM and use the slowest clock speed, I think the N64 simply uses what its been told. It doesnt expect someone to swap in different RAM, especually 2 different speed chips.

I think I will agree with you that something deffinatly happened as proved by the results you got.

Had nothing changed then it would prove nothing.

Trev
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[MRKane]

I made sure that the clock speed was the same as the proper ram - I think it's proof that the latency is affecting something as it's about the only difference (except the dreadful damage from installation!) I really need someone to give me some more information on the rendering path used before I can guess that some things are being put into the screen at a higher frequency than others...

Still, I'm confident enough that it's had a positive improvement to they and follow it up with some 4mb chips
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[MRKane]

Actually I realise that this isn't quite over yet!

I've read that some of the expansion packs were built with two 2MB chips instead of one 4MB...and I happen to have two of the faster chips left over so does anyone know which expansion packs were the dual chip ones? They're a bit pricey on ebay to take a gamble on getting the correct one.
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!

[G14Classified]

Damn, i'm not sure if im necroing this, especially so close to new years eve 2016, but I had never seen this thread and I do not understand most stuff being said here however it had me on the edge of my seat till the end, What happened? is this still being worked on? Even though it was glitchy getting the chip working is incredible! I really hope this info at least gets around to other forums where someone can continue on in case work stopped here.

[Trevor]

I would consider the project still in development.

Damn, has it been a year already... wow... time flies... it was like yesterday that we were talking about this.

As far as I know, objects are loaded into ram when called, textures are loaded at start(I think)
PD loads all at start to reduce Load Times during play.

So, if GoldenEye is delaying showing objects then they are being delayed into ram.

This could be due to slower timing or loss of sync or crc causing it to re-send many times before being sucessfull.

Trev
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[MRKane]

Kind of about time to do a follow up to this particular thread as I finally called the unit dead and consigned it to spare parts about a week ago (pulled a few chips off for use in other little projects), and I hate it when threads online go dead and you never know what the conclusion was!

I'm still actually looking for suitable 4MB replacement RAM chips but really haven't been able to find any. I'd conclude that the RAM swap did make a difference but wasn't able to measure it in any way, and the only true test I could have done would have involved an expansion pack also.

I was left wondering how much the cart itself was involved in all of this process, as well as which parts of the RAM were used with the RCP etc. no matter how I dress all of this it was a very "blunt instrument" kind of experiment

Still - not all is lost. For instance I can advise that were anyone to want and do this mod (or something similar) I'd use a heat gun in future to remove the chips, and after aligning the chip using a few soldered points, to reflow the solder already on the PCB onto the new chip. They seem to be stunningly bulletproof in this regard.

And I guess that closes that as bits of this console are going to be used in a region mod
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!