Nintendo header

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Revision as of 02:07, 12 January 2011 by Zepper (talk | contribs) (boo)
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About 33% of licensed Nintendo NES games have an header present at their last bank, at addresses $ffe0-$fff9, right before the interrupt vectors.

The info in them is frequently incomplete and/or inaccurate. When info on a particular filed is not present, a byte $00 or $ff is used for padding

  • $ffe0-$ffef : Name of the game, in ASCII, zero terminated (sometimes the name is abbreviated or replaced by Nintendo's code).
  • $fff0-$fff1 : PRG checksum (either the last 16k bank, or the whole PRG-ROM). Clamped sum of all bytes, excluding the two checksum bytes.
  • $fff2-$fff3 : CHR checksum.
  • $fff4 : High nybble = prg size (0=64kb, 2=32kb, 3=128kb, 4=256kb 5=512kb).
  • $fff4 Low nybble = chr size (0 or 8 = 8kb of RAM, 1=16kb, 2=32kb 3=128kb, 4=256kb).
  • $fff5 : Mirroring. ($04 = mapper controlled, $02 = hardwired to vertical, $81 or $82 = hardwired to horizontal.
  • $fff6 : Version ($01 by default, incrementing on revisions)
  • $fff7 : Unknown.
  • $fff8 : Maker's code, the same used for the FDS, GB, GBC and SNES headers. $01 = Nintendo, $08 = Capcom, etc.
  • $fff9 : Unknown.