Programming NROM

NROM and the other boards that make up mapper 0 are the simplest of all NES cartridge boards. All address decoding and chip enable handling are handled by the NES hardware; the only integrated circuits on the board are the PRG ROM, CHR ROM, and (in 72-pin carts) CIC.

NROM has two configurations:

• NROM-256 with 32 KiB PRG ROM and 8 KiB CHR ROM
• NROM-128 with 16 KiB PRG ROM and 8 KiB CHR ROM

Your program is mapped into $8000-$FFFF (NROM-256) or both $8000-$BFFF and $C000-$FFFF (NROM-128). Most NROM-128 games actually run in $C000-$FFFF rather than $8000-$BFFF because it makes the program easier to assemble and link. Some kinds of data used by the NES CPU, such as the vectors and sampled sound, have to be in $C000-$FFFF, and it simplifies the linker script if everything is in the same memory region. There are probably a few games that rely on the mirroring, but experiments with a multicart engine show that most can run with garbage in $8000-$BFFF.

NES 2.0 header

.segment "HEADER"
  .byte "NES", $1A
  .byte 2         ; 1 or 2 for NROM-128 or NROM-256 respectively
  .byte 1         ; 8 KiB CHR ROM
  .byte $00       ; Mapper 0; $00 or $01 for horizontal or vertical mirroring respectively
  .byte $08       ; Mapper 0; NES 2.0
  .byte $00       ; No submapper
  .byte $00       ; PRG ROM not 4 MiB or larger
  .byte $00       ; No PRG RAM
  .byte $00       ; No CHR RAM
  .byte $00       ; 0 or 1 for NTSC or PAL respectively
  .byte $00       ; No special PPU