Talk:Mapper

Allocations

By FCEUX 2.2.1, they allocated mapper 160 to describe an undersize NINA-003-006 board (32k PRG, 16k CHR). This seems superfluous. They also allocated mapper 181 to describe another board like iNES Mapper 185 that didn't fit with the existing heuristic. It would be nice to take the opportunity to promote NES 2.0 submappers#iNES Mapper 185. —Lidnariq (talk) 21:41, 23 June 2013 (MDT)

Also, wasn't 256-511 supposed to be for developers or debugging use? I need to request a reserved number for future hardware designs. I'll probably go find the IRC channel for that.  ;) BTW: The documentation for NES 2.0 header format has different allocation planes. It's best to fix this BEFORE someone goes and tries to update/make any mapper code libraries. Again, going to bring this to attention of mods in chat. alphamule (talk) 13:51, 29 August 2014 (MDT)

Rule of thumb: once you have final hardware, then you can get a mapper #. Before then, pick something arbitrary and otherwise unusable such as m100, or use UNIF. There's more theoretical possible mappers than there will ever be space for. —Lidnariq (talk) 14:40, 29 August 2014 (MDT)

In the plan as described by KH in the original NES 2.0 doc, 256-511 were to be filled after 0-255 had been filled. Because of the continuing pace of new Chinese discoveries since then, a revised, Unicode-inspired plan splits this into 256-511 for western games and 512-767 for eastern games. Presently, 3840-4095 are reserved for private use, as well as 100 and 248. --Tepples (talk) 15:34, 29 August 2014 (MDT)

Cool, thanks for the info! This should be helpful to future readers, as well. I found out that blargg is working on a similar project so I'm waiting for a PM response. I also need to get a working NES to test the hardware out on. alphamule (talk) 07:42, 30 August 2014 (MDT)

unicode joke terms

Might we rename "Supplementary Multilingual Plane" and "Supplementary Ideographic Plane"? Jokes about the unicode standard are rather obscure, and don't help anyone understand what these categories are for. - Rainwarrior (talk) 16:33, 16 April 2015 (MDT)

Jokes about unicode ?! I would never have guessed that was some. Anyways, jokes do not belong to here.Bregalad (talk) 04:12, 17 April 2015 (MDT)

So, the second question to ask is what to name them. From what I can tell, the two planes are meant to distinguish mappers for new games (plane 1) from mappers that are used for illegal compilations/reproductions/modifications (plane 2). Presumably the idea is that emulator authors may wish to de-prioritize pirate mappers that don't contribute new games to the library. There's a bit about "east asia" in the current description which seems unnecessary to me; shouldn't pirate carts from any region be included here? (Russian? Brazilian?) China probably has the most prolific market for it, sure, but I don't think that needs to be part of the plane's definition. My suggestion:

Plane 0: iNES 1

• Still has a few slots open for new homebrew?
• Put new pirate mappers in plane 2, not here.

Plane 1: Homebrew

• New games developed for newly created mappers
• Undiscovered commercial-era mappers (if any exist)

Plane 2: Pirate

• Multicarts used to illegally compile existing games
• Modifications and hacks of existing games

- Rainwarrior (talk) 10:06, 17 April 2015 (MDT)

True, title hacks, graphics hacks, pure mapper hacks, and multicarts "that don't contribute new games to the library." But not all games made for the East Asian market fall into these categories. Some are ports from a more powerful system, such as Final Fantasy VII, Pokemon, and Somari. Some are original games (ab)using others' characters, such as Kart Fighter and various Pokemon and Harry Potter-themed games. But what makes East Asian games stand out from games for other markets is provision in the mapper for writing systems with more than a hundred characters, which needs either CHR RAM, ExGrafix, or precomposed phrases. (See CHR ROM vs. CHR RAM.) Games for Russian and Brazilian markets can get away with assuming a 1:1 relationship among tiles, glyphs, and characters. Besides, with the deprecation of UNIF, we need to allocate mappers for a bunch of CaH4e3 dumps, and separating out the Chinese stuff will help keep that effort from colliding with homebrew too much. So I've renamed the planes to "Plane 1" and "Plane 2" but left the East Asian wording. --Tepples (talk) 17:45, 19 April 2015 (MDT)

Okay, so you're not trying to separate pirate/multicart from homebrew/legitimate? Your goal is just to separate them by language/region? The language in place right now doesn't seem to mention an appropriate place for new pirate stuff, unless it already falls in the East-Asian category. You should probably write a description that designates that material to one plane or another, so that it's clear where to allocate. Of course, nobody has wanted to allocate anything yet, except zzo38 who appears to have pre-allocated 380, despite not having released any ROMs for it? I'm never going to be the maintainer of pirate mapper allocation, so I don't feel very strongly about how they are specifically organized. I just found the names borrowed from unicode the opposite of helpful when trying to figure out what the planes were being designated for. - Rainwarrior (talk) 21:09, 20 April 2015 (MDT)