Talk:Cartridge connector

Orientation

I'm a little confused about this. Why does the pin orientation for the NES appear to be viewed from underneath the connector? Wouldn't it make more sense if it was a top-down view like on the famicom diagram? - Rainwarrior 20:45, 26 August 2012 (MDT)

Probably to be consistent with standard pinout numbering, which always goes counterclockwise and has pin 1 as top-left. It's also consistent with the edge on the mainboard. Not the best of reasons... —Lidnariq 20:53, 26 August 2012 (MDT)

It make it very counter-intuitive if you're trying to do something related to Famicom<->NES conversion. I could see it being more useful if you're soldering something to the back of a toploader board, but other than that case I find it really confusing. Would you mind if I reversed it to be consistent with the Famicom version? I could reverse the numbers alongside it, if it's important that they stay the same. - Rainwarrior 21:12, 26 August 2012 (MDT)

Ahh, I see that many Nintendo NES carts are numbered in this way, but I still think it'd be better just to have the numbering proceed upside down. As it is right now you would have to be looking at the card-edge upside down to see the same orientation as this diagram (and the numbers on the board would be upside down as well). - Rainwarrior 21:37, 26 August 2012 (MDT)

The hesitations I have to reordering it is 1- that the parallelism between the Famicom and NES header isn't as obvious and 2- the presented pin order isn't consistent with the industry convention. But these aren't good enough reasons for me to stop you. (But they're good enough for me to not do the edit myself)—Lidnariq 23:21, 26 August 2012 (MDT)

Okay, I have reversed the NES diagram. The numbering in both diagrams is consistent with the numbering on Nintendo PCBs, so I made no changes to that. I don't know what industry convention is for numbering pins of a card-edge connector, but I don't think it's relevant here, since Nintendo provided their own numbering on their PCBs (and if one of them meets the industry standard, the other is backwards). I added some notes about the orientation and how the two systems relate to each other. - Rainwarrior 10:47, 27 August 2012 (MDT)

What is the industry convention for card edges? I'm used to pin orders being counter-clockwise around a chip from the top. Is it different for a card edge? The Nintendo boards are numbered left to right on one side, right to left on the other, rather than clockwise or counterclockwise around the board. - Rainwarrior 12:41, 27 August 2012 (MDT)