NoCIC

NoCIC

DISCLAIMER

Any use of this project is under your own responsibility. You will be responsible of checking the correct construction and functionality of your board. By using this project You will agree that I cannot be held responsible if it will destroy any of your devices, damage your computer, burn down your house or whatever.

Sponsorship

This project is kindly sponsored by PCBWay. PCBWay specializes in manufacturing high-quality PCBs and makes them affordable to hobbyist and professionals alike.

The range of services they offer include PCB prototyping, assembly, instant quotes for your order, a verification process by a team of experts and an easy to use, hassle-free order process.

I'm grateful to PCBWay for the help in evolving and testing this project. You can order the currently released revisions of the board from them, see the link below!

Introduction

This is a replacement of the NES CIC IC that implements the reset functionality, fits in a DIP16 footprint and... nothing else.

The NullCIC already does this, but I faced some issues with it where the NES sometimes failed to startup properly during a cold boot, and required a manual reset (possibly related to timing of my specific motherboard, even though the issues were not present with an original CIC installed).

Tweaking the cap and bodging a resistor on the NullCIC alleviated the issue by a lot, but I decided to go with something that allowed me to control the reset timing a bit more reliably, and went with a classic 555 circuit.

The values for the components in the BOM should provide around 500ms of time in reset at startup.

This board was tested with two of my NES units without issues, let me know if it works for you!

Hardware

The board was designed with KiCad EDA.

Bill of Materials

JP1 can be optionally jumpered to allow the 555 to reset the CIC in the cart.

Ordering the boards

You can order the board for this project at PCBWay and support me or download the gerbers and have them printed wherever you like!!!

💰 Selling these boards 💰

I you want to contact me about selling this project, you can reach me via email at 0hkzUNDERSCOREprojects6ATposteoDOTnet after properly fixing the email address by removing the digits and replacing the uppercase words with the proper characters.

Contacts via other channels will be ignored, as it means you did not read this document thoroughly.

"Collaborations" will boil down to the following:

• If you wish to produce and share this project at a loss or at cost, go for it. I am only asking for attribution and to let me know via email.
• If you want to do it for profit, let's discuss it. I'll probably settle for a rough 5% of the profit. Importing components is getting more expensive by the day, so this will contribute to me making future projects available for free.
• I will NOT do customer assistance for you or your customers. This is a hobby, not my job.

If this is not ok for you, you're cordially invited to go bother someone else :)

Authorized sellers will be listed in this README. If you find someone selling my boards without being listed here, it means they're stealing other people's work.

TODO

• There are some "reports" of overheating for games that attempt to glitch the CIC with voltage spikes if the CIC is not there. Find a way to test this with those games?