How An Indie Developer Makes His Own NES Cartridges
If you know about the repro cart business, and indie developers who publish their own original games (or Mario/Zelda hacks) on cartridges that can be used with a real NES….you’ve most likely wondered how it’s done. Publishing a game on a cartridge that requires a chipset and circuit board, as opposed to sending out a digital file or burning a disc, sounds incredibly complicated. And it is. Andrew Reitano, an electrical engineer from New York, makes physical versions of the NES game he created, “Super Russian Roulette.” The good news is that he’s invented a universal circuit board that the NES can read any game from (original carts needed a custom board for each title). That eliminates some of the work, but not all. Reitano told the website Polygon what he needs to finish the job. “The typical process for me is to design and order a prototype printed circuit board domestically, prove out the circuit, then order a large quantity of blank PCBs overseas. The PCBs for the NES