Kevin's post from the nesdev thread:
Well, Jason (gametech) came over tonight and we did a bunch of everdrive testing. Turns out his everdrive works fine on my HDMI modified toploader. We ran SMB3, Zelda, Double Dragon, Faxanadu, SMB, SMB2, and a bunch of other games and all of them seem to work fine. Overall I tested NROM, UNROM, MMC1, and MMC3 games.
The only minor issue I had was reset. sometimes I had to mash reset a few times before the menu would come back up. Once (out of 15-20 games run) I had to cycle the power.
This confirms what I said earlier about the ED working back in november. It seemed to work then and still seems to work now.
Turns out his ED is one of the very first made, and as such it has really old firmware on it. Rev 3 firmware.
I also have a "modern" ED that uses the latest firmware. This ED does NOT work on the Hidef nes. The menu sometimes comes up and the graphics are always corrupt- looks like uninitialized VRAM. You can tell the menu is there, but you can't start a game, it just resets. Sometimes it's showing an error screen I think, but you can't read it. I did not get this version to run a game.
So I took the rev 3 firmware off Jason's ED and put it on the "modern" ED, and guess what it worked just as well as his ED did! So whatever change happened between rev 3 and 4 of the ED firmware seems to be the reason. I put the latest version of firmware on Jason's ED and it failed in the same way the "modern" ED failed.
These are good data points on tracking down the problem I think.
I was thinking of making a video showing this happening.
Regarding the HDMI connector fit, I test fitted my toploader with the cable I have here and it worked OK so I thought it was going to be fine. The connector is recessed as far as it is so I could use the same board on the NES and the nt both. I tested so I thought it was OK, but turns out it isn't. Various cables seem to have different "tongue" lengths. I modified one by cutting some of the plastic off with an xacto knife and it only took me about a minute to do this. I was surprised how easy it was actually.
This board would work fine on a front loader I think. the plastic is much thinner on the back so the fit should not be an issue there.
On the next run I will move the connector out on a little PCB "flag" to fix this issue.
Like any other brand new high complexity product, there's going to be some things to fix. There's literally hundreds or even thousands of little things that could go wrong, so it's not unlikely one or two of these things will slip through. I tried to do extremely thorough testing here. This included 20 sets of CPU/PPU's, 4 different NES main boards (front loaders and top loaders), 12 or 13 Hidef NES proto boards I hand stuffed and reflowed, and 10 different monitors. There is also the HDMI Analyzer that I paid quite a lot of money for just specifically so I could debug the HDMI link on this project. Overall I am in fairly deep on this project financially so I hope it will eventually pay off, and that I will make a bit more than minimum wage for the hours I put in and the cash I spent for tools and prototypes. Overall 5 or 6 people were helping me test/debug it (it wasn't just 2 people as someone claimed).
Not a whine or anything, just stating what the facts are. Hope this clears up some of the loose ends people have about the project. I hope to be able to supply as many boards as the modding community can use. There's not going to be any limit. So long as people buy them I will sell them, barring any parts availability issues.
