Tuna Board Turns a Raspberry Pi Pico Into a Nintendo Famicom Cartridge Bus Simulator
Designed as an alternative to the older Kazzo, the Tuna aims to make Famicom preservation and development as easy as possible.
Pseudonymous vintage gaming enthusiast "Goripon" has shown off a new cartridge adapter, the Tuna, for Nintendo Famicom games — building on the earlier Kazzo but swapping the ATmega164P for a shiny new Raspberry Pi Pico.
"I received a Tuna board from a certain place, so I assembled it immediately," Goripon writes in translation, showing off his latest acquisition in a Twitter thread. "Completed with a switch to Raspberry Pi Pico."
The original Kazzo was designed to address the increasingly difficult task of dumping the ROMs within Nintendo Famicom cartridges, offering a simulated bus with a USB connection to a host PC running dumping software. While earlier designs existed, many used legacy interfaces like IEEE-1284 — a printer port rarely found on modern computers.
The Tuna is, effectively, a Kazzo clone — but where the Kazzo uses a Microchip ATmega164P microcontroller, the Tuna swaps it out for a Raspberry Pi Pico and its shiny new RP2040 dual-core microcontroller.
The board itself, and the firmware which gives the Raspberry Pi Pico its cartridge-dumping capabilities, is the creation of pseudonymous maker "norix-v." The hardware design comes complete with tuna_can, a custom debugger capable of writing, reading, and dumping data — and boasting full compatibility with the original Kazzo.
Design files and source code for the Tuna can be found on norix-v's GitHub repository, under an unspecified "OSHW" license and the GNU General Public License 2.0 respectively.
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