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.

ghalfacree
over 3 years ago Gaming / Retro Tech

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.

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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.

ghalfacree

Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.

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