The modern answer for playing NES game carts on any smart device! USB-NES turns your NES carts into a library of flash drives that work on any modern OS. Within the USB-NES drive is the digital contents of the NES cart ROMs, including any battery-backed save RAM, represented with the defacto .NES and .SAV file standards. You run your cart on an NES emulator just by dragging and dropping the .NES file from the flash drive. It is also possible to read and replace the contents of battery-backed save game RAMs, allowing for greater save game play management. Plug and play, compact and easy to use, USB-NES is the legit way to play thousands of NES game carts on any modern smart device.
Download the USB-NES lite Owner’s Manual
Download NES Graphics Demo
(Runs on real NTSC NES/Famicom hardware or most modern NES Emulators)Download
Download USB-NES .STL files for 3D Printed Case
(4 x #4-40 x 1″ machine screws &
2 x #4-40 x 11/16″ machine screws required)Download
As of this writing, all known stable public releases of NES emulation software for smart devices and such seem to be compatible with USB-NES, and this means the ability to load the .NES cart ROMs via the USB-NES file system directly. This means you do not have to create a local digital copy of the .NES ROM file to play the game; the emulator loads the game directly from the NES cart.
USB-NES Firmware Upgrades & Mapper Compatibility Page
USB-NES has support for over 40 cart mapper types, homebrew flash cart support, a manual mapper override mode, plus save game file importing /exporting and USB-upgrade capability. Firmware updates for USB-NES will become available as new mappers are discovered and bug fixes are made.
Manual Mode: Auto-detection Override
Occasionally USB-NES can not automatically identify a cartridge properly, even if it seems that it should be able to. In these unusual cases, there is a way to tell USB-NES exactly how to read out a NES game boardset by creating a mapper abstract and enabling the manual mode.
NES 2.0 Support
USB-NES supports the NES 2.0 specification, which adds extra flags and information about the board set hardware detected in the cartridge when rendering the NES ROM header. However by default it is disabled since many emulators do not support NES ROMs with the v2.0 identifier set. To enable NES 2.0, open the SETTINGS.TXT file in the root directory of USB-NES drive and set the NES_2.0___enable parameter to = 1.