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"Road Riot 4WD" just needed a good cleaning -- it now plays perfectly! I guess that capacitor isn't needed after all to make the cart work. Can someone tell me what purpose they serve on homebrew EPROMS?
A capacitor basicly serves the function of blocking DC voltages and allow AC voltages to pass through (filtering) or used as a means of storing electrical energy.
The capacitors used for the cartridges are called bypass capacitors. They're typically of the value of .01 or .1 uf (microfarads). They're used to filter out any remaining fluctuations, or ripple, from the DC supply voltages. It is recommended in circuit design to have one of these capacitors fore each logic chip on a board. The capacitors are placed as close as possible to the component they are filtering the DC voltage for.
Here's a web page that can go into more detail:
http://www.seattlero...n97/basics.html
Glenn