Twitch
06-04-2006, 02:24 AM
Welcome to this which I hope will be the first of many Articles on Classic Gaming Platforms and Games of our time, this one is on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
The Nintendo Entertainment System or NES as it is more commonly called was realsed in Japan as the Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom) on July 15, 1983 at which point the console actually bombed due to programming problems but after a motherboard replacement and a product recall it was re-released and by the end of '84 was the most popular console for the time.
After this great success Nintendo decided that they should release the console in North America and approched Atari to help them, who promptly refused as they were working on their own 8-bit console the 7800. Nintendo then decided to release the console themselves at the Consumer Electronics Show(CES) in June of '85, with a new case to make it more suitable for the American market, in a way it was made to resemble a VCR. The console was then realeased across the contry in February the following year.
For the next ten years Nintendo ruled over the North American and Japanese gaming markets and by 1990 it had become the greatest selling video game system in history. The console enjoyed a good life until it was eventually discontinued in America in '95, however it continued to sell in Japan until they too discontinued it in 2003.
The controllers on the Famicom & the NES were very similar in their design the real differences were in the Famicom controllers being hard wired to the console and containing a microphone. The console also had a fairly large selection of secondary controllers and accessories such as the Zapper light gun for usage in games such as Duck Hunt or my personal favourite the Power Glove which was featured in the 1989* film The Wizard. There was also the ill-fated Robot operating buddy which failed miserably.
The NES had some pretty impressive specs for its day
CPU: Ricoh 8-bit processor based on MOS Technology 6502 core, custom sound hardware, and a restricted DMA controller on-die
The PAL version of the CPU ran at 1.66MHz and the NTSC at 1.79MHz
It had five audio channels.
2 pulse-wave channels, variable duty cycle (25%, 50%, 75%, 87.5%), 16-level volume control, hardware pitch-bend support, supporting frequencies from 54Hz to 28kHz.
1 triangle-wave channel, fixed volume, supporting frequencies from 27Hz to 56kHz
1 white-noise channel, 16-level volume control, supporting two modes (by adjusting inputs on a linear feedback shift register) at 16 preprogrammed frequencies
1 delta pulse-code modulation (DPCM) channel with 6 bits of range, using 1-bit delta encoding at 16 preprogrammed sample rates from 4.2 kHz to 33.5 kHz, also capable of playing standard PCM sound by writing individual 7-bit values at timed intervals.
Picture processing unit (PPU): Ricoh custom-made video processor
Palette: 48 colors and 5 grays in base palette; red, green, and blue can be individually darkened at specific screen regions using carefully timed code.
Onscreen colors: 25 colors on one scanline (background color + 4 sets of 3 tile colors + 4 sets of 3 sprite colors), not including color de-emphasis
Display resolution: 256×240 pixels, though NTSC games usually used only 256×224, as the top and bottom 8 scanlines are not visible on most television sets (see overscan); for additional video memory bandwidth, it was possible to turn off the screen before the raster reached the very bottom.
It is also intersting to note the large number of console makers at the time that copied the NES, and tried to break through it's proprietary 10NES authentication chip which was placed in every console, and in every officially licensed cartridge. If the console’s chip could not detect a counterpart chip inside the cartridge, the game would not be loaded. Which caused Nintendo a few problems with other developers.
The console also had the fastest selling stand alone video game title ever Super Mario Bros. 3.
Well that's it for the first part of our Classic console series, of which I hope there will be many more to come.
-Twitch
*Thanks to Movius for pointing out the date problem
For Reference all of the Tech Specs and date info came from Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org)
The Nintendo Entertainment System or NES as it is more commonly called was realsed in Japan as the Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom) on July 15, 1983 at which point the console actually bombed due to programming problems but after a motherboard replacement and a product recall it was re-released and by the end of '84 was the most popular console for the time.
After this great success Nintendo decided that they should release the console in North America and approched Atari to help them, who promptly refused as they were working on their own 8-bit console the 7800. Nintendo then decided to release the console themselves at the Consumer Electronics Show(CES) in June of '85, with a new case to make it more suitable for the American market, in a way it was made to resemble a VCR. The console was then realeased across the contry in February the following year.
For the next ten years Nintendo ruled over the North American and Japanese gaming markets and by 1990 it had become the greatest selling video game system in history. The console enjoyed a good life until it was eventually discontinued in America in '95, however it continued to sell in Japan until they too discontinued it in 2003.
The controllers on the Famicom & the NES were very similar in their design the real differences were in the Famicom controllers being hard wired to the console and containing a microphone. The console also had a fairly large selection of secondary controllers and accessories such as the Zapper light gun for usage in games such as Duck Hunt or my personal favourite the Power Glove which was featured in the 1989* film The Wizard. There was also the ill-fated Robot operating buddy which failed miserably.
The NES had some pretty impressive specs for its day
CPU: Ricoh 8-bit processor based on MOS Technology 6502 core, custom sound hardware, and a restricted DMA controller on-die
The PAL version of the CPU ran at 1.66MHz and the NTSC at 1.79MHz
It had five audio channels.
2 pulse-wave channels, variable duty cycle (25%, 50%, 75%, 87.5%), 16-level volume control, hardware pitch-bend support, supporting frequencies from 54Hz to 28kHz.
1 triangle-wave channel, fixed volume, supporting frequencies from 27Hz to 56kHz
1 white-noise channel, 16-level volume control, supporting two modes (by adjusting inputs on a linear feedback shift register) at 16 preprogrammed frequencies
1 delta pulse-code modulation (DPCM) channel with 6 bits of range, using 1-bit delta encoding at 16 preprogrammed sample rates from 4.2 kHz to 33.5 kHz, also capable of playing standard PCM sound by writing individual 7-bit values at timed intervals.
Picture processing unit (PPU): Ricoh custom-made video processor
Palette: 48 colors and 5 grays in base palette; red, green, and blue can be individually darkened at specific screen regions using carefully timed code.
Onscreen colors: 25 colors on one scanline (background color + 4 sets of 3 tile colors + 4 sets of 3 sprite colors), not including color de-emphasis
Display resolution: 256×240 pixels, though NTSC games usually used only 256×224, as the top and bottom 8 scanlines are not visible on most television sets (see overscan); for additional video memory bandwidth, it was possible to turn off the screen before the raster reached the very bottom.
It is also intersting to note the large number of console makers at the time that copied the NES, and tried to break through it's proprietary 10NES authentication chip which was placed in every console, and in every officially licensed cartridge. If the console’s chip could not detect a counterpart chip inside the cartridge, the game would not be loaded. Which caused Nintendo a few problems with other developers.
The console also had the fastest selling stand alone video game title ever Super Mario Bros. 3.
Well that's it for the first part of our Classic console series, of which I hope there will be many more to come.
-Twitch
*Thanks to Movius for pointing out the date problem
For Reference all of the Tech Specs and date info came from Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org)