Twitch
08-04-2006, 02:55 AM
In the later years of the 80's after the enormous success of the NES, Nintendo were at the top of the gaming world until two competitors, NEC's PC Engine and Sega's Mega Drive made them realise they had some serious competition. It was then that Nintendo tasked Masayuki Uemura, who had designed the NES to start work on a new console to compete against Sega and NEC.
It was on November 21, 1990 that Nintendo released their first 16-bit console, the Super Famicom to the Japanese gaming community, and at 250,000 Yen the consoles 300,000 units sold out within hours. In Japan the Supe Famicom easily outsold cheif rival the Mega Drive, with Nintendo to keeping an 85% market share mostly due to it's third party support from companies like Capcom, Konami, Tecmo, Square Co., Ltd., Koei, and Enix. Nine months later the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (as it was to be called elseware) was released in North America with a new deisgn and Super Mario World in the box., and was then released in Europe during April of the following year.
Unfortunately for Nintendo the market dominace of the SNES that was seen in Japan could never occur due to the firmly established market hold of Sega's Mega Drive, with sega also having cheaper games and consoles as well as beign more popular with American gamers and families due to a large amount of anti-Japanese sentiment that had grown, with the NES being accused of shoddy workmanship and the SNES being called a tool of Economic War, due to the problems between the NTSC and PAL signal conversions, Nintendo fixed all of the consoles for free but many people still held on to the sentiment.
In 1999 North America stopped making the SNES as the Nintendo 64 had been released and the SNES had lost its market share. The Japanese however in classic style didn't halt production until 2003 with them still producing some games for the console in 2000. Many of the classic SNES games are currently beign reborn as Gameboy ports with popular titles such as; The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the past and the Mana series among them.
Also as a bad point for Nintendo there were many problems that people had with the console the first big one was that they had come to expect backwards compatibility, as was the case with the Atari 2600 and 7800. Another large wingeing point for the masses was the cartridge differences between the NTSC and PAL versions, whereas the NES cartridge had been the same the world over the SNES cartridge was not. The North American Model had a rectangular cartridge with grooves whereas the other models had a rounded base so one couldnot be inserted into a console from another region as this was another of Nintendo's regional lockout types. With another part of it being a region coded chip that matched to the console, the technologies were defeated through adaption catridges which allowed gamers to use other region games on their console.
Just like the NES before the SNES had a few cool add-ons one of which was the Super Scope an extremely large bazooka-esque light gun, which came with a variety of games on the cartrdige with it. One of the more popular western add-ons however was the Mouse which came with Mario Paint, a game that was quite simplistic in it's design but allowed for hours of fun for many people who were not big gaming fans and for young children. But by far the most popular was the Super Game Boy which allowed players to play their gameboy games on their television and in colour, although only a pallete of four coulours was selectable for orginal games. There were also special edition games that allowed fo r 13 colours during the game and 256 colours on the title screen. Also released only in Japan was the Satellaviewa modem which hooked into the base of the SNES and connected to the St. GIGA satellite radio station, users of the satellaview could download gaming news and special editions of games.
For it's time the SNES was designed to compete with the other 16-bit consoles of the time and so had similar specs.
CPU: Nintendo custom '5A22', believed to be produced by Ricoh; based around a 16-bit CMD/GTE 65c816 (a predecessor of the WDC 65C816, used by the Apple IIGS personal computer). And in most cases ran at 2.68 MHz.
RAM: The SNES/SFC 5A22 CPU has direct access to 128KB of Work RAM.
Sound: Sound Controller Chip: 8-bit Sony SPC700 CPU for controlling the DSP; running at an effective clock rate around 1.024MHz
Main Sound Chip : Sony S-SMP
SFx sound chip : Sony\Nintendo S-DSP
Video
Picture Processor Unit: 15-bit
Video RAM: 64KB
Palette: 256 entries; 15-bit color depth (RGB555) for a total of 32,768 colors.
Maximum colors per layer per scanline: 256.
Maximum colors on-screen: 4,096 without alpha and 32,768 (using color arithmetic for transparency effects).
Maximum colors per sprite: 128
Resolution: between 256x224 and 512x448
The SNES was an excellent piece of machinery but it never experience the same level of success as the NES, however it did have some of the greatest games on it with the greatest music and because of that below I've linked to two of the most memorable SNES tunes so you can remember the thrill.
Pictured from top left to bottom right; Pal Version SNES and Super Famicom, The NTSC version, The redesigned NTSC version, the Super Scope, The Satellaview, the Super Gameboy, A Chrono Trigger Screenshot, An F-Zero Screenshot.
For Music Chrono Trigger Battle Theme (http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/showimage.php?i=17314&c=209) and F-Zero Mute City (http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/showimage.php?i=17315&c=209)
-Twitch
Once again most pics and extra info came from Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org)
It was on November 21, 1990 that Nintendo released their first 16-bit console, the Super Famicom to the Japanese gaming community, and at 250,000 Yen the consoles 300,000 units sold out within hours. In Japan the Supe Famicom easily outsold cheif rival the Mega Drive, with Nintendo to keeping an 85% market share mostly due to it's third party support from companies like Capcom, Konami, Tecmo, Square Co., Ltd., Koei, and Enix. Nine months later the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (as it was to be called elseware) was released in North America with a new deisgn and Super Mario World in the box., and was then released in Europe during April of the following year.
Unfortunately for Nintendo the market dominace of the SNES that was seen in Japan could never occur due to the firmly established market hold of Sega's Mega Drive, with sega also having cheaper games and consoles as well as beign more popular with American gamers and families due to a large amount of anti-Japanese sentiment that had grown, with the NES being accused of shoddy workmanship and the SNES being called a tool of Economic War, due to the problems between the NTSC and PAL signal conversions, Nintendo fixed all of the consoles for free but many people still held on to the sentiment.
In 1999 North America stopped making the SNES as the Nintendo 64 had been released and the SNES had lost its market share. The Japanese however in classic style didn't halt production until 2003 with them still producing some games for the console in 2000. Many of the classic SNES games are currently beign reborn as Gameboy ports with popular titles such as; The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the past and the Mana series among them.
Also as a bad point for Nintendo there were many problems that people had with the console the first big one was that they had come to expect backwards compatibility, as was the case with the Atari 2600 and 7800. Another large wingeing point for the masses was the cartridge differences between the NTSC and PAL versions, whereas the NES cartridge had been the same the world over the SNES cartridge was not. The North American Model had a rectangular cartridge with grooves whereas the other models had a rounded base so one couldnot be inserted into a console from another region as this was another of Nintendo's regional lockout types. With another part of it being a region coded chip that matched to the console, the technologies were defeated through adaption catridges which allowed gamers to use other region games on their console.
Just like the NES before the SNES had a few cool add-ons one of which was the Super Scope an extremely large bazooka-esque light gun, which came with a variety of games on the cartrdige with it. One of the more popular western add-ons however was the Mouse which came with Mario Paint, a game that was quite simplistic in it's design but allowed for hours of fun for many people who were not big gaming fans and for young children. But by far the most popular was the Super Game Boy which allowed players to play their gameboy games on their television and in colour, although only a pallete of four coulours was selectable for orginal games. There were also special edition games that allowed fo r 13 colours during the game and 256 colours on the title screen. Also released only in Japan was the Satellaviewa modem which hooked into the base of the SNES and connected to the St. GIGA satellite radio station, users of the satellaview could download gaming news and special editions of games.
For it's time the SNES was designed to compete with the other 16-bit consoles of the time and so had similar specs.
CPU: Nintendo custom '5A22', believed to be produced by Ricoh; based around a 16-bit CMD/GTE 65c816 (a predecessor of the WDC 65C816, used by the Apple IIGS personal computer). And in most cases ran at 2.68 MHz.
RAM: The SNES/SFC 5A22 CPU has direct access to 128KB of Work RAM.
Sound: Sound Controller Chip: 8-bit Sony SPC700 CPU for controlling the DSP; running at an effective clock rate around 1.024MHz
Main Sound Chip : Sony S-SMP
SFx sound chip : Sony\Nintendo S-DSP
Video
Picture Processor Unit: 15-bit
Video RAM: 64KB
Palette: 256 entries; 15-bit color depth (RGB555) for a total of 32,768 colors.
Maximum colors per layer per scanline: 256.
Maximum colors on-screen: 4,096 without alpha and 32,768 (using color arithmetic for transparency effects).
Maximum colors per sprite: 128
Resolution: between 256x224 and 512x448
The SNES was an excellent piece of machinery but it never experience the same level of success as the NES, however it did have some of the greatest games on it with the greatest music and because of that below I've linked to two of the most memorable SNES tunes so you can remember the thrill.
Pictured from top left to bottom right; Pal Version SNES and Super Famicom, The NTSC version, The redesigned NTSC version, the Super Scope, The Satellaview, the Super Gameboy, A Chrono Trigger Screenshot, An F-Zero Screenshot.
For Music Chrono Trigger Battle Theme (http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/showimage.php?i=17314&c=209) and F-Zero Mute City (http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/showimage.php?i=17315&c=209)
-Twitch
Once again most pics and extra info came from Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org)