11 ms·

What made the NES so interesting?

336 points by zdw 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago
There were so many things the NES did right. For instance the color palette was designed with aesthetics in mind: it had 56 colors that you'd want to use, compared to the 216 colors of the web safe palette that must have been chosen by a physicist because 60% of them make me want to puke. The Atari 400 and 800 had an elaborate system for game-friendly video that couldn't touch what the NES did with tiles. They did amazing things with the TI-99/4A (like simulate framebuffer graphics with tiles so long as you didn't need to cover the whole screen... a trick you couldn't do with the character ROM talked about in this article) but it didn't have the brilliant end-to-end engineering of the NES... ... And of course the ability to extend the hardware with the cartridge took advantage of the falling cost of electronics AND fit with the business model that the cheap console is subsidized by expensive games.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  The NES colors are nice but not sure how "designed" it was - to get colors from an NTSC or PAL signal is phase shifting, so if the colors are in rainbow order (which they are) then each color is simply a phase shift of some amount and the "design" is which amount of phase shift. I was always curious why they left 8 colors black and why black and white was duplicated in the palette, though. Something like the C64 which used a "resistor bank" to pick the colors actually had thought into the individual choices of each color. What NES got very right IMHO was: - More than 16 colors - Adequate horizontal resolution but not caring about the maximum since the point wasn't to display text (256 pixels, not 160 or 320) - 2 bits per pixel with just enough palettes to be useful - no 1bpp graphics. - 64 sprites - so many sprites even if they were 8x8 - Hardware scrolling and multiple nametable support A lot of the magic in the NES was all the sprites - 64 is a lot for the hardware at the time, the fact they had the same resolution as the nametable, and easy support for scrolling. Also the CPU was kinda fast - 1.79MHz is speedy for a 6502 CPU.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    If you're aligned to the axes of the NTSC system you're going to form a grid on intensity, hue and saturation. There's almost no way to make somebody a better colorist than to take away their RGB sliders and give them something more like HSV. You get ideas like complementary and analogous colors "for free". As atrocious as NTSC was it's representation of color was parsimonious of bandwidth as well as compatible with black and white. I think it's got something to do with the eye being much more sensitive to green but RGB cubes wind up terribly unbalanced and "meaningless" in my way of thinking whereas the Nintendo colors are "meaningful" in that they are aligned with human perception. (Never seen anybody else do it but I run my Hue, Sengled and LIFX lights green on hot summer days to add less heat to the house... I figure the strange color rendition is not so bad because I'm either supplementing outside light from the windows or if is really hot the windows are covered with space blankets and I don't care how strange of a scene it is.)
  - LocalH 5y ago
    > Something like the C64 which used a "resistor bank" to pick the colors actually had thought into the individual choices of each color. According to Bob Yannes, there wasn't much thought that went into the C64 color selections. From https://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/2001/ https://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/2001/ : Subject: "Re: VIC-II colors" From: Robert 'Bob' Yannes To: Philip 'Pepto' Timmermann Date: 27.09.1999 I was involved with the development of the VIC-II, however the actual implementation of the design, including the Color Palette, was done by someone else. I have forwarded your message to him, but it is up to him if he wants to respond. I can tell you that the design was based on the principle that adding a sine wave of a particular frequency and amplitude to an inverted version of the same sine wave at a different amplitude produces a phase-shifted sine wave of the same frequency. The amount of phase shift is directly proportional to the amplitudes of the two sine waves. The VIC-II used the 14.31818 MHz master clock input (4 times the NTSC color burst frequency of 3.579545 MHz) to produce quadrature square-wave clocks. These clock signals were then integrated into triangle waves using analog integrators. The triangle waves were then integrated again into sine waves (actually rounded triangle waves, but good enough for this application). This produced a 3.579545 MHz sine wave, inverse sine wave, cosine wave and inverse cosine wave. An analog summer was used to create the phase-shifts in the Chroma signal by adding together the appropiate two waveforms at the appropiate amplitudes. The Color Palette data went to a look-up table that specified the amplitude of the waves by selecting different resistors in the gain path of the summer. The end result was that we could create any hue we wanted by looking at the NTSC color wheel to determine the phase-shift and then picking the appropiate resistor values to produce that phase-shift. Color Saturation was controlled by scaling the gain of the summer. When we picked the resistor values to determine the output phase-shift, we also scaled them to produce the desired output amplitude. Luminance was controlled using a simple voltage divider which switched different pull-down resistors into the open-drain output. We could create any Luminance we wanted by choosing the desired resistor value. I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue, saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor values, rather than having a completely unique set for each color. I believe that Commodore actually got a patent on this technique. It was certainly superior to the Apple or Atari approach at the time, as they ended up with whatever colors that came out — ours allowed the designer to freely select Hue, Saturation and Luminance. Since all of this was based on selecting different resistor values and resistance varied from chip lot to chip lot, there was variation from one Commodore 64 to another. It wasn't as bad as it could have been though, since all of the Chrominance selection was based on resistor ratios, which could be kept constant even if the actual resistor values varied. Luminance was more of a problem. A trimmer resistor should really have been used to pull up the output. This would have allowed the Luminance to be adjusted for consistency from unit to unit, however Commodore didn't care enough about consistency to bother with adjusting each unit. — Robert 'Bob' Yannes
- sircastor 5y ago
  I wrote an NES game for my senior project in university. Later, when I researched writing a game for the Atari 2600, I was surprised to learn that you basically had to write your own display subroutine, whereas the NES did that work for you.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    The system used in the Atari 400 and Atari 800 is definitely based on the thinking of the Atari 2600 in that you are really thinking about drawing one line at a time but you are getting help to do it This chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTIC is controlled by a "display list" that sets the strategy used to draw lines on a line-by-line basis. If you have 20 blank lines you can just skip past them and not waste any RAM representing them. If you want to put a line of text at the bottom of a video game it is completely easy. This chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTIA_and_GTIA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTIA_and_GTIA is controlled by the ANTIC and composites ANTIC's data stream it with sprites, tiles and characters. It's a sweet system and crazy flexible, made it easy to make games like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VDM8nC9sM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VDM8nC9sM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOV5C_wvP4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOV5C_wvP4o but it just didn't have it together like the NES system, or the even better tiles & sprites system in the original Game Boy.
    - syntheweave 5y ago
      It's interesting, though, to see the co-evolution of the Atari design strategy in the 7800, Amiga, and Lynx (the former explicitly being a souped-up 2600 and the latter two sharing design team in part). By the time of the Lynx there's a clear bias in the featureset towards "lots of powerful sprites in a fixed memory layout", so the alien nature of the earlier systems is mostly gone and it's become roughly as straightforward as a Neo Geo, plus a few little surprises like the retention of the old Atari "LFSR distortion" sound effects in the form of programmable timers as something you could opt to plug into the audio(which like the Amiga, is 4 channel digital, but the sound driver used in most games biases towards chiptune sounds).
  - phone8675309 5y ago
- nsxwolf 5y ago
  The TI-99/4A could address the entire screen with its tiled “bitmap” mode - its predecessor the TI-99/4 could not.
- phire 5y ago
  > compared to the 216 colors of the web safe palette that must have been chosen by a physicist because 60% of them make me want to puke. Most likely a computer programmer. It's just all the combinations of six shades of Red, Green and Blue that are equally spaced out. 00, 33, 66, 99, cc and ff. The NES colors are actually equally simplistic internally: 12 equally spaced color hues with 4 levels of luma (plus 4 grays, 2 whites and 10 blacks wasting space in the pallet). But it works so much better because it's done in the YUV color space, rather than the RGB color space. Then the analog hardware doesn't manage to replicate it's target YUV colors accurately (or consistently across models, regions and even individual machines/tvs), which adds character.
- Lerc 5y ago
  The Web safe colours were infinitely better than the standard VGA. Once I tried to come up with a good set of 256 colours for a fantasy console and found almost all of the existing options sucked. I Documented an analysis and what I came up with here http://blag.fingswotidun.com/2018/04/giving-kwak8-256-colours.html http://blag.fingswotidun.com/2018/04/giving-kwak8-256-colour... ( You can mouse-over the spinning colour cubes to view them in Lab space) I think I could come up with a better set if I were to do it again today, but I was pretty pleased with this attempt.
eleusive 5y ago
Folks who found this article interesting will also appreciate Nathan Altice's book "I AM ERROR" which looks at how the NES's various technical decisions and limitations influenced the NES's lasting cultural legacy. The book contains a surprising amount of technical depth combined with history, business, and sociology. It's really excellent.
- loloquwowndueo 5y ago
  “I am Error” is a book from the Platform Studies series, to which the extremely famous and well-regarded “Racing the Beam” also belongs - an awesome analysis of the technical features and restrictions of the Atari 2600/VCS and how they influenced the games that defined the console.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    Every one of the Platform Studies books that I’ve read is a gem — I think I’ve only missed a couple of them.
    - krallja 5y ago
      I’m having a hard time getting into “Spoony Bards…” because it spends so much of the first couple chapters trash-talking the SNES in generic terms.
      - ChickeNES 5y ago
        I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was very excited for it after Racing the Beam and I AM ERROR, but the negative tone made me put it down almost immediately.
- pinewurst 5y ago
  Another vote for that being an excellent book!
jqcoffey 5y ago
Principally the thing it did right, having lived through the era, is bring a real video game home with Super Mario Bros. At the time I had a C64 and an Atari 2600, but would spend every quarter I could dig up at the arcade at the bowling alley next door playing pretty much anything, but especially Super Mario Bros. The Nintendo was the first console to bring the arcade home and it was absolutely revolutionary.
- snarfy 5y ago
  Yep, this is what did it for me. I was playing vs. super mario at the arcade and was amazed it was available at home. yes, it was a bowling alley arcade
- furyofantares 5y ago
  Interesting, it never felt like an arcade game to me. When I'd go to the arcade I avoided Super Mario Bros. It didn't feel like an arcade game like Rampage. I played it on the NES first (and it was released there before arcades, though I don't think I played until 1989 personally). But I didn't own an NES at the time, so it wasn't that I could play it for free at home. SMB is a much better game than Rampage. I would also play Excitebike at the arcade, also not nearly as good as SMB. I guess in an arcade I was looking for simple high score games, I wanted to dream of putting my initials on, but I also wanted to be able to walk away when I died (where in SMB if I got to 8-2 then died I'd wanna go again/continue).
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    I found Rampage more fun as a concept than SMB, but it doesn’t have the replay value or progression that you really want in a home video game, where SMB does. I could never get into Excitebike. Controls always felt so awkward.
    - johnwalkr 5y ago
      Rampage is a great game but it’s slow no matter how good you are. With most 2D mario games they nailed the level design such that you can play faster with practice and it’s fun in the same way skiing a familier run faster than last time is fun. The warp zones help replayability too.
bla3 5y ago
What a great article. If you liked this, you'll likely also enjoy https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0 https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0 I'm not giving a summary since that video is most fun to watch if you don't know the punchline in advance. (No relationship to the video other than that I liked it.)
- ec109685 5y ago
  Agreed. I always wondered how games got so much better through the NES’s lifetime and didn’t realize the extent of the hardware augmentation in those cartridges. Brilliant move making the pins so powerful.
stormbrew 5y ago
> The NES is in some sense a composite-only system. While there is an RGB mod, it's quite invasive[...] This is something that a lot of even very plugged into retrogaming people don't really get about the NES and RGB mods. I think it's very counterintuitive for people now that there is no part of the system that operates in actual 'color' information. The NES' video output is composite from start to finish[1], with palette entries corresponding to approximate output frequencies for the color subcarrier. So there is no canonical palette for the NES - the colors produced by games varied by region, a little bit by unit, and especially because NTSC had trouble with stable color even by TV. So people imagine that RGB or HDMI mods of the NES are somehow tapping into a missing layer of raw color information, but what it's actually doing is intercepting communications with the PPU and modelling (on an fpga) an extra PPU that does operate in RGB, and then constructing a new video signal from that. And then you have to pick a palette, because there isn't just one. I have an RGB modded NES (a US toploader) but I doubt I will ever buy or make another one. At this point I think it's better to just use an upscaler, which will produce no less authentic a picture. The main benefit imo of the rgb mod is that there's less interference so the picture is clearer, even if you just output reconstructed composite from it. [1] There is actually a model of NES PPU that outputs RGB, it was used in the PlayChoice arcade machines (which generally used RGB monitors, not composite) and it has a palette that most people agree is ugly as sin.
- derefr 5y ago
  Wouldn't the palette chosen by Nintendo for use in first-party emulators going for a "nostalgic" feel (e.g. the NES Classic's https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kachikachi https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kachikachi) be in some sense the "canonical" palette? At least in the same way that an author's statements about their own previously-published works are "canonical" to those works. My thinking is that there was certainly an RGB palette that the designers — probably working on something like an Amiga — chose when creating the pixel art for the games; and that Nintendo likely has institutional memory, if not hard records, of what that design-time palette was; and so later palettes in RGB-based emulators were likely chosen to closely resemble those design-time palettes.
  - 5y ago
joe12312312 5y ago
I love nes
tiahura 5y ago
Super Mario Brothers.
freedomben 5y ago
If you have any interest in NES or video game history, and you haven't read "Super Mario" by Jeff Ryan, get it. I first read it about 10 years ago, but it was one of the most interesting books I'd read and should be evergreen. I also bought the audiobook, which is phenomenal. Read by the great Ray Porter, and DRM free on Downpour: https://www.downpour.com/super-mario https://www.downpour.com/super-mario You'd be amazed at how many times Nintendo almost died in the cradle!
- johnwalkr 5y ago
  I don’t have a book recommendation because they all seem to be flawed in some way, but the history of Sega is fascinating. The following is really rough: Originally an American company, it imported slot machines to American bases around the world. Those were eventually banned on bases and success was found importing automatic photobooths and coin-op games to Japan, and eventually Sega became a Japanese company. I glossed over hundreds of pages of details. It’s also interesting seeing what influence the American offices of Sega and Nintendo had in the 90s.
  - sircastor 5y ago
    Several years ago, Blake Harris wrote a book called “Console Wars” which is largely about Sega competing against Nintendo. It’s a great read.
- lukaszkups 5y ago
  can you please provide a direct download link? It seems it's unavailable for my country (Poland) - will really appreciate it!
Taywee 5y ago
If you like this kind of article, Retro Game Mechanics Explained is a channel with a lot of really similar retro game console hardware and software breakdowns. It's a really good channel that goes into a lot of detail and has fantastic visuals: https://www.youtube.com/c/RetroGameMechanicsExplained https://www.youtube.com/c/RetroGameMechanicsExplained
- vikingerik 5y ago
  Be warned that the Gell-Mann effect applies; you can't tell when a presentation is accurate when you're not an expert. I'm an expert on the Atari 2600 (wrote a homebrew game.) This channel's video on it isn't quite accurate. He overstates the case of how primitive the machine is, claiming that it takes only 39 bits to display the 2600's screen. That's not really true. The playfield (20), sprite (8x2), missiles (2x1), and ball (1) do total to 39 bits of pixel data... but a lot more than that is involved, many registers modify those pixel bits. There are two X-position latches for all five objects, four color registers, two sprite width/repeat registers, two sprite reflection registers, one register to repeat/mirror/priority the playfield, plus a few more bits in the "vertical-delay" (really each another latch) and timing (horizontal and vertical blank and sync) registers. Here's the list, with a total of 45 byte-sized registers, although not all bits are used and some are for nongraphical purposes (audio, collision detection). https://github.com/munsie/dasm/blob/master/machines/atari2600/vcs.h https://github.com/munsie/dasm/blob/master/machines/atari260... (starts at line 88)
  - Taywee 5y ago
    Thanks for the information. I actually don't know that much about the Atari, so I extrapolated from his NES, SNES, and GameBoy knowledge, which is very accurate (the Pokemon sprite videos are incredibly in depth, including a stream of him manually deciding a Pokemon sprite by hand over the course of three or so hours). Having done NES programming, I was surprised at the level of detail and accuracy in some of those. I suppose he might just be more experienced in the Nintendo home consoles.
    - vikingerik 5y ago
phendrenad2 5y ago
What made the NES great was what others have already mentioned: by 1985 chip technology was at a point where you could do hardware tiling and RAM was cheap enough that you could do nice color lookup tables. Also the NES came out during a video game crash, so competitors were holding back on making new consoles (their latest consoles were a few years earlier). Also the ability to do simple stored audio wave patterns and not just sine waves and white noise probably mattered a lot. Another little detail is the controller layout. Nintendo was the first to figure out that "shitty rubber joystick" wasn't a selling point, and a simple d-pad was infinitely preferable for real games.
- ddingus 5y ago
  Yeah, that D-pad was a big deal. So many "new" input dynamics possible allowed for more expressive and robust input. Platformers on a single or two button joystick, for example, just do not work as well.
- flatiron 5y ago
  And then proceeded to come out with the wii and forced motion games.
  - eropple 5y ago
    ...which sold eye-poppingly to a mass audience, while the DS and 3DS sold a ton to a more core gaming audience, and the two have merged in really neat ways with the Switch. (I am very much a "core gamer", I'm playing Triangle Strategy right now, but Ring Fit Adventure also owns.)
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    Technically, many games (such as the massively popular smash bros) allowed you to use the wiimote sideways as a normal controller.
genewitch 5y ago
I am not sure why this webpage is so hard to screenshot, but my main screenshot service can't do it (i get a 404 after it returns the URL), and in firefox directly telling it to screenshot loses a significant amount of text. I cannot complain enough, this is a simple web page. there is absolutely no reason i cannot capture a static image of it. beyond that, i sort of enjoyed a deeper dive, but the subject matter was relatively uninteresting to me. Technology used to have to be bent to the will of the group programming for it, and i'm sure with enough time and the lack of a release schedule from the three big CPU manufacturers, we'd have amazing results with x86 and Arm now, too. But it was a different time, and i do appreciate history. Sure do wish i could save the site as a .png, though.
- syradar 5y ago
  You can do that with the Capture Screenshot command in DevTools https://swimburger.net/blog/web/hidden-gem-take-screenshots-using-built-in-commands-in-chrome-edge https://swimburger.net/blog/web/hidden-gem-take-screenshots-...
  - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
    On Firefox you can just right-click > Take Screenshot.
    - genewitch 5y ago
      doesn't actually work the way it claims to work, see http://projectftm.com/#-b3CluYULJcy0JiPUjjUCg http://projectftm.com/#-b3CluYULJcy0JiPUjjUCg for the 19000KB screenshot firefox took, with missing text after the first 30% or so. With the European GDPR(?) stuff and general cookie alerts and floating ad boxes, i find that a good 20-30% of all web pages cannot be correctly "captured" as an image. Realistically, since i can literally scroll the actual webpage and see everything, there is no reason that a screenshot wouldn't capture the exact same thing, but it's 2022 and here we are. Sorry, my pastebin (projectftm.com) is one of the few that allows both arbitrary resolution screenshots as well as pinch/ctrl-scrollwheel zoom to arbitrary sizes. My screenshot bot uploads to a regular nginx webserver, however the screenshot id it generates is a 404. I haven't figured out how to adjust the timeout interval, as i think that's on the bot's home host side, and not the firefox side. the API has a timeout for receiving data from a remote host and if firefox takes longer than that to produce a screenshot it just gives up, even though the script has created a link.
29athrowaway 5y ago
If you wanted to publish a game for the NES, you had to go through Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo. He had the final veto power at the moment of publishing a game. If he didn't like the game, the game would not get published no matter what. This process ensured that the NES had only quality games. Yamauchi was 7th dan in Go, and at one point was the richest man in Japan.
- lxrbst 5y ago
  >This process ensured that the NES had only quality games. Probably some rubberstamp thing then. NES had _plenty_ of bad games though, actually the majority of games published were bad. See LJN.
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    I was so incredibly disappointed with some of those games. Like the BTTF game.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    It had to do with bugs, etc. And that a game wasn’t E.T. level awful.
- butlerm 5y ago
  Some companies did manage to produce NES compatible cartridges without NES permission, but it wasn't easy. They had to work around or defeat the lock out chip designed to prevent that.
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    Ironically, "Super 3D Noah's Ark", a bible inspired game, was one of such games, but for the SNES. The required you to put a licensed catridge on top of the game catridge, and the unlicensed catridge would piggyback on the licensed catridge for loading.
    - LocalH 5y ago
bullen 5y ago
To me the NES is the precursor of Apple and Google with closed systems that preys on the discovery of the home computer and creates waste (cartridges) when software can be written to re-writeable media (cassettes, floppies and network). C64 and Amiga are the precursors of the Raspberry, that while not 100% good; they atleast leave you in charge of your machine to a larger extent: http://move.rupy.se/file/commodore.png http://move.rupy.se/file/commodore.png Another interesting tidbit is that Nintendo wanted Commodore to design the Famicom but Tramiel bailed in the last second when the Commodore guy was allready in Japan on his way to that first meeting. Last but not least, the C64 had S-video before it even had that name, separating the chroma and luma. Not even the Amigas had that 10 years later.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Floppies and cassettes had slow access times and lacked the ability to use mappers to extend functionality. Pluggable ROM cartridges had a lot of advantages and were used by computer systems of the era too. Besides, Nintendo did have the Famicom Disk System in Japan, which used rewritable floppies.
  - bullen 5y ago
    Everything can do anything, you need to look at what the majority did. And not even 0.0000001% of NES/Famicom owners had a keyboard and a disk drive and out of those probably 0% did any coding since Nintendo to this day does not allow you to run what you want on your hardware unless you hack it.
- butlerm 5y ago
  The Amiga had analog RGB output that was used by everyone because high resolution text (640x200) was unreadable with the composite output. Composite was okay for playing video games (inevitably 320x200), but few actually did that. One RGB monitor that worked (and much better than composite) was good enough. That was in August 1985, about three years after the C-64. The Atari ST came out a few months earlier, and had excellent monitors, the problem was you really wanted two of them, one for high resolution (640x400), non-interlaced black and white, and the other for RGB low resolution (320x200) color. They were not compatible with each other. In the PC world you started to see digital RGB EGA with 64 colors about this time, but until VGA monitors came out there wasn't really anything to compare to the Amiga / Atari ST in the color department. VGA was released in 1987, and of course took a few years to become common. An amazing number of PC video games were still CGA (four color low res digital RGB) at the time, but that of course all changed a few years later when VGA became standard.
evancoop 5y ago
It seems tangential, but interesting, that a system that provided my childhood years with probably thousands of hours of entertainment did so with individual games requiring less memory than the average corporate spreadsheet. Has anyone attempted to calculate utility per byte? Certainly, the relative evolution of society would play a role (a cave-dweller might have found a few hieroglyphs entirely fascinating), but even with a certain adjustment factor in terms of the general complexity of dominant sources of information, Nintendo games would assuredly excel. As evidence, folks are still speed-running the original Super Mario Bros from 1985. Lindy effect or efficiency of "utility" per byte?
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  I expect a plain text file would win the utility per byte award.
  - evancoop 5y ago
    Possibly, but I doubt that 35-years later, folks would continue to read and re-read that .txt file for its entertainment value. Those few hundred thousand bytes of Mario Bros. code have been reviewed by so many for so long!
    - LocalH 5y ago
      Try 32,768 bytes (plus 8,192 bytes of graphics data).
shultays 5y ago
I always found mappers and additional hardware in cartridges fascinating. NES does not support saves? Just put a battery and additional memory in cartridge to store your data. No animations? Add more pattern tables and cycle through them during the game. An interesting way to keep your console's price low and add some extensibility at the cost of making cartridges more expensive.
holyyikes 5y ago
I don't think the NES is that interesting. Who said it is? It was just another machine that came out, had some games, got outdated, and then was replaced by something else just like all the rest. The SNES was the most "special" of the Nintendo machines in that it hit the sweet spot where the games were sophisticated enough to be really interesting yet still simple enough to be made by small teams and thus not end up as run by committee corporate turds.
animal531 5y ago
I loved how you could tell the complexity of the game by the weight of the cartridge. Some like Super Mario Bros 3 were at the top end, while those 1000 in 1 compilation games seemed to weight very little more than the plastic casing.

336 points by zdw 5y ago

There were so many things the NES did right. For instance the color palette was designed with aesthetics in mind: it had 56 colors that you'd want to use, compared to the 216 colors of the web safe palette that must have been chosen by a physicist because 60% of them make me want to puke. The Atari 400 and 800 had an elaborate system for game-friendly video that couldn't touch what the NES did with tiles. They did amazing things with the TI-99/4A (like simulate framebuffer graphics with tiles so long as you didn't need to cover the whole screen... a trick you couldn't do with the character ROM talked about in this article) but it didn't have the brilliant end-to-end engineering of the NES... ... And of course the ability to extend the hardware with the cartridge took advantage of the falling cost of electronics AND fit with the business model that the cheap console is subsidized by expensive games.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
The NES colors are nice but not sure how "designed" it was - to get colors from an NTSC or PAL signal is phase shifting, so if the colors are in rainbow order (which they are) then each color is simply a phase shift of some amount and the "design" is which amount of phase shift. I was always curious why they left 8 colors black and why black and white was duplicated in the palette, though. Something like the C64 which used a "resistor bank" to pick the colors actually had thought into the individual choices of each color. What NES got very right IMHO was: - More than 16 colors - Adequate horizontal resolution but not caring about the maximum since the point wasn't to display text (256 pixels, not 160 or 320) - 2 bits per pixel with just enough palettes to be useful - no 1bpp graphics. - 64 sprites - so many sprites even if they were 8x8 - Hardware scrolling and multiple nametable support A lot of the magic in the NES was all the sprites - 64 is a lot for the hardware at the time, the fact they had the same resolution as the nametable, and easy support for scrolling. Also the CPU was kinda fast - 1.79MHz is speedy for a 6502 CPU.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  If you're aligned to the axes of the NTSC system you're going to form a grid on intensity, hue and saturation. There's almost no way to make somebody a better colorist than to take away their RGB sliders and give them something more like HSV. You get ideas like complementary and analogous colors "for free". As atrocious as NTSC was it's representation of color was parsimonious of bandwidth as well as compatible with black and white. I think it's got something to do with the eye being much more sensitive to green but RGB cubes wind up terribly unbalanced and "meaningless" in my way of thinking whereas the Nintendo colors are "meaningful" in that they are aligned with human perception. (Never seen anybody else do it but I run my Hue, Sengled and LIFX lights green on hot summer days to add less heat to the house... I figure the strange color rendition is not so bad because I'm either supplementing outside light from the windows or if is really hot the windows are covered with space blankets and I don't care how strange of a scene it is.)
- LocalH 5y ago
  > Something like the C64 which used a "resistor bank" to pick the colors actually had thought into the individual choices of each color. According to Bob Yannes, there wasn't much thought that went into the C64 color selections. From https://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/2001/ https://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/2001/ : Subject: "Re: VIC-II colors" From: Robert 'Bob' Yannes To: Philip 'Pepto' Timmermann Date: 27.09.1999 I was involved with the development of the VIC-II, however the actual implementation of the design, including the Color Palette, was done by someone else. I have forwarded your message to him, but it is up to him if he wants to respond. I can tell you that the design was based on the principle that adding a sine wave of a particular frequency and amplitude to an inverted version of the same sine wave at a different amplitude produces a phase-shifted sine wave of the same frequency. The amount of phase shift is directly proportional to the amplitudes of the two sine waves. The VIC-II used the 14.31818 MHz master clock input (4 times the NTSC color burst frequency of 3.579545 MHz) to produce quadrature square-wave clocks. These clock signals were then integrated into triangle waves using analog integrators. The triangle waves were then integrated again into sine waves (actually rounded triangle waves, but good enough for this application). This produced a 3.579545 MHz sine wave, inverse sine wave, cosine wave and inverse cosine wave. An analog summer was used to create the phase-shifts in the Chroma signal by adding together the appropiate two waveforms at the appropiate amplitudes. The Color Palette data went to a look-up table that specified the amplitude of the waves by selecting different resistors in the gain path of the summer. The end result was that we could create any hue we wanted by looking at the NTSC color wheel to determine the phase-shift and then picking the appropiate resistor values to produce that phase-shift. Color Saturation was controlled by scaling the gain of the summer. When we picked the resistor values to determine the output phase-shift, we also scaled them to produce the desired output amplitude. Luminance was controlled using a simple voltage divider which switched different pull-down resistors into the open-drain output. We could create any Luminance we wanted by choosing the desired resistor value. I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue, saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor values, rather than having a completely unique set for each color. I believe that Commodore actually got a patent on this technique. It was certainly superior to the Apple or Atari approach at the time, as they ended up with whatever colors that came out — ours allowed the designer to freely select Hue, Saturation and Luminance. Since all of this was based on selecting different resistor values and resistance varied from chip lot to chip lot, there was variation from one Commodore 64 to another. It wasn't as bad as it could have been though, since all of the Chrominance selection was based on resistor ratios, which could be kept constant even if the actual resistor values varied. Luminance was more of a problem. A trimmer resistor should really have been used to pull up the output. This would have allowed the Luminance to be adjusted for consistency from unit to unit, however Commodore didn't care enough about consistency to bother with adjusting each unit. — Robert 'Bob' Yannes
sircastor 5y ago
I wrote an NES game for my senior project in university. Later, when I researched writing a game for the Atari 2600, I was surprised to learn that you basically had to write your own display subroutine, whereas the NES did that work for you.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  The system used in the Atari 400 and Atari 800 is definitely based on the thinking of the Atari 2600 in that you are really thinking about drawing one line at a time but you are getting help to do it This chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTIC is controlled by a "display list" that sets the strategy used to draw lines on a line-by-line basis. If you have 20 blank lines you can just skip past them and not waste any RAM representing them. If you want to put a line of text at the bottom of a video game it is completely easy. This chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTIA_and_GTIA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTIA_and_GTIA is controlled by the ANTIC and composites ANTIC's data stream it with sprites, tiles and characters. It's a sweet system and crazy flexible, made it easy to make games like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VDM8nC9sM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VDM8nC9sM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOV5C_wvP4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOV5C_wvP4o but it just didn't have it together like the NES system, or the even better tiles & sprites system in the original Game Boy.
  - syntheweave 5y ago
    It's interesting, though, to see the co-evolution of the Atari design strategy in the 7800, Amiga, and Lynx (the former explicitly being a souped-up 2600 and the latter two sharing design team in part). By the time of the Lynx there's a clear bias in the featureset towards "lots of powerful sprites in a fixed memory layout", so the alien nature of the earlier systems is mostly gone and it's become roughly as straightforward as a Neo Geo, plus a few little surprises like the retention of the old Atari "LFSR distortion" sound effects in the form of programmable timers as something you could opt to plug into the audio(which like the Amiga, is 4 channel digital, but the sound driver used in most games biases towards chiptune sounds).
- phone8675309 5y ago
nsxwolf 5y ago
The TI-99/4A could address the entire screen with its tiled “bitmap” mode - its predecessor the TI-99/4 could not.
phire 5y ago
> compared to the 216 colors of the web safe palette that must have been chosen by a physicist because 60% of them make me want to puke. Most likely a computer programmer. It's just all the combinations of six shades of Red, Green and Blue that are equally spaced out. 00, 33, 66, 99, cc and ff. The NES colors are actually equally simplistic internally: 12 equally spaced color hues with 4 levels of luma (plus 4 grays, 2 whites and 10 blacks wasting space in the pallet). But it works so much better because it's done in the YUV color space, rather than the RGB color space. Then the analog hardware doesn't manage to replicate it's target YUV colors accurately (or consistently across models, regions and even individual machines/tvs), which adds character.
Lerc 5y ago
The Web safe colours were infinitely better than the standard VGA. Once I tried to come up with a good set of 256 colours for a fantasy console and found almost all of the existing options sucked. I Documented an analysis and what I came up with here http://blag.fingswotidun.com/2018/04/giving-kwak8-256-colours.html http://blag.fingswotidun.com/2018/04/giving-kwak8-256-colour... ( You can mouse-over the spinning colour cubes to view them in Lab space) I think I could come up with a better set if I were to do it again today, but I was pretty pleased with this attempt.

eleusive 5y ago

Folks who found this article interesting will also appreciate Nathan Altice's book "I AM ERROR" which looks at how the NES's various technical decisions and limitations influenced the NES's lasting cultural legacy. The book contains a surprising amount of technical depth combined with history, business, and sociology. It's really excellent.

loloquwowndueo 5y ago
“I am Error” is a book from the Platform Studies series, to which the extremely famous and well-regarded “Racing the Beam” also belongs - an awesome analysis of the technical features and restrictions of the Atari 2600/VCS and how they influenced the games that defined the console.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  Every one of the Platform Studies books that I’ve read is a gem — I think I’ve only missed a couple of them.
  - krallja 5y ago
    I’m having a hard time getting into “Spoony Bards…” because it spends so much of the first couple chapters trash-talking the SNES in generic terms.
    - ChickeNES 5y ago
      I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was very excited for it after Racing the Beam and I AM ERROR, but the negative tone made me put it down almost immediately.
pinewurst 5y ago
Another vote for that being an excellent book!

jqcoffey 5y ago

Principally the thing it did right, having lived through the era, is bring a real video game home with Super Mario Bros. At the time I had a C64 and an Atari 2600, but would spend every quarter I could dig up at the arcade at the bowling alley next door playing pretty much anything, but especially Super Mario Bros. The Nintendo was the first console to bring the arcade home and it was absolutely revolutionary.

snarfy 5y ago
Yep, this is what did it for me. I was playing vs. super mario at the arcade and was amazed it was available at home. yes, it was a bowling alley arcade
furyofantares 5y ago
Interesting, it never felt like an arcade game to me. When I'd go to the arcade I avoided Super Mario Bros. It didn't feel like an arcade game like Rampage. I played it on the NES first (and it was released there before arcades, though I don't think I played until 1989 personally). But I didn't own an NES at the time, so it wasn't that I could play it for free at home. SMB is a much better game than Rampage. I would also play Excitebike at the arcade, also not nearly as good as SMB. I guess in an arcade I was looking for simple high score games, I wanted to dream of putting my initials on, but I also wanted to be able to walk away when I died (where in SMB if I got to 8-2 then died I'd wanna go again/continue).
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  I found Rampage more fun as a concept than SMB, but it doesn’t have the replay value or progression that you really want in a home video game, where SMB does. I could never get into Excitebike. Controls always felt so awkward.
  - johnwalkr 5y ago
    Rampage is a great game but it’s slow no matter how good you are. With most 2D mario games they nailed the level design such that you can play faster with practice and it’s fun in the same way skiing a familier run faster than last time is fun. The warp zones help replayability too.

bla3 5y ago

What a great article. If you liked this, you'll likely also enjoy https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0 https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0 I'm not giving a summary since that video is most fun to watch if you don't know the punchline in advance. (No relationship to the video other than that I liked it.)

ec109685 5y ago
Agreed. I always wondered how games got so much better through the NES’s lifetime and didn’t realize the extent of the hardware augmentation in those cartridges. Brilliant move making the pins so powerful.

stormbrew 5y ago

> The NES is in some sense a composite-only system. While there is an RGB mod, it's quite invasive[...] This is something that a lot of even very plugged into retrogaming people don't really get about the NES and RGB mods. I think it's very counterintuitive for people now that there is no part of the system that operates in actual 'color' information. The NES' video output is composite from start to finish[1], with palette entries corresponding to approximate output frequencies for the color subcarrier. So there is no canonical palette for the NES - the colors produced by games varied by region, a little bit by unit, and especially because NTSC had trouble with stable color even by TV. So people imagine that RGB or HDMI mods of the NES are somehow tapping into a missing layer of raw color information, but what it's actually doing is intercepting communications with the PPU and modelling (on an fpga) an extra PPU that does operate in RGB, and then constructing a new video signal from that. And then you have to pick a palette, because there isn't just one. I have an RGB modded NES (a US toploader) but I doubt I will ever buy or make another one. At this point I think it's better to just use an upscaler, which will produce no less authentic a picture. The main benefit imo of the rgb mod is that there's less interference so the picture is clearer, even if you just output reconstructed composite from it. [1] There is actually a model of NES PPU that outputs RGB, it was used in the PlayChoice arcade machines (which generally used RGB monitors, not composite) and it has a palette that most people agree is ugly as sin.

derefr 5y ago
Wouldn't the palette chosen by Nintendo for use in first-party emulators going for a "nostalgic" feel (e.g. the NES Classic's https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kachikachi https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kachikachi) be in some sense the "canonical" palette? At least in the same way that an author's statements about their own previously-published works are "canonical" to those works. My thinking is that there was certainly an RGB palette that the designers — probably working on something like an Amiga — chose when creating the pixel art for the games; and that Nintendo likely has institutional memory, if not hard records, of what that design-time palette was; and so later palettes in RGB-based emulators were likely chosen to closely resemble those design-time palettes.
- 5y ago

joe12312312 5y ago

I love nes

tiahura 5y ago

Super Mario Brothers.

freedomben 5y ago

If you have any interest in NES or video game history, and you haven't read "Super Mario" by Jeff Ryan, get it. I first read it about 10 years ago, but it was one of the most interesting books I'd read and should be evergreen. I also bought the audiobook, which is phenomenal. Read by the great Ray Porter, and DRM free on Downpour: https://www.downpour.com/super-mario https://www.downpour.com/super-mario You'd be amazed at how many times Nintendo almost died in the cradle!

johnwalkr 5y ago
I don’t have a book recommendation because they all seem to be flawed in some way, but the history of Sega is fascinating. The following is really rough: Originally an American company, it imported slot machines to American bases around the world. Those were eventually banned on bases and success was found importing automatic photobooths and coin-op games to Japan, and eventually Sega became a Japanese company. I glossed over hundreds of pages of details. It’s also interesting seeing what influence the American offices of Sega and Nintendo had in the 90s.
- sircastor 5y ago
  Several years ago, Blake Harris wrote a book called “Console Wars” which is largely about Sega competing against Nintendo. It’s a great read.
lukaszkups 5y ago
can you please provide a direct download link? It seems it's unavailable for my country (Poland) - will really appreciate it!

Taywee 5y ago

If you like this kind of article, Retro Game Mechanics Explained is a channel with a lot of really similar retro game console hardware and software breakdowns. It's a really good channel that goes into a lot of detail and has fantastic visuals: https://www.youtube.com/c/RetroGameMechanicsExplained https://www.youtube.com/c/RetroGameMechanicsExplained

vikingerik 5y ago
Be warned that the Gell-Mann effect applies; you can't tell when a presentation is accurate when you're not an expert. I'm an expert on the Atari 2600 (wrote a homebrew game.) This channel's video on it isn't quite accurate. He overstates the case of how primitive the machine is, claiming that it takes only 39 bits to display the 2600's screen. That's not really true. The playfield (20), sprite (8x2), missiles (2x1), and ball (1) do total to 39 bits of pixel data... but a lot more than that is involved, many registers modify those pixel bits. There are two X-position latches for all five objects, four color registers, two sprite width/repeat registers, two sprite reflection registers, one register to repeat/mirror/priority the playfield, plus a few more bits in the "vertical-delay" (really each another latch) and timing (horizontal and vertical blank and sync) registers. Here's the list, with a total of 45 byte-sized registers, although not all bits are used and some are for nongraphical purposes (audio, collision detection). https://github.com/munsie/dasm/blob/master/machines/atari2600/vcs.h https://github.com/munsie/dasm/blob/master/machines/atari260... (starts at line 88)
- Taywee 5y ago
  Thanks for the information. I actually don't know that much about the Atari, so I extrapolated from his NES, SNES, and GameBoy knowledge, which is very accurate (the Pokemon sprite videos are incredibly in depth, including a stream of him manually deciding a Pokemon sprite by hand over the course of three or so hours). Having done NES programming, I was surprised at the level of detail and accuracy in some of those. I suppose he might just be more experienced in the Nintendo home consoles.
  - vikingerik 5y ago

phendrenad2 5y ago

What made the NES great was what others have already mentioned: by 1985 chip technology was at a point where you could do hardware tiling and RAM was cheap enough that you could do nice color lookup tables. Also the NES came out during a video game crash, so competitors were holding back on making new consoles (their latest consoles were a few years earlier). Also the ability to do simple stored audio wave patterns and not just sine waves and white noise probably mattered a lot. Another little detail is the controller layout. Nintendo was the first to figure out that "shitty rubber joystick" wasn't a selling point, and a simple d-pad was infinitely preferable for real games.

ddingus 5y ago
Yeah, that D-pad was a big deal. So many "new" input dynamics possible allowed for more expressive and robust input. Platformers on a single or two button joystick, for example, just do not work as well.
flatiron 5y ago
And then proceeded to come out with the wii and forced motion games.
- eropple 5y ago
  ...which sold eye-poppingly to a mass audience, while the DS and 3DS sold a ton to a more core gaming audience, and the two have merged in really neat ways with the Switch. (I am very much a "core gamer", I'm playing Triangle Strategy right now, but Ring Fit Adventure also owns.)
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  Technically, many games (such as the massively popular smash bros) allowed you to use the wiimote sideways as a normal controller.

genewitch 5y ago

I am not sure why this webpage is so hard to screenshot, but my main screenshot service can't do it (i get a 404 after it returns the URL), and in firefox directly telling it to screenshot loses a significant amount of text. I cannot complain enough, this is a simple web page. there is absolutely no reason i cannot capture a static image of it. beyond that, i sort of enjoyed a deeper dive, but the subject matter was relatively uninteresting to me. Technology used to have to be bent to the will of the group programming for it, and i'm sure with enough time and the lack of a release schedule from the three big CPU manufacturers, we'd have amazing results with x86 and Arm now, too. But it was a different time, and i do appreciate history. Sure do wish i could save the site as a .png, though.

syradar 5y ago
You can do that with the Capture Screenshot command in DevTools https://swimburger.net/blog/web/hidden-gem-take-screenshots-using-built-in-commands-in-chrome-edge https://swimburger.net/blog/web/hidden-gem-take-screenshots-...
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  On Firefox you can just right-click > Take Screenshot.
  - genewitch 5y ago
    doesn't actually work the way it claims to work, see http://projectftm.com/#-b3CluYULJcy0JiPUjjUCg http://projectftm.com/#-b3CluYULJcy0JiPUjjUCg for the 19000KB screenshot firefox took, with missing text after the first 30% or so. With the European GDPR(?) stuff and general cookie alerts and floating ad boxes, i find that a good 20-30% of all web pages cannot be correctly "captured" as an image. Realistically, since i can literally scroll the actual webpage and see everything, there is no reason that a screenshot wouldn't capture the exact same thing, but it's 2022 and here we are. Sorry, my pastebin (projectftm.com) is one of the few that allows both arbitrary resolution screenshots as well as pinch/ctrl-scrollwheel zoom to arbitrary sizes. My screenshot bot uploads to a regular nginx webserver, however the screenshot id it generates is a 404. I haven't figured out how to adjust the timeout interval, as i think that's on the bot's home host side, and not the firefox side. the API has a timeout for receiving data from a remote host and if firefox takes longer than that to produce a screenshot it just gives up, even though the script has created a link.

29athrowaway 5y ago

If you wanted to publish a game for the NES, you had to go through Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo. He had the final veto power at the moment of publishing a game. If he didn't like the game, the game would not get published no matter what. This process ensured that the NES had only quality games. Yamauchi was 7th dan in Go, and at one point was the richest man in Japan.

lxrbst 5y ago
>This process ensured that the NES had only quality games. Probably some rubberstamp thing then. NES had _plenty_ of bad games though, actually the majority of games published were bad. See LJN.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  I was so incredibly disappointed with some of those games. Like the BTTF game.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  It had to do with bugs, etc. And that a game wasn’t E.T. level awful.
butlerm 5y ago
Some companies did manage to produce NES compatible cartridges without NES permission, but it wasn't easy. They had to work around or defeat the lock out chip designed to prevent that.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Ironically, "Super 3D Noah's Ark", a bible inspired game, was one of such games, but for the SNES. The required you to put a licensed catridge on top of the game catridge, and the unlicensed catridge would piggyback on the licensed catridge for loading.
  - LocalH 5y ago

bullen 5y ago

To me the NES is the precursor of Apple and Google with closed systems that preys on the discovery of the home computer and creates waste (cartridges) when software can be written to re-writeable media (cassettes, floppies and network). C64 and Amiga are the precursors of the Raspberry, that while not 100% good; they atleast leave you in charge of your machine to a larger extent: http://move.rupy.se/file/commodore.png http://move.rupy.se/file/commodore.png Another interesting tidbit is that Nintendo wanted Commodore to design the Famicom but Tramiel bailed in the last second when the Commodore guy was allready in Japan on his way to that first meeting. Last but not least, the C64 had S-video before it even had that name, separating the chroma and luma. Not even the Amigas had that 10 years later.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Floppies and cassettes had slow access times and lacked the ability to use mappers to extend functionality. Pluggable ROM cartridges had a lot of advantages and were used by computer systems of the era too. Besides, Nintendo did have the Famicom Disk System in Japan, which used rewritable floppies.
- bullen 5y ago
  Everything can do anything, you need to look at what the majority did. And not even 0.0000001% of NES/Famicom owners had a keyboard and a disk drive and out of those probably 0% did any coding since Nintendo to this day does not allow you to run what you want on your hardware unless you hack it.
butlerm 5y ago
The Amiga had analog RGB output that was used by everyone because high resolution text (640x200) was unreadable with the composite output. Composite was okay for playing video games (inevitably 320x200), but few actually did that. One RGB monitor that worked (and much better than composite) was good enough. That was in August 1985, about three years after the C-64. The Atari ST came out a few months earlier, and had excellent monitors, the problem was you really wanted two of them, one for high resolution (640x400), non-interlaced black and white, and the other for RGB low resolution (320x200) color. They were not compatible with each other. In the PC world you started to see digital RGB EGA with 64 colors about this time, but until VGA monitors came out there wasn't really anything to compare to the Amiga / Atari ST in the color department. VGA was released in 1987, and of course took a few years to become common. An amazing number of PC video games were still CGA (four color low res digital RGB) at the time, but that of course all changed a few years later when VGA became standard.

evancoop 5y ago

It seems tangential, but interesting, that a system that provided my childhood years with probably thousands of hours of entertainment did so with individual games requiring less memory than the average corporate spreadsheet. Has anyone attempted to calculate utility per byte? Certainly, the relative evolution of society would play a role (a cave-dweller might have found a few hieroglyphs entirely fascinating), but even with a certain adjustment factor in terms of the general complexity of dominant sources of information, Nintendo games would assuredly excel. As evidence, folks are still speed-running the original Super Mario Bros from 1985. Lindy effect or efficiency of "utility" per byte?

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I expect a plain text file would win the utility per byte award.
- evancoop 5y ago
  Possibly, but I doubt that 35-years later, folks would continue to read and re-read that .txt file for its entertainment value. Those few hundred thousand bytes of Mario Bros. code have been reviewed by so many for so long!
  - LocalH 5y ago
    Try 32,768 bytes (plus 8,192 bytes of graphics data).

shultays 5y ago

I always found mappers and additional hardware in cartridges fascinating. NES does not support saves? Just put a battery and additional memory in cartridge to store your data. No animations? Add more pattern tables and cycle through them during the game. An interesting way to keep your console's price low and add some extensibility at the cost of making cartridges more expensive.

holyyikes 5y ago

I don't think the NES is that interesting. Who said it is? It was just another machine that came out, had some games, got outdated, and then was replaced by something else just like all the rest. The SNES was the most "special" of the Nintendo machines in that it hit the sweet spot where the games were sophisticated enough to be really interesting yet still simple enough to be made by small teams and thus not end up as run by committee corporate turds.

animal531 5y ago

I loved how you could tell the complexity of the game by the weight of the cartridge. Some like Super Mario Bros 3 were at the top end, while those 1000 in 1 compilation games seemed to weight very little more than the plastic casing.