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Advanced Nintendo Entertainment System (ANES) – NES Modded to Use 2 PPUs
- EvanAnderson 4mo agoThere's a nice video demonstration here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=V2kaV_m4iNU https://youtube.com/watch?v=V2kaV_m4iNU It would have been neat if Nintendo had set this up so the stock unit could have been expanded like this.
- excalibur 4mo ago> So, if you like my ANES and you want to get a better look at it, check the description for a link to my OnlyFans. BEEP! > ...for a link to my GitHub.
- foxyv 4mo agoImagine if OnlyFans was a subscription service to see your favorite personalities do electrical engineering and software development! Oooh lah lah!
- whaleofatw2022 4mo agoBut can it do a better bad apple?
- gkhartman 4mo agoReminds me of a NES that I overclocked when I was around 14 years old. It was the sort of silly thing a nerdy kid would do with too much free time on their hands, and didn't do much to improve the system. Most of the time it caused more issues than it fixed, but it was a good learning experience. This is far more exciting, since it adds functionality to they system. Maybe I'll dust off my old hacked up NES and do this at some point. If only I had the free time these days. Thx for sharing :)
- pipes 4mo agoWhat did it improve? Sprite flicker? Slow down? I'd no idea this was possible on real hardware!
- Graziano_M 4mo agoShould be able to fix a bunch of stuff. Slowdowns, missed frames, etc. The game only has a limited amount of time to do all of its logic before the VSYNC interrupt forces it to draw to the screen. Game have different ways of handling this, e.g. by rolling back and abandoning the changes, drawing whatever they have, etc. A faster clock should make it s/t games that don't always get done in time should at least have a better chance.
- toast0 4mo agoOverclocking won't help with sprite flicker. Sprite flicker happens because the PPU will only evaluate the 8 frontmost sprites active on a line. Sometimes you get sprites disappearing by priority, sometimes the software will alternate active sprites; software sprite disabling in some titles is probably harsher than needed (might flicker when there's more than X sprites on the screen, even if there is never more than 8 on one line)
- HerbManic 4mo agoIt was always fun seeing the weird things that would happen with over clocked consoles from the 80's and 90's. The most notable one I have seen was the performance change on Road Rash on the Genesis/Mega Drive. RR1 & 2 it just speed up the whole game. RR3, it just increased the frame rate and made it a much more enjoyable experience.
- truemotive 4mo agoOh man, A thing I literally needed right now haha
- arrakeen 4mo agogreat name following the NESticle lineage
- gwbas1c 4mo agoWhat I'd like to know is: Why did Nintendo allow the PPU to pass along another pixel color, but didn't take advantage of it in a shipping product? Is this a case of "you ain't gonna need it" overengineering; or was the PPU used in other products. (And thus these pins were used elsewhere?)
- NobodyNada 4mo agoThe PPU (and variants of it) was used in quite a few arcade machines, in addition to the NES. I don't know if there were any actual machines that used dual PPUs, but the functionality was likely intended for creating an arcade machine with dual-layer background graphics.
- ndiddy 4mo agoThe RGB PPUs used in arcade machines didn’t have the master/slave functionality, they instead used those pins for the analog RGB output.
- ndiddy 4mo agoIt’s a feature that doesn’t take much die space to implement, so if they didn’t need those pins otherwise I don’t see why not to add it. If it turned out that the PPU wasn’t good enough for what developers expected, this would have let them make a quick follow-up console as a stop-gap with little R&D expense required. If you want an actual example of overengineering on the NES, they put a giant custom connector on the bottom of every system that never ended up getting used for anything. They probably wasted at least a couple bucks per unit on that.
- StilesCrisis 4mo agoThey did use the connector on the Famicom multiple times, so it's not a complete waste. They just didn't end up bringing the Disk System or Satellaview stateside.
- gwbas1c 4mo agoAs the other reply mentions, the connector was used for the disk system in Japan. Nintendo didn't like it because of piracy and reliability issues; and then finally memory mappers rendered it obsolete. The disk system had a much more powerful audio chip. If you have a Switch, you can hear it on the "Excitebike vs" game that never made it to the US, or you can go on YouTube and look up the opening to the Japanese version of Zelda.
- fhn 4mo ago[flagged]
- QuantumNoodle 4mo agoANES? Like the homophone to anus?
- chews 4mo agomakes blowing cartridges to then stuff into the ANES and enjoy; homophonic behavior.
- whycome 4mo agoWait til you hear about the port on the NES’ bottom.
- zamadatix 4mo agoWhat? No, how could you have such a disgusting mind! Kidding :), sad folks downvoted you for the question though. The video breakdown highlights that the name is a joke in this section https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2kaV_m4iNU&t=250s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2kaV_m4iNU&t=250s but the other 4 minutes are worth watching as well.