3 ms·
Official NES mappers allowed up to 1 megabyte of ROM (512kb program ROM, 512kb graphics ROM). I can't really imagine needing more than that for an NES game. Ye
by throwawayspeccy 12y ago
Official NES mappers allowed up to 1 megabyte of ROM (512kb program ROM, 512kb graphics ROM). I can't really imagine needing more than that for an NES game.
Yes, theoretically you could stick an ARM processor in a cartridge and run most of the game off that, using the PPU as a glorified framebuffer. But many (most?) retroprogrammers are in it largely for the engineering/optimization challenge (or else, why wouldn't you just write a retro-styled PC game), so they draw the line for "cheating" much more strictly than even you have. e.g. some fan translators refusing to expand the ROM size of a game and butchering the translation to fit (Japanese text is much more dense than English), instead of using a larger ROM to fit a better translation. Or some NES homebrew programmers not using mappers at all and working within the constraints of NROM (32kb program rom and 8kb graphics rom). So I wouldn't accuse any of these homebrew programmers of "cheating," because if they were actually guilty of it, those in "the scene" would have called their bluffs long ago.
- curun1r 12y agoFWIW, I put cheating in quotes because it doesn't seem like cheating to me. It's only cheating the original specs of the machine. If the developers of actual cartridges were allowed to make use of that trick, why shouldn't modern day retroprogrammers have that option? But if a retroprogrammer were to use a mapper to achieve a 1 meg ROM, modern hardware would make that a decision with very little negative consequences. A programmer at the time might have to live with a game that cost well over $100. So cheating in quotes because people did it in their actual cartridges. Cheating without quotes would be something like breaking out of the emulator sandbox and embedding the Quake engine.