Viewing profile — RetroSpark

You're right: many of TecToy's Brazil-exclusive Master System games were tweaked versions of Game Gear releases. That includes games like Ecco 2, Mortal Kombat 3 and Sonic Blast, b…

I don't know if they even had an emulator at the time - I don't think a 1980s PC could run a NES emulator at a reasonable speed. Another possibility is that they used a hardware de…

> On execution, 16-bit Thumb instructions are transparently decompressed to full 32-bit ARM instructions in real time, without performance loss. That quote is from the ARM7TDMI man…

Throughout the entire NES game library, almost no games use these illegal opcodes. Apparently as part of the licensing process, Nintendo would verify that games only used the offic…

> Link's Awakening feels like it shouldn't be possible in a single megabyte of mask ROM Half a megabyte, even! (For the original monochrome game - the later color version is a full…

220uF is correct. Along with the 75Ω terminating resistor inside the TV, that forms a high-pass filter with a cutoff frequency of ~10Hz.

Nice and compact! When I was writing a Z80 emulator I made heavy use of the tables in Sean Young's "The Undocumented Z80 Documented" [0] (chapters 8, 9 & 10). This 2-page reference…

> no instruction timing chart? Instruction timings are in the pink table on the left-hand side. For example, `ADC HL, BC; ED4A; H15` means that the instruction affects the flags as…

> Sony’s part number suggests it has a 45 inch tube inside. But in a rare case of truth in advertising, Sony advertised it as a 43-inch model. The overall tube size is 45”, the act…

According to [0], about 1.2 kg (2.6 lbs). Surprisingly this is mostly in the neck and funnel of the tube - the screen itself uses different metals because lead would affect its opt…

Yes, the aperture grille (hundreds of wires and a metal frame holding them in tension) is itself heavier than a traditional shadow mask. However, aperture grilles also use differen…

AFAIK the French NES is just a PAL console with an added composite-to-RGB converter. Although it outputs RGB signals, the quality is no better than composite.

The Sega Genesis did something similar - its hardware is a strict superset of the Master System's, so it can run SMS games natively. However, unlike the Game Boy and GBA, the cartr…

> A megabyte of ram on a machine with only a 16 bit address space gets a bit silly. Do you really want to manage 16 memory pages? The Game Boy Color has a 16-bit address space and …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperGun

It doesn't sound like they include the entire ROM, only the parts necessary to play back the recording. If you "take control", the game may try to access parts of the ROM which are…

Presumably this refers to Ricoh, who produced the CPUs and PPUs for both the NES and Super NES.

The Game Boy is much more similar to the Sega Master System & Game Gear than to the NES. Some games (e.g. Lemmings 2, Pinball Dreams, Spirou) were developed for both handhelds (or …

> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices. True, but there was a huge difference between a good-quality RGB monitor and a …

> a 32x20 array of tile indices Oops, that should say 32x 30 .

> The graphics chip can halt the CPU until it has reached the start of a new scanline. This seems similar to the horizontal-blank interrupt that's available on later machines, wher…

> The NES didn't have a framebuffer either The NES does have two nametables that perform a similar role, though. Instead of storing a 256x240 array of pixels, they store a 32x20 ar…

The other replies describe the lack of coprocessors, but there is one way in which Mega Drive cartridges got more sophisticated over time - increased ROM capacity. At launch, most …