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What made the NES so interesting?

nicole.express

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Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#21

Post by PaulHoule »

sircastor wrote: post #15
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

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 am…

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.

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

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

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=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.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#23

Post by KerrAvon »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #6
eleusive wrote: post #3

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.

“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.

Every one of the Platform Studies books that I’ve read is a gem — I think I’ve only missed a couple of them.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#24

Post by freedomben »

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

You'd be amazed at how many times Nintendo almost died in the cradle!

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#25

Post by KerrAvon »

furyofantares wrote: post #10
jqcoffey wrote: post #4

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.

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…

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.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#26

Post by hyakosm »

stormbrew wrote: post #16

> 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 p…

In France we had a different color system (SÉCAM), while the other european countries were in PAL, but French TV were required to have a Péritel/SCART entry by law, offering RGB input. So the french NES was basically the european PAL version with an extra PAL to RGB converter.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#27

Post by phone8675309 »

sircastor wrote: post #15
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

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 am…

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.

I find this video great about describing Racing the Beam: https://youtu.be/sJFnWZH5FXc

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#28

Post by Taywee »

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

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#29

Post by phendrenad2 »

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.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#30

Post by Wowfunhappy »

stormbrew wrote: post #16

> 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 p…

What about the Sharp Nintendo Television? According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmhhDvncrFY, the NES has a direct RGB connection to the display.
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