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What made the NES so interesting?

nicole.express

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Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#81

Post by batty_alex »

bennysomething wrote: post #61
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…

I've got a RGB modded NTSC nes too. I bought it so o could use with an ossc (open source scan converter, bit of hardware that does lagless line doubling to output to hdmi 720 or 1080 etc, though I'm sure you know this others might not). The results are way past what I expected and I'm really happy with it. However the RGB mod I got for my N64 to use with ossc has been really disappointing. I'm sure it would look good…

For the N64, you'll want to look into mods that remove the blur effect on the N64: https://www.retrorgb.com/n64blur.html

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#82

Post by Taywee »

vikingerik wrote: post #35
Taywee wrote: post #28

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

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),…

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.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#83

Post by 83457 »

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…

Related to this, I never knew just how bad the Sega Genesis composite signal looked until I switched to RGB. It may have the worst composite signal of any system ever.

Europe had RGB so I wonder if that was part of the reason the Mega Drive (Genesis) was so popular. The SNES doesn't look (much?) better than the Genesis when both in RGB, but SNES composite is much much better than Genesis.

https://youtu.be/tT9OnPjQKWY?t=116

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#84

Post by bullen »

butlerm wrote: post #78
bullen wrote: post #51

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.pn…

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…

Sure, but the RGB standard did not survive so the Amigas are for all intents and purposes limited by composite out of the box today.

Again everything can do anything.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#85

Post by bullen »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #73
bullen wrote: post #51

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.pn…

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.

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.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#86

Post by matheusmoreira »

phone8675309 wrote: post #27
sircastor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Love this channel. More about horizontal and vertical blanking:

https://youtu.be/Q8ph2OVqZeM

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#87

Post by [deleted] »

genewitch wrote: post #40

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…

[deleted]

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#88

Post by dylan604 »

bluescrn wrote: post #68
IMSAI8080 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why we joked NTSC meant Never The Same Color. SECAM = System Essentially Contrary to the American Method PAL = Perfection At Last

I thought PAL was 'Picture Always Lousy'

SD just sucked.

I want a time machine to go back and prevent the US decision makers to not fret about keeping a color system backwards compatible with B&W. I don't care to use the time machine to prevent war, making stock picks or sports bets. I just want to make my future career a little less insane by stopping this idiotic (in hindsight) decision. If there's enough time, I'd try to convince them to keep working on progressive scan and avoid more complications to my future career by not needing to deal with interlacing issues.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#89

Post by nemo44x »

lxrbst wrote: post #46
29athrowaway wrote: post #42

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.

>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.

It had to do with bugs, etc. And that a game wasn’t E.T. level awful.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#90

Post by nicole_express »

genewitch wrote: post #40

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…

I'd love to support this use case, but I don't know how? I mean, this is about as plain-text as a site can get without just being text, if there's some tweak I need to make to the site generator to make it work though I'd be willing to do it.
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