Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What made the NES so interesting?

nicole.express

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 127 posts

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#91

Post by evancoop »

It seems tangential, but interesting, that a system that provided my childhood years with probably thousands of hours of entertainment did so with individual games requiring less memory than the average corporate spreadsheet.

Has anyone attempted to calculate utility per byte? Certainly, the relative evolution of society would play a role (a cave-dweller might have found a few hieroglyphs entirely fascinating), but even with a certain adjustment factor in terms of the general complexity of dominant sources of information, Nintendo games would assuredly excel.

As evidence, folks are still speed-running the original Super Mario Bros from 1985. Lindy effect or efficiency of "utility" per byte?

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#92

Post by Moru »

smilespray wrote: post #59
mrob wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Refresh rate is linked to mains frequency. It doesn't have to be. Japan has a split power grid with 50Hz in the east and 60Hz in the west, but television frequency is 60Hz on both sides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#/m...

This explains why western Japan is so much further ahead than eastern Japan. Everything is just faster there.

There was a computer you could switch between 50 and 60 Hz with a button press. This controlled the CPU clock too so you got a faster computer with 60 Hz. But I can't remember what computer it was? Can't have been the Amiga or Atari even though they also could do it, has to have been an older one?

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#93

Post by eropple »

flatiron wrote: post #70
phendrenad2 wrote: post #29

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 a…

And then proceeded to come out with the wii and forced motion games.

...which sold eye-poppingly to a mass audience, while the DS and 3DS sold a ton to a more core gaming audience, and the two have merged in really neat ways with the Switch. (I am very much a "core gamer", I'm playing Triangle Strategy right now, but Ring Fit Adventure also owns.)

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#94

Post by Wowfunhappy »

evancoop wrote: post #91

It seems tangential, but interesting, that a system that provided my childhood years with probably thousands of hours of entertainment did so with individual games requiring less memory than the average corporate spreadsheet. Has anyone attempted to calculate utility per byte? Certainly, the relative evolution of society would play a role (a cave-dweller might have found a few hieroglyphs entirely fascinating), but e…

I expect a plain text file would win the utility per byte award.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#95

Post by thedeadfish »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #72
bennysomething wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And pal snes conversion of street fighter 2 was really slow! As were lots of games. All my retro hardware is NTSC now (I live UK which was pal territory). Though UK developers new what they were doing an optimised properly for pal. Goldeneye looks better on pal for example.

SF2 was not only slow but letterboxed and squashed down too. Unfortunately it wasnt optimised for PAL. Australia is PAL too. I remembered waiting for this game and being so disappointed. It was $135 also which was a lot. Modern games are like $70.

No game was ever fully optimized for PAL because it is literally impossible. The only way to fix the squashed down graphics would be to completely re-scale all the art. This re-scaled art would no longer fit in the existing 8x8 tiles so you would then have to completely redo all the background and sprite mappings, you may have problems with overlapping parallax layers no longer lining up to whole tiles, and might have problems with video ram since the re-scale art now requires more memory. Basically a fully PAL optimized game would be pretty much a completely separate port built from the ground up.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#96

Post by thedeadfish »

83457 wrote: post #83
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…

I think it might just be the NTSC composite that looks bad. I have never felt any desire to use RGB on my PAL Mega Drive since the composite output looks excellent. On PAL it gives just the right amount of blending to smooth out the dithering, but at the same time is sharp enough to resolve individual pixels, and lacks any sort of rainbow effect which apparently plagues NTSC.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#97

Post by 83457 »

thedeadfish wrote: post #96
83457 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it might just be the NTSC composite that looks bad. I have never felt any desire to use RGB on my PAL Mega Drive since the composite output looks excellent. On PAL it gives just the right amount of blending to smooth out the dithering, but at the same time is sharp enough to resolve individual pixels, and lacks any sort of rainbow effect which apparently plagues NTSC.

Gotcha. Certainly sounds like it is only NTSC composite then.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#98

Post by philistine »

wk_end wrote: post #32
derefr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the palette chosen by Nintendo for use in first-party emulators going for a "nostalgic" feel (e.g. the NES Classic's https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Kachikachi ) be in some sense the "canonical" palette? At least in the same way that an author's statements about their own previously-published works are "canonical" to those works. My thinking is that there was certainly an RGB palette that the de…

To throw a few wrenches into that: * As evidenced by the fact that the (RGB-based) Nintendo VS. System has a different palette than later emulation releases, even at the time Nintendo wasn't sure of the "correct" RGB palette (or has since come around and changed their mind about what that should be). * There wasn't really any sort of standard devkit. Different developers, different games, different artists used diffe…

> I don't really trust Nintendo to make any extra effort to provide an "authentic" experience in their re-releases

To add to that, the emulation of old games is handled by the NERD group at Nintendo, based in France (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_European_Research_%26...). Nintendo is not a monolithic block, and internal groups will have vastly different opinions on how things should look.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#99

Post by evancoop »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #94
evancoop wrote: post #91

It seems tangential, but interesting, that a system that provided my childhood years with probably thousands of hours of entertainment did so with individual games requiring less memory than the average corporate spreadsheet. Has anyone attempted to calculate utility per byte? Certainly, the relative evolution of society would play a role (a cave-dweller might have found a few hieroglyphs entirely fascinating), but e…

I expect a plain text file would win the utility per byte award.

Possibly, but I doubt that 35-years later, folks would continue to read and re-read that .txt file for its entertainment value. Those few hundred thousand bytes of Mario Bros. code have been reviewed by so many for so long!

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#100

Post by phendrenad2 »

flatiron wrote: post #70
phendrenad2 wrote: post #29

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 a…

And then proceeded to come out with the wii and forced motion games.

Technically, many games (such as the massively popular smash bros) allowed you to use the wiimote sideways as a normal controller.
Post reply on HN