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What made the NES so interesting?

nicole.express

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Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#101

Post by tenebrisalietum »

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…

When I was young and would play NES, it was usually on an older CRT TV and the NES was connected via the RF connector. So you had the RF interference, and the fine tuning certainly added things because often it had to be adjusted, and then anything with tint, brightness, etc. was adjusted until it looked good in the room. Some problematic TVs had bleeding colors, etc. or brightness issues, or the antenna connector was broken, causing fuzziness, etc.

Take the analog path from NES to TV in that common situation, then the second analog path inside the TV generating the color, then NTSC color/lum separation limitations, and "crisp" or "accurate" is something that couldn't describe the results.

On nesdev.com there's at least one thread where quite a few people are discussing about the best way to capture the color palette from video sources, and argument that there really isn't a "golden palette" because each TV was different and NTSC quirks: a pixel sent to a CRT TV could have different colors depending on its position and the colors/luminance before and after.

So CRT/NTSC fuzziness is part of the memory and nostalgia. I like the NTSC emulation options in FCEUX which do a really good job of the color fringing and smearing that was on CRT TVs and really make it "look" like how it was when I was young.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#102

Post by dylan604 »

Moru wrote: post #92
smilespray wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are you thinking of the Turbo button on PCs?

I've personally never seen the ability to switch from mains frequency. That's a switch on the back of the PSU that typical goes from 240v or 120v.

The turbo button and mains frequency are 2 totally different things.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#103

Post by butlerm »

bullen wrote: post #84
butlerm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The analog RGB signals from an Amiga are so standard that you can easily break them out and plug into almost any analog RGB monitor, including any decent VGA monitor with an off the shelf adapter. Composite support is an aberration and no one in their right mind would run an Amiga using composite only for any significant period of time, and it has always been that way. It was a waste of hardware, they should have left it out, almost no one ever used it.

Of course these days HDMI conversion is better, but that is also the case for nearly any video signal you want to display from more than a couple of decades ago.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#104

Post by sircastor »

HideousKojima wrote: post #36
sircastor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot in SMB that we take for granted, but I didn’t understand as a kid. The physics system made the action feel real. The the subtle animation of the coins rotating in the air (actually part of the background, interestingly) gave the levels fullness. It was a really impressive achievement compared to the competition at the time (which of course had been destroyed by the video game crash of 1983)

The coins in SMB don't rotate. They have a glow animation (as do the question mark blocks) but no spinning.

You’re right! I got them mixed up.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#105

Post by sircastor »

johnwalkr wrote: post #47
freedomben wrote: post #24

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…

I don’t have a book recommendation because they all seem to be flawed in some way, but the history of Sega is fascinating. The following is really rough: Originally an American company, it imported slot machines to American bases around the world. Those were eventually banned on bases and success was found importing automatic photobooths and coin-op games to Japan, and eventually Sega became a Japanese company. I glo…

Several years ago, Blake Harris wrote a book called “Console Wars” which is largely about Sega competing against Nintendo. It’s a great read.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#106

Post by 29athrowaway »

butlerm wrote: post #79
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.

Some companies did manage to produce NES compatible cartridges without NES permission, but it wasn't easy. They had to work around or defeat the lock out chip designed to prevent that.

Ironically, "Super 3D Noah's Ark", a bible inspired game, was one of such games, but for the SNES.

The required you to put a licensed catridge on top of the game catridge, and the unlicensed catridge would piggyback on the licensed catridge for loading.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#107

Post by shultays »

I always found mappers and additional hardware in cartridges fascinating. NES does not support saves? Just put a battery and additional memory in cartridge to store your data. No animations? Add more pattern tables and cycle through them during the game. An interesting way to keep your console's price low and add some extensibility at the cost of making cartridges more expensive.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#108

Post by ChickeNES »

krallja wrote: post #80
KerrAvon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m having a hard time getting into “Spoony Bards…” because it spends so much of the first couple chapters trash-talking the SNES in generic terms.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was very excited for it after Racing the Beam and I AM ERROR, but the negative tone made me put it down almost immediately.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#109

Post by holyyikes »

I don't think the NES is that interesting. Who said it is? It was just another machine that came out, had some games, got outdated, and then was replaced by something else just like all the rest.

The SNES was the most "special" of the Nintendo machines in that it hit the sweet spot where the games were sophisticated enough to be really interesting yet still simple enough to be made by small teams and thus not end up as run by committee corporate turds.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#110

Post by hyakosm »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #75
hyakosm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait a minute: we had SCART in the Netherlands too, but it supported both composite (CVBS) and RGB. In fact, if you had a composite device (with the yellow, red and black plugs), you could just get one of those cheap passive adapters to hook it up to SCART: https://media.s-bol.com/mwVL1yR45z6E/1144x1200.jpg IIRC our childhood (Philips) TV had two SCART inputs: one supported both RGB and CVBS, the other only CVBS.

Traditionally, TV with two SCART had one with RGB + CVBS and the other with S-Video + CVBS.
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