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What made the NES so interesting?

nicole.express

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Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#111

Post by vikingerik »

Taywee wrote: post #82
vikingerik wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think he knows the Atari too, but misrepresented it in the video, choosing to push the message of how primitive the Atari is rather than presenting technical accuracy. And, knowing that he did that with the Atari, now I have to ascribe less credibility to anything else he presents that I'm not an expert on.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#112

Post by stormbrew »

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…

Video and audio quality varies pretty wildly between models of the genesis, so some are better than others. But basically every model has some kind of notorious issue with output fidelity.

I think they pretty often need to be recapped in modern times. More so than contemporary nintendo systems tend to need to, I think.

In the end most of this wasn't really super obvious on an 80s/early 90s consumer CRT though, and I don't think people were really comparison shopping on it.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#113

Post by stormbrew »

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…

sibling comment mentioned that you either need to do deblur as a post-process step or mod the n64 to remove blur to get rid of it. Tbh I don't have an issue with this, because the n64 really truly is a blurry mess it's just not obvious on a crt. But of all my consoles the n64 is one I pretty rarely go back to.

And yeah, I also got a modded nes to use with an ossc but now there are good retro-console upscalers that'll take composite (notably the retrotink5x, which incidentally does have a deblur filter for the n64 iirc) and it just doesn't seem worth it anymore. I'll still mod my consoles (or get them modded by someone better at it than me) if they actually have a better video signal to steal, but I just don't see the point in faking one in the console instead of outside it.

I've been poking at trying to mod famicoms/NESs just for the purposes of getting a cleaner composite signal out of them, but it's tricky and I'm not that good at this stuff.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#114

Post by Moru »

dylan604 wrote: post #102
Moru wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, not the turbo button, it was the 50/60 Hz software switch that made the computer faster. Hm, might just have been that the gfx chip was working less in 50 Hz come to think of it...

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#115

Post by smilespray »

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?

I do remember seeing several computers in the 80s having this switch, but they were all modded. They also required you to have a more expensive monitor that could handle the format change (PAL/NTSC and 50/60hz)

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#116

Post by bullen »

butlerm wrote: post #103
bullen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lef…

I use composite on my A1200 because RGB -> anything means trouble with signals and latency. My GV-USB2 capture dongle has zero latency and I only play games.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#117

Post by animal531 »

I loved how you could tell the complexity of the game by the weight of the cartridge. Some like Super Mario Bros 3 were at the top end, while those 1000 in 1 compilation games seemed to weight very little more than the plastic casing.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#118

Post by stormbrew »

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…

> That is, they weren't looking at whatever RGB output they had as the definitive version, but just as a rough guideline for how the image would appear on TVs. Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it.

I don't think it's necessarily even very likely that they were looking at rgb from a devkit. These days people associate PVMs and other pro monitors with RGB but they aren't synonymous. Take a look through ebay listing for PVMs and you'll find plenty of composite or s-video-ish pro monitors from the 80s kicking around.

And even some microcomputer monitors were composite. If the dev tooling they used was based on a C64 or Apple IIe (which also used 6502 cpus), that'd be composite out for eg., even with a designed-for-c64/appleIIe monitor. And I'm pretty sure I've seen photos of people using Apple IIe or similar for NES dev.

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#119

Post by derefr »

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…

> Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it.

Sure, but that's not what I meant.

Back when images were being bit-banged into computers, you didn't really care what the results looked like on the screen of your workstation, if your workstation wasn't the target system. You designed on paper — usually grid paper — and then iterated from there by flashing an EEPROM and checking the results on the machine.

When I say "the design colors", I mean the marker-pen colors used to color the grid paper. You might also call these the "pre-color-grading" palette.

Certainly, the artist would get a different idea about what they wanted a thing to look like, once the image had been passed through the "color grading" of the NES palette; and so would then iterate toward a design that most-closely lined up the vision in their head with what the NES could actually produce.

But the artist's original intent wasn't to achieve that iteratatively-color-graded final result image; it was to achieve the original colors they had put down on the grid paper. That original intent was just stymied by the system; and so they had to settle for the colors the system could do.

(I realize that modern designers working with retro art styles often design from scratch under palette constraints; but video games were much newer then, and so most of the professional art-and-design people working in the industry had never done digital art before, and had been trained / previously worked only in traditional art. The closest their designers would have got to the kind of constraints imposed by the NES would be in designing neon signs.)

Re: What made the NES so interesting?

#120

Post by LocalH »

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.

But the coins in SMB3 did rotate, as they did pretty much in every game since. So it's an easy confusion.
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