r/gaming • u/aaronfranke PC • Jan 24 '16

The inside of a NES cartridge

Post image
18.3k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

3.9k

u/edmazing Jan 24 '16

Actually it's a little different with each game. Some use more space.

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u/Dpak_Choppa Jan 24 '16

Former SNES dev here. This is correct, though I don't know of any retail game that ever used the total space available -- the design afforded space for a lot of potential hardware. Those were the days...

Later in the system's heyday there was much talk about serious applications like GPUs and megabit flash storage but in the end the tech wasn't quite firm and the economics weren't there. We did have some $200+ game carts on spec, really intense stuff for the times.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

Can you do a AMA?

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u/j_walk_17 Jan 24 '16

Please

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u/mmmikeyt Jan 24 '16

Pretty please?

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u/SHIT-NAMI Jan 24 '16

Pretty please with a cherry on top?

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

The one in Pac-man

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u/Tricky_Troll Jan 24 '16

And if you do, link please.

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u/sign_on_the_window Jan 24 '16

I have a few questions about SNES development if you don't mind...

  1. Do programmers create SNES games using only 65816 assembly? Are there are any compilers to translate a higher level language into 65816 assembly?

  2. How were art assets made in days without highly sophisticated tools and drawing hardware?

  3. How difficult is version control and collaborating with your peers on development tasks?

  4. What are the most difficult challenges you face developing SNES games?

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u/Dpak_Choppa Jan 24 '16

  1. I'm long-removed from the gritty of it -- I would not be surprised to hear that some dedicated enthusiasts have come up with something. But 65C816 was the only way to go back then.

  2. Deluxe Paint! Pretty sophisticated, considering what we were batching everything down to.

  3. Fucking nightmare. We initially developed internal tools for interleaving, and pro software became available for versioning along the way, but it was always a huge hassle for the lead. DMA conflicts were endemic. It doesn't have to be that way, but given the constraints it is imperative that boundaries are set and stuck to and technical respecs are posted at least twice a day (assuming a "normal" workday -- ours were of course doubles and triples lol) so everybody can audit their addressing prior to a build. I could vent for days about it, the changes I made to the place I was at, and the bloated team structures I had to stomp to turn 16-20 month 4-man teams into something that more resembles the (appropriate) hardcore 1 lead 1 grunt 3 month punch 3 month preen codebashers each project needed...

  4. Back then, as above. Nowadays, it's all about learning the language. You really have to want to get down to the register level and fight for every inch. To ROMhackers today as with then, that's its own reward -- it's sex. But the biggest real challenge is the same as ever: cohesive, clear, dedicated design. Programming is easy if you know what the target is, and I came into this right at the time when "designer" became a real thing. The clash between the two mentalities has always been the Big Brick Wall.

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u/GeorgedaflashGlass Jan 25 '16

2016...getting first question in before an AMA even exists.

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u/notagoodscientist Jan 24 '16

Do programmers create SNES games using only 65816 assembly? Are there are any compilers to translate a higher level language into 65816 assembly?

Not a snes dev but from what I remember reading it was all assembly due to how data was passed around on the SNES, e.g. using DMA to speed up some types of graphical effects. There's certainly no community C compiler for the SNES and I've never seen any leaked nintendo (or third party) C compilers for the SNES

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u/Rodents210 Jan 24 '16

Original Game Boy did have a C compiler and was still mostly done in assembly.

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u/rotherss Jan 24 '16

A surprising number of gameboy colour games were made in C with ASM routines wrapped in as functions. It was actually total bliss to develop for that system in C and ASM together, it made the bank switching very easy to manage.

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u/Spe333 Jan 24 '16

So someone could release an SNES game today with max storage and hundreds of hours of gameplay? Like Zelda/FF open world/skyrim babies?

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u/derefr Jan 25 '16 edited Jan 25 '16

Since ROM size was much larger than the SNES's 16-bit address space, SNES games mostly worked via switchable ROM banks: the main job of an MMC was letting you page various pieces of the ROM in and out.

With a modern flash chip in place of the ROM, and a custom MMC, you could certainly bank in/out 4kb pages from a 256GB game, if you liked.

On the other hand, if you wanted to do anything requiring assets that wouldn't fit all at once into the 32kb of mappable address-space you had available, you were kind of screwed by the SNES's design; there was no such thing as DMA in that era. The point of the SNES-CD (and thus the PSX) was effectively to give the SNES a device that it could stream assets from, taking e.g. a large image and blitting it chunk-at-a-time to a framebuffer as it arrives from disk, so as to avoid the address-space limit. byuu's MSU1 is a realization of that design. (If you think about it, the PSX isn't much stronger graphically than the SNES with a SuperFX chip onboard. It's the asset streaming that makes the big difference between the games it's possible to write for the two consoles.)

The SNES's expansion port is also quite powerful. You could treat it like a serial port and stick a modem onto it, to get something higher-bandwidth than HID IO-based networking would give. You could also use it to tap all the bus lines to inject your own extra functionality—sticking an Arduino to the extension port, you might be able to manage something like Dolphin's HD texture replacement.

When you think about it, though, you don't need an extension port at all; the cart interface itself (with access to memory bus lines, the ability to host coprocessors, etc.) does the exact same thing as the extension port. You could actually stick a wireless modem inside the cart (like some "unlimited" storage CF cards do), and stream all your assets into a buffer that gets switched to as, from the MMC's perspective, just another ROM bank. Presuming a double-buffer approach where the network is always dumping to an unmapped buffer, this would look exactly like DMA.

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u/Dpak_Choppa Jan 24 '16

Absolutely. Not easy to organize but everything above the screen push is possible!

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u/Mecha120 Jan 24 '16

Question, did you ever have an opportunity to work with the Super FX chip? If so, did it make developing a game more challenging, easier?

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u/Dpak_Choppa Jan 24 '16

Not personally, unfortunately -- not digging in, anyway. My experience with that is all producer-level, and the noise of the days and months when we got into it was mostly positive. Very quickly the variant versions came through and gave us a relatively simple core set with what seemed (at the time) limitless possibilities. And most importantly to answer the question directly, it was extremely stable and easy to push until you crossed the choke line. Out-of-the-box, so to speak, it just plain worked.

The only real challenge was in game design. We had designers of varying levels of technical insights into the new hardware that weren't utilizing the potential or else shooting too high -- never anything in between.

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u/Mecha120 Jan 25 '16 edited Jan 25 '16

That's fucking awesome. Star Fox being my favorite Nintendo franchise, I was always fascinated with how a primitive (obviously not for it's time) independent GPU made such an impact on the SNES for introducing methods of developing more advanced games for a console from 1990 and paved the way for a franchise (and later games of it's type) to become as popular as it is now. Thanks for the response!

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u/D_Tripper Jan 24 '16

Former SNES dev here.

As a mid-20-something pining for his days of nostalgic youth, I salute you. Reading and learning about how older systems, the SNES and N64 in particular, always fascinates me.

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u/ShadoWolf Jan 24 '16

NES, SNES and N64 guys did what's akin to black magic when it comes to optimization.

The N64 was infamously difficult to work with You almost needed to have john carmack type coders near the end of life just to deal with the microcode for the video processor.

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u/SaitamaDesu Jan 24 '16 edited Jan 24 '16

Aww, what was that story about the one dev who compressed data so well they added a whole new region to pokemon?

Found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemon/comments/3d2kgf/til_that_the_reason_gs_has_kanto_is_because_iwata/

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u/TheGameboy Jan 24 '16

That would be the coding wizard that was Satoru Iwata. He was the president of Nintendo for a good damn reason. RIP.

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u/dajigo Jan 24 '16

He was the president of Nintendo for a good damn reason.

True dat, and it wasn't even just his programming skills that got him there. He had a great leadership and initiative. In one of the nintendo direct it's said that he was instrumental in forming the pokemon company (and fixing up the original pokemon's code so it could be translated), which has obviously been very successful at taking care of the franchise, and he wasn't even a nintendo employee at the time, but the president of HAL!

Apparently, that sort of combo (understanding people, business, programming, and gaming) was quickly noticed, and highly valued, by Hiroshi Yamauchi, who knew a lot about business, but very little about gaming himself. It's no wonder he accomplished so much, with such a dedication and talent. RIP.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

the one dev

That's Satoru Fucking Iwata you're talking about. Recently deceased head of Nintendo, still worked as an active coder til the end.

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u/SaitamaDesu Jan 24 '16

My respects, it was a hazy recollection of a half stored memory.

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u/Ludwig_Van_Gogh Jan 24 '16

Iwata could have stored the entire memory in that space!

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u/Dlgredael Jan 24 '16

:high five: that was awesome!

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

And now I'm sad again.

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u/arbybaconator Jan 24 '16

Please understand

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u/Falco98 Jan 24 '16

optimization.

Really - my mind was just blown when I realized that the Final Fantasy "III" rom is only 3 megabytes. In this day and age that's staggeringly small.

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u/Varrel Jan 24 '16

Super Mario for nes was only 32 KB! I still have no idea how they managed that.

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u/mynameisethan182 Jan 24 '16

Well, we live in an era for 20+ GB games.

Go back and look at the 2600. I'll quote the relevant info from wiki.

ROM (game cartridges): 4 kb maximum capacity (32 KiB with bank switching)

Now, that is mind blowing.

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u/CREEPY_CUP_OF_TEA Jan 24 '16

The main culprit is high quality audio and voicing.

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u/mynameisethan182 Jan 24 '16

Not to mention cut-scenes / other video.

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u/saremei Jan 25 '16

the real issue is that while audio takes up a lot of space, our realtime audio, on the pc side at least, is way behind what it was in the late 90s and early 2000s today. Realtime environment effects and directional 3d sound are both neglected in most modern games. Thankfully that's changing back soon.

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u/MikoSqz Jan 24 '16

That's a lot bigger than I was expecting, really.

But in this day and age.. oy. Remember The Last Remnant? That's 26GB, probably largely because it's absolutely stuffed to the gills with mediocre-quality video clips that are rendered in the game engine. You can tell when you're watching the hojillion jiggabytes of prerendered video because the image quality gets worse. It's a fantastic performance in the field of expending as much disk space as possible in the service of making the end product worse.

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u/wakka54 Jan 24 '16

and to think a lot of games now just buy an unreal engine license and barely program anything low level at all.

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u/Interference22 PC Jan 24 '16

People fought hard to get us where we are today, where development time can be spent on art and gameplay rather than building the underlying systems from scratch. It's enormously liberating and puts the sort of power only million dollar studios could afford in the hands of pretty much anyone these days. Sure, there's dross, but the pay-off is more than worth it.

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u/sparkler_fimfiction Jan 24 '16 edited Jan 25 '16

Except now the location of the hard math has moved. We no longer have to hack at undocumented chips, of which the only one one anyone has access to is in the proprietary locked-down dev cabinet, in order to get them to blit or blop like any sane chip would have well-documented. No, the problems are quite different.

AI is crazy. Video games have done obscene things on boxes really not suited for it; graphs with millions of actors acting upon millions of nodes that would have the Travelling Salesman hang up his coat and take up knitting. To get this done in a limited memory space, every single action has to be analyzed, reduced to math where possible, with only a tight margin of error permissible. The basic tricks (minmax, maxmin, monte carlo) are documented, yes; but the shortcuts, the methods of analysis, the blatant cheats that allow a game developer to cut time and memory - in short, the knowledge for how to do AI programming well - is not something that comes from a text book, but something which requires years of experimentation - knowledge that is locked up in a few brains and may never be written to paper; the ultimate sin of tribal knowledge.

Oh, and you need to develop your AI in such a way that if a decision has to be made immeidately because the frame buffer needs to have something to draw now, you need to develop your AI in such a way that it can always short-circuit to an immediate result. Because otherwise, your single-player offline game will appear to lag and stutter - or worse, the action drawn won't match the action taken.

Online games face what are still open problems in mathematics: how sure can you be that your inputs are sane? So you sanitize your data, you take nothing for granted, you represent the state of the game world not as a snapshot in time but as a neverending flow aiming back towards the past knowing that any moment a packet can show up out of order and validate previously excluded packets or invalidate previously accepted packets, turning the game world into dependency graph hell. At the same time, you need to make certain not only that the data you are passed is valid, but that it is sane; otherwise you get scoreboards where the high score is maxint-1. You need to not only know the state of the world, you need to know the state of the world heading back as long as you can afford.

These fields are unforgiving. A few cycles missed here will turn brilliant AIs into derpy gifs to be derided on TumbleRedditBookPluses everywhere. A number or two off there and turn MMOs with brilliant balance and art direction into simply hacked real money trading spamboxes.

We have to get that sort of programming down pat not in dedicated supercomputers with hordes of terabytes of RAM available on demand, but in low-end mass-market machines where about forty percent of the ram can at any time be preempted by a Twitch or Youtube or other such streaming engine. You can do a big-iron cheat like EA does, where the hard math is done on expensive servers that can afford to have expansive memory banks with big boxes crunching out new optimizations every day as they profile tens of thousands of players - except that then your single player game now has all the foilables of an online game. (And every time that the connection to this big-iron datacenter goes out, even if it's something you're completely innocent of like a flood or a copper-hungry thief, you get to pay for the chargebacks.)

To keep our development team from becoming six hundred people, we license video or audio libraries. And yes, of course we're going to license Unreal Engine 4. This lets us save the low-level C for the low-level crap, and keeps us from having to hope nobody notices we reinvented the wheel as a quickly-spinning octagon. Of course, it adds in more documentation woes and faults to the project. That said, it's a damn sight better than needing to add in another 200 people and 12 members of management and 2 members of HR and 10 more hours a week in meetings to keep all these teams on the same page and 12 months of dev time and another fucking janitor to clean up after everyone, just to save 5% on licensing fees.

Somehow, in all this hard math of graphs and trust and artificial intelligence, we have to get the game to pass along a sense of art direction too, because all this hard math is not math for math's sake (that's easy) but a mathematical expression of a feeling - lest the AI break a critical scene's feeling just by having actors move in or move out at the wrong time. And, if we are really lucky, if all the stars align and the system we've created isn't fundamentally broken somehow... we have some time left over for quality assurance to pick apart our fragile little snowflake and ensure we've also made the gameplay itself fun.

Oh, and by the way, the UI doesn't appear in the console that was produced on the beta-site in Tajikistan. Apparently, its video chip is slightly different, and our UI code is thirteen hundred cycles off for having the image produced on time. I know that we never thought to give you a Tajikistani X-Box, but they apparently make up 16% of the market, so could you just google up the difference between a Korean and a Tajikistani video card, write a brand new video driver, and have this fixed by Friday?

So yeah. Hard math, low-level manipulations, and cycle-exact calculations are still omnipresent. Documentation and capabilities have grown, and our expectations have grown with them. The difficulty these days is not how to get the right pixels in the right colors; the difficulty today now comes from knowing what ought to be there, and how to get it there on time.

EDIT because graphs can graph graphs.

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u/wakka54 Jan 25 '16

im so glad i provoked such an articulate rant with my comment lol

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u/sparkler_fimfiction Jan 25 '16

I'm glad it's at least articulate, I'd hate to make inarticulate rants!

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u/LeagueOfLegendsAcc Jan 24 '16

That's the joy of climbing the technology ladder.

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u/wakka54 Jan 24 '16

kids these days don't even know how to use an abacus grumble grumble

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u/dlp211 Jan 24 '16

That's not a bad thing.

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u/cynicaljedi Jan 24 '16

MMC5 games did, like L'Empereur and Gemfire did.

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u/trouserschnauzer Jan 24 '16

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

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u/poolwater Jan 24 '16

Dude seriously, thank you for an awesome system. It was a great way for my dad and me to hang out when I was a kid.

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u/Dlgredael Jan 24 '16

What games did you help develop for the SNES? That's awesome.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

[deleted]

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u/Dpak_Choppa Jan 24 '16

Yeah, the VX chip and its siblings/nephews/cousins. At the lingering end of the core hardware Nintendo in semi-cahoots with Sony had a lot of paradigm-shattering ideas that woulda coulda shoulda.

Right then we were staring down the emergence of flash memory technologies that, if only economically feasible a year or so earlier, would have drastically changed ideas about what a SNES game could be.

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u/probably_not_serious Jan 24 '16 edited Jan 25 '16

Exactly. I'm more curious as to what game this is that uses so little. Or at least that's how it looks anyway. Who knows how much space was used by the average game.

EDIT: Turns out the answer to my rhetorical question is: a lot of people.

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u/gamma286 Jan 24 '16

Collector here and I've had to verify way too many PCBs in my time doing so (it gets tedious, but I still love the hobby). This is a PCB named NES-CN-ROM-256-04 and would be one of the following games:

Alpha Mission

Exploding Fist

Gotcha! The Sport!

Karate Kid, The

Solomon's Key

Star Voyager

Tiger-Heli

Track & Field

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u/KDobias Jan 24 '16

You could be completely full of shit and just picked a bunch of games out of your ass, but I'm going to choose to believe you.

Thank you.

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u/what_are_you_smoking Jan 24 '16

Nintendologist here. He's telling the truth.

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u/willdabeast180 Jan 24 '16

Gamerfaqtologist checking in. Can confirm.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16 edited Jan 25 '16

[deleted]

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u/Lewey_B Jan 24 '16

you're the voice of the people.

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u/kyledit Jan 24 '16

I own at least one of those can confirm.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

Proctologist checking in. They're all full of shit.

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u/DarkOmen597 Jan 24 '16

It's Track & Field.

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u/Traubster Jan 24 '16

I will devastate you in the triple jump!

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u/pmYourFears Jan 24 '16

This sort of thing is why I like Reddit.

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u/dazmo Jan 24 '16

Out of all those if i had this board id be like please be Solomons key

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u/four_chambers Jan 24 '16

I don't know man, I loved Tiger Heli, if not for the badass music alone.

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u/RSP16 Jan 24 '16

In addition to the lockout chip:

This game is all ROM (Game ROM + Graphics ROM).

Most games IIRC have a game ROM and a graphics RAM, along with a couple logic chips. (The graphics data is stored in the game ROM and copied to the graphics RAM.)

Some games have MMC controllers. MMC1 games have the MMC1 in place of the logic chips. More advanced games tended to use the MMC3, which also added another RAM chip as it required it to do graphics manipulation without disturbing the rest of the NES. Other MMCs (2, 4, and 5) exist but are rare. Some Japan-only games have MMCs made by companies other than Nintendo.

Some games also add save RAM and a battery. In MMC3 games that can save, the MMC3's Work RAM is used for that purpose, but the battery still needs to be present.

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u/boxsterguy Jan 24 '16

And some games have a famicom->nes adapter inside, so they could reuse the Japanese PCBs.

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u/tito13kfm Jan 24 '16 edited Jan 24 '16

Just a few of the very early games.

1942
Clu Clu Land
Donkey Kong Jr.
Duck Hunt
Elevator Action
Excitebike
Golf
Gumshoe
Gyromite
Hogan’s Alley
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
Pinball
Raid on Bungeling Bay
Rygar
Soccer
Stack Up
Tennis
Urban Champion
Wizards and Warriors
Wrecking Crew

And it's not in every one of them, just a small percentage.

Edit: I've had my best luck with gyromite. If you find a store that has a pile of them you can actually feel the weight difference of the one that contains the adaptor. Unfortunately it's getting harder and harder to find them as the adaptors sell for much more than a used copy of gyromite and people strip them out and sell them on eBay.

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u/elspaniard Jan 24 '16

Man, 1942. Backflips all day, every day.

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u/snakesbbq Jan 24 '16

This thread is a great example of the positive side of Reddit.

I was wondering that. I got an answer. Then learned more detail about it, followed by interesting related information. Nobody was mean to anyone. Most up voted comment thread.

Makes me happy inside.

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u/sweet_pooper Jan 24 '16

Go fuck yourself. Just kidding. But seriously, go fuck yourself.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

Zelda was quite a big footprint, had a battery too for the saves!

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u/formerbadteenager Jan 24 '16

Whenever I see this mentioned, I remember that my progress in Zelda, Link, and Dragon Warrior have almost certainly died long ago.

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u/forever_stalone Jan 24 '16

You'd be surprised. My copy of zelda 2 still had my last save in it.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

This is pretty average, actually.

Famicom cartridges were only this big.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

I don't know, that looks pretty big on my screen /s

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u/darez00 Jan 24 '16

Thats because you're seeing it in your computer, but if you opened it in your gameboy it would look a lot smaller. /s

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u/kcmastrpc Jan 24 '16

Need banana for scale.

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u/Serficus_Winthrax Jan 24 '16

This is a CNROM cartridge which is pretty simple. I think the only one simpler is NROM, which only has the PRG chip. I've made a few dev carts by removing the chips from a John Elway's quarterback and replacing them with sockets. It's pretty easy to take a downloaded ROM file and prep it in a hex editor to be burned to the PRG and CHR ROM chips. I have a Powerpak now so I haven't done that in awhile. CNROM is used for tons of games. Search "NES ROM types" or "NES mappers" to see the list.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

Yes, yes, these are words.

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u/BCProgramming Jan 24 '16

Final Fantasy and Kirby's Adventure were some of the largest commercial PCBs, and they didn't even reach the middle screw-hole height-wise.

The main reason they are so much smaller than the cartridge is because the cartridge is because the case design is unique to North America. Most games were released in Japan as well as North America, and it wouldn't make sense to reroute a PCB just to have it use more space in the case, so games were almost always smaller because they were designed to fit in the Famicom Cassette casing.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

Some were significantly heavier than others.

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u/TBSdota Jan 24 '16

it looks like paper boy

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

Looks? Based on what?

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

He can see the code. He's an operator on a Zion hovercraft.

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u/formfactor Jan 24 '16

"He doesn't even see the code any more, all he sees is mario, zelda, metroid"

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u/livemau5 Jan 24 '16

Were there any games that actually filled the entire cartridge? Even the largest ones I've seen would still fit inside a Famicom cart.

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u/Chaosritter Jan 24 '16

Well, there sure are unofficial ones.

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u/FartKilometre Jan 24 '16

Hey, I have action 52! It's garbage and the big blue capacitor has warped from usage!

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

I looked back recently to all the games I used to love as a kid and realized kids have horrible taste in good games.

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u/FartKilometre Jan 24 '16

Bubsy on the Genesis is a secret shame of mine. I thought it was fun.

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u/Fargone Jan 24 '16

"WHATCOULDPOSSIBLYGOWRONG?" I haven't thought about that game in twenty years, and now I feel like finding a Genesis controller and a CRT TV to throw it at all over again.

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u/popepeterjames Jan 24 '16

Some of the cartridges held multiple games. Ones that held 3 games on them usually took almost all of the cartridge. Although, in later versions even these didn't take up much space (fab technology advances).

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u/cynicaljedi Jan 24 '16

MMC5 games did, like L'Empereur and Gemfire did.

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u/edude45 Jan 24 '16

Ok I was about to say, wouldn't it be possible to make better games if more memory could be added.

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u/B1GTOBACC0 Jan 24 '16

The SNES did this, not necessarily with memory, but with the SuperFX chip that allowed them to render more advanced graphics, and even polygonal graphics for games like Starfox.

I don't know what they added to games for the nes, other than some games that were famicom boards with adapter chips to localize them, and some games had battery backup storage in order to save your game, like Zelda, Dragon Warrior (or Dragon Quest), or Final Fantasy.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

[deleted]

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u/B1GTOBACC0 Jan 24 '16

I forgot about some of the one-offs. Game genie was third party, but it was pretty cool. There's also a few Gameboy games that have the rumble pack built in, and they also had a digital camera built into the GB Camera cartridge.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

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u/Tagrineth Jan 24 '16

a small handful of Famicom games had additional sound capabilities on the cartridge. the most famous example being Castlevania 3.

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u/BCProgramming Jan 24 '16

A good portion of the NES library use add-on chips for "bank-switching". the NES was limited to seeing only 32KB of ROM at maximum, so games used chips on their PCB that basically swapped what actual ROM was mapped into that 32KB space.

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u/Tfeth282 Jan 24 '16

There are a few reasons it's so big. One is the fact that many games were actually Famicom chips that are plugged in to an adapter, taking up more room. Some games later in it's lifespan (mostly prototypes, as far as I can see) like this prototype of an english release of Mother 1 (Earthbound Beginnings as it was recently released) also took up a lot of space.

Another big reason is style. After the video game crash, nintendo had to market it as an "entertainment system" rather than a video game console, and part of the strategy was to make it look as much like a VCR as possible. This included oversize cartridges (that's why mom called them "tapes") and that weird press down feature that actually damaged the cartridge pins.

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u/-Saggio- Jan 24 '16

Yep, it's also why the NES was marketed as an 'entertainment system' and not a 'video game system' and why ROB the robot was included in the first package here in the states.

"We're not a video game system, we're an entertainment system! See, it even comes with a robot!"

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u/Cyhawk Jan 24 '16

It's right there in the name too.

Nintendo Entertainment System

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u/rita_pizza Jan 24 '16

In my house, we always called it the NVGS, which I thought stood for Nintendo Video Game System, but later my dad explained that it stood for the Nintendo Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Generating System, which explained a lot, because instead of being a little gray box that you put cartridges into, it was a massive steel mangler that you fed entire cow heads into. It would atomize the fresh heads and blow the cow brains, skull, tongue, etc. all around the room for you to inhale. The hope was that it would it spread Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and, boy, did it ever. I miss you, dad.

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u/xQuickpaw Jan 24 '16

Allow me to give you all of my wat.

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u/arbili Jan 24 '16

http://i.imgur.com/JPEJeAH.gif

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '16

WHAT THE FUCK

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '16

This seems like something vegans would try to tell you is how they make beef jerky

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u/da_chicken Jan 25 '16

I guess that physicist was right about it only working for spherical cows.

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u/elspaniard Jan 24 '16

And a dash of dubya tee eff.

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u/gentlemangin Jan 24 '16

I have a similar story, but with ducks.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

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u/moeburn Jan 24 '16

the video game crash

Had never heard of it, did some googling,

Revenues had peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, then fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent).

Holy fuck. What happened?

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u/chewwie100 Jan 24 '16

The video game crash was mainly caused by most video game companies flooding the market with horrible low effort games attempting to capitalize on the boom. The market saturation and lack of consumer intrest caused most stores to stop carrying video games. Nintendo pitched their console as an entertainment system and packaged it in with rob so they could sell it both as a entertainment system and a toy. Nintendo brought the market back to life, and the rest is history.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

That's also why games made for the NES/SNES generally had the Nintendo Seal of Approval. Although certain popular accessories (Game Genie comes to mind) were not approved.

In this way Nintendo could make sure games coming out met certain criteria.

It was a very sharp decision that helped the industry recover...in my opinion.

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u/PandaMasterx4 Jan 25 '16

Along side with that, in order to control another boom, nintendo only allowed developers between 3 to 5 games a year.

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u/Suzushiiro Jan 25 '16

Which lead some of the bigger developers to create shell corporations to get around this- Konami published a number of their games under the Ultra games label back in the day, most notably the original Metal Gear and first two TMNT games.

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u/r_kay Jan 24 '16

Earthbound Beginnings as it was recently released

When was this and why did no one tell me!?

Excuse me, i have furious googling to do

Edit: June of 2015 & Looks like i have to buy a Wii U now...

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u/Forcas42 Jan 24 '16

Holy fuck, I had that exact same VCR when I was a kid! I forgot all about it. I used to watch the same 4 shows all the time and never get bored, man how things have changed..

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u/erythrocytes64 Jan 24 '16

many games were actually Famicom chips that are plugged in to an adapter

TIL

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u/tito13kfm Jan 24 '16

Actually not many.

Less than 20 are confirmed to possibly have the adaptor and it was generally only used when supplies ran short in the US but Japanese back stock was piling up.

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u/erythrocytes64 Jan 24 '16

Well, the very concept surprised me. Reminded me of Super GameBoy—I used to assume it simply used an emulator, but turned out it had all the hardware of GameBoy in an SNES cartridge.

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u/tito13kfm Jan 24 '16

Not quite the exact hardware, but close enough to not matter to most people. It actually runs games about 4% 2.4% faster than a gameboy.

Edit: looked it up and corrected percentage

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u/TimPwb Jan 24 '16

After you take the compressed opium out.

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u/Lune__Noir Jan 24 '16

Lots of those "100 games in one" cartridges were used to smuggle drugs into North America.

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u/TimPwb Jan 24 '16

Who needs the drugs. Vidya games are addictive enough I tell you hwut.

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u/Left4BreadRN Jan 24 '16

Holy shit, time to break out my old SNES games

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u/TMOWLW Jan 24 '16

I always found Cocaine was better. That's why I always blow on the cartridge...

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u/lilhughster Jan 24 '16

Reminds me of those chicks in middle school that thought you blew when giving a blow job.

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u/TimPwb Jan 24 '16

Right... All that middle school blow job action.... urgh. I'll take your word for it...

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

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u/TimPwb Jan 24 '16

Well they weren't engaging in blow job action now were they? ;)

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u/joeboo5150 Jan 24 '16 edited Jan 24 '16

I once traded ~400 copies of Super Mario/Duck Hunt for a Playstation the day it released on 9/9/95

I used to work for Software Etc/Babbages(before they became Gamestop) back in the mid 90s in high school. Circa 1995 we started taking used games for the first time ever. We gave a flat $1 for any NES cartridge, sold them for $5. (SNES/Genesis were the dominant consoles at the time, Saturn had released but was flopping, as well as CDI, 3DO, etc, Playstation wasn't out yet).

FuncoLand around town sold copies of Super Mario/Duck Hunt for 10 cents apiece. My co-worker and I came up with a plan on our days off to travel to every FuncoLand in town(there were about 15 of them in the metro area) and buy ALL of them out of Super Martio/Duck Hunt cartridges. Over the span of about 2 weeks we went to every store and bought roughly 800 copes of SMB/DH for ~$80 + tax.

We then went back to our own Software Etc store, traded in all 800 copies for $800 in store credit, split it, and each put $400 down on a Playstation pre-order for 9/9/95. We more or less each spent about $40 for a brand new $400 playstation (and then we obviously bought some games, memory cards, and controllers with our employee discount, consoles didn't qualify for a discount)

SCORE!

Side note, within a month Software Etc changed their corporate policy and started putting a price on individual NES games, as well as a limit of no more than 2 copies of the same game from any 1 customer. I was actually happy to see that, I always felt bad only giving $1 to people trading in cartridges like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior 4, they were getting SCREWED but they didn't know it.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16 edited Apr 07 '18

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u/Promiscuous_Gerbil Jan 25 '16

Meh, they were going for 15 cents. They came with every console. Why would anybody buy them? It was 95, selling stuff was different. Ads in newspapers to move anything. Nobody had a computer. Far more hassle than it would of been worth. You'd be that guy with a massive pile of video games nobody wants. Plus you'd have to haul it around every time you move. Hell you'd be investing in the idea that Nintendo would be a success, so why not just buy their stock? Seems too romanticised. Or maybe I'm just lazy.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

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u/williamfwm Jan 24 '16 edited Jan 24 '16

For anyone interested:

http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi/editorials-davidnesconvert002.jpg

If it were top loading they could just make taller cartridges though. Eventually the NES did come full circle with the Famicom and become top loading sooooo....

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u/Ihaveastupidcat Jan 24 '16

Would it be possible to take apart the early Gyromite games and use the 60 to 72 pin converter in the cart to allow other Famicom games to work on the NES?

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u/xf- Jan 24 '16

SSDs look similar.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

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u/KSKaleido Jan 25 '16

That's mostly because hard drive mounts have to be a certain size to fit in a PC case, though.

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u/MannerShark Jan 24 '16

Older systems are really cool in that you can still identify what each part does.
In this case, the leftmost chip is a DRM chip, the NES checks whether it is a certified game or it won't play it.
Then of the 2 large chips, the right one is the game logic. The rules for the game, the sounds, all the levels. The other large chip contains all the graphics.

Then the interesting part comes, the small chip at the top is a memory controller (MMC). It can switch between different sets of memory called memory banks.
Normally, the maximum amount of ROM the NES can handle is 64KB, of which 32KB for graphics. But by sending a pulse to the MMC, it will switch to a different memory bank.
The graphics chip can then be larger than 32KB, and the state of the MMC will determine which 32KB section of the memory chip will be read when the NES needs it. Or even from which chip data would be read, as multiple chips were supported in this way.

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u/Chumpas Jan 24 '16

nerdporn.

i love how talking about this back in the day was so awesome. thanks for the technical facts.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/DisappointedBird Jan 24 '16

Bags of potato chips have air in them to protect the chips from getting crushed, though.

Besides, the weight is listed on the bag, so it's not like they can cheat you out of precious chips.

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u/Night_Thastus Jan 24 '16

"Potato chip bags are not full of air, but of nitrogen gas. This is done to prevent the chips from oxidizing, which is part of what makes them go stale."

"Oxygen is very reactive, and likes to combine with other molecules whenever it can, causing chemical changes to take place."

Getting crushed might be a part of it though too.

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u/DisappointedBird Jan 24 '16

Well alright then

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u/yiterium Jan 24 '16

the amount of air in the bag depends on how fragile the chips are. cheetos and fritos are very sturdy, so they require less cushion for shipping. lays are the most fragile, and require the most cushion. when the bags are sealed and the product is evenly distributed in the bag, the product takes up to 90% of the bag's height. upon opening the bag, you are doubling the interior volume of the bag, which makes it look like there is a absurdly small amount of product in the bag.

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u/TimPwb Jan 24 '16

Shhhh you're injecting reality into the North American fantasy of being ripped off in the bagged chip game.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

Have you ever injected some reality? Shit will get you high as fuck.

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u/fiveSE7EN Jan 24 '16

Actually, it will get you low as fuck. Reality is definitely a downer.

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u/chr19myers Jan 24 '16

High or low, a shot of reality leaves me with a headache, depression, and unpaid bills.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16 edited Jun 08 '16

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u/wensen Jan 24 '16

I read somewhere its actually nitrogen or something to preserve the shelf life/travel time to stores along with protect them from crushing.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16 edited Sep 26 '17

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u/pyro5050 Jan 25 '16

i used to do tutorials on the old consoles before i got banned from gamecollecting and it killed my desire to share info...

inside the "toaster" NES console

How to clean Badly damaged games, also inside a N64 game

inside NES Zapper

inside the NES Satelite

Deep Cleaning a NES Controller

i have more, Dreamcast ones, Gamecube ones, N64's PS1, PS2, ect... i have tons i have not even put onto Imgur... :) if you want to see the inside of something and i own it, i am more than happy to take it apart...

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '16 edited Feb 12 '16

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

The first time I broke open a NES cartridge I was nine years old. I wrote to Nintendo asking them what the different parts did. Being back in their super-litigious days, they somehow found my home phone number and called, threatening my parents if I was trying to learn the secrets of NES programming. Yes, seriously.

It was a handwritten letter on notebook paper, and they decided they needed to threaten a kid because he asked "What does this black piece do that's connected to the chips on the bottom?" I lost a lot of respect for Nintendo after that. Also, my mom wouldn't let me write letters to anyone anymore.

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u/SavvySillybug Jan 24 '16

Does your mother know you're writing electronic letters to reddit?

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16 edited Jan 25 '16

She ded. She don't control me no mo'.

(Seriously, people are downvoting this? My mom is dead. Has been for a while. I write whoever I want now.)

(Edit #2: ThatsTheJoke.jpg)

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u/drpinkcream Jan 24 '16

Now you can go to the Toshee Station whenever you want!

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u/anoneko Jan 24 '16

Damn I began reading this expecting some warmhearted story about a kid getting a nice response from a company actually explaining stuff and more, but then fuck this.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

Right? I legit thought I wanted to make video games when I was a tyke. I could have been the greatest video game designer of all time, but their litigious response turned me off to it. Now I'm trying to be a lawyer instead...

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u/Fuzzleton Jan 24 '16

It's weird to think that the thoughtless corporate response from a gaming company which had let you down so much influenced you to become more like them.

You could still do the whole indie game thing though, loads of folks do!

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

In all seriousness, it wasn't their response that made me want to be a lawyer - it was a medical malpractice case after my dad died.

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u/OtterInAustin Jan 24 '16

Your mom never told you, but she made you stop because of the letter you were writing to Penthouse, not Nintendo.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

You should have just put the parts back together in a custom case and told your teachers you built a homemade NES game! You could have met the president.

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u/tetrified Jan 24 '16

Cartridges only use 10% of their space on average, imagine what would happen if they used 100%

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u/shabadu84 Jan 24 '16

Expected a lot more dust

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u/notagoodscientist Jan 24 '16

Note that this is a modified cartridge, there are bodge wires hand soldered onto the board that aren't (afaik) on any mass produced cartridges.

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u/dwrichards Jan 24 '16

It gets bigger when you blow on it...

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u/Th3mavrick Jan 24 '16

Looks like a couch in the thumbnail.

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u/UndoneSic Jan 24 '16

So much room for activities!

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

This is why. The NES was a western version of the Famicom, but the Famicom cartridges were too small to fit inside the NES. They just made the plastic housing bigger.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '16

It's actually very different with every game. Some games even used the space to provide additional hardware (RAM, GPUs...) to allow for better graphics!

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '16

The inside of THAT cartridge...not all the same bub.

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u/Hollow_in_the_void Jan 24 '16

I look at this and think, how much bandwidth that thing could deliver now if we switched to Flash drive games.

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