Battle of the Bits: Nintendo Power, Mappers, and Circuit Boards - Talkin' Code Ep. 3
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ก.พ. 2022
- Companion to Nintendo Power Vol. 20's article on "Why Your Game Paks Never Forget" - a sampler of cartridge contents with a brief explanation.
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#NintendoPower #Mappers #NES - เกม
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This article and a few others in Nintendo Power made me a CPU design engineer today
Yes please, do a MMC5 deep dive!
It would also be interesting to cover how the games developed by Koei (which represent the majority of MMC5 games) were written in C and run in a kind of virtual machine (this was a common method for implementing high-level languages on the 6502--the original Apple II version of Wizardry also ran in a VM, known as the p-System)
I concur! That would be SUPER cool to see! Would love to hear more about the MMC5 for sure.
I'm surprised that there was such a technical article in Nintendo Power! I find memory map conversion romhacks to be fascinating. I've seen people do some truly incredible things with them.
Oh cool what have they done with them?
Those conversions are great. They really open the doors for ROM hacking on various titles.
@@DisplacedGamers There is one thing that opening SMB made me remember, has anyone ever tested to see what the game does if the solder pad jumper for tile scroll direction on the board is desoldered off horizontal and reapplied to vertical?
@@EnigPartyhaus Something like Devil World on NES may demonstrate it. In that game horizontal scrolling is smooth, but vertical is choppy.
@@arciks11The Legend of Zelda also has "choppy" vertical scrolling (8 pixels at a time). Doing pixel-smooth vertical scrolling while also displaying a HUD basically requires "tricking" the hardware--it isn't something the NES PPU was designed to do. It seems that the method to do it was discovered sometime around 1986-1987 and spread rapidly among developers--too late for Zelda but in time for games such as Konami's Salamander and Rare's Wizards and Warriors.
Even now, there's AAA games that take up 100GB, that cost $70, that I play a few hours and get bored with them. Then there's Terraria and FTL, which collectively take up less than a gig, and both cost me $2.50, that I've played forever.
The SNES and NES may not have been technically as powerful, but they really made use of all the hardware and made some amazing games
I like to use these classic games as file size comparisons. Super Mario Bros: 40KB. Super Mario World: 512KB. Super Mario 64: 8MB. Ocarina of Time: 32MB. If your spreadsheet app or angry birds clone needs more space than a AAA 3D dungeon crawler, what the heck are you doing?
Props 4 Terraria👊
Honestly when the SNES came out it was already considered a pretty good machine spec wise. Sure, if you compare it with the Genesis/MD you’ll find that it has a slower CPU (which in my opinion is not even a fair point to make because the 68k in the genesis and the 65C816 based snes cpu have different architectures), but oh boy it has a nice graphical subsystem and a sound subsystem. Sure, you could pull off some of the features the SNES has spec wise on a genesis (look at games from Treasure and Puggsy), but honestly I think it requires more bare metal coding to make it work compared to working with the SNES (I think?).
Sound on the SNES was a huge hurdle tho, especially if you didn’t have some very specific tools from Nintendo. As far as I know the sound subsystem is made out of a DSP and the necessary stuff to output analog audio stuff. I don’t know if the instruction set of that thing was ever given to developers. Still, impressive stuff
That quote about the measure of a great game about being fun to play is very true. I played a lot of overcomplicated modern games but going back to the simplicity and fun of Super Mario 2 is always the best.
every year they keep trying to outdo super mario bros 2 yet they always fail.
That's why I've kinda always stuck by Nintendo. I honestly could not care less about 420 frames per second and 16k ultra mega HD video output and sound so clear you can hear each individual blade of grass moving. Just make it fun to play and I'll show up for 1 bit games idc.
I find myself playing games on emulators more and more.
I never played Mario 3 and will do so soon.
I'd say the NES memory mappers are a big part of the reason Nintendo is still around today - they allowed the NES to stay relevant for a lot longer than it would have otherwise. Aside from enabling larger game storage - the mappers could do things like flip pages for animations - like in Mario 3 and enable multidirectional split screen scrolling.
The thing about memory mappers is that, given that the games are provided on cartridges, it's basically impossible to *not* permit memory mapper functionality to some extent. No matter how you define your console, so long as the CPU has to read the ROM through pins on the cartridge, there would always have been the possibility for the cartridge to have internal logic to route those read requests to different internal ROM addresses.
Granted, the NES could have been a bit less mapper friendly. They made the decision to force cartridges to store character data on a separate ROM chip that the NES PPU accesses. This meant that the NES itself didn't need VRAM specifically for character data. Using character VRAM isn't a bad idea, but copying data to such RAM *mid-frame* would be prohibitive. So the gymnastics Punch-Out pulled wouldn't have been possible with dedicated character VRAM.
Of course, the SNES solved that problem by having a whole bunch of VRAM, but that's exactly what the NES developers were trying to avoid. Not to mention SNES tiles are 2-bytes-per-tile rather than 1, so having a bunch more tiles tiles was a thing you could do.
@@GeneralBolas I remember reading that the NES/Famicom was designed in such a way as to require as little RAM as possible. Given the original 1983 release date of the Famicom it makes sense - RAM was absurdly expensive in those days.
@@mrflamewars That could easily backfire, though. If the RAM you save in the console has to be provided by the cartridge, then instead of paying the cost for RAM once you pay it every time you buy a new game. Of course, Moore's law was established enough at that point that Nintendo could rely on RAM banks to increase in size/fall in price over the life of the console.
@@TheRationalPi There are lots and lots of games that have an 8KB SRAM so you're right. Wasteful - but economically cheaper.
@@GeneralBolas And the SNES's increased VRAM allowed it to focus on the special midframe tricks it could do with HRAM.
8:00 I'd like to point up a common misunderstanding about nametable mirroring aka the horizontal solder blob. That solder blob was just meant to set how the tilemaps are seen by the PPU. It doesn't limit the directions of scrollings. Scrolling in both axes is a built in feature of the PPU. As a matter of fact, Hudson's Adventure Island used the same mirroring setup as Castlevania 1 and it does diagonal scrollings right up and right down way before SMB3 came up. Setting the solder blob on the H like Castlevania, when scrolling up and down and diagonally, you could have some artifacts in the first or last 8 lines of the image, but those were out the the visible portion of the display on NTSC systems. On PAL systems you will see those artifacts but you could eliminate them by simply disabling the image on the last 8 lines of display by using some interrupt from cartridge or the sprite 0/bg collision detection, for example... Mario 3 sets the tilemap to be 32 tiles wide and 60 tiles height (because it needs the HUD) and so it has to disable the leftmost 8 pixels to minimize artifacts when scrolling horizontally but you still get color artifacts (seen at the right when moving horizontally) since the color attributes in the tilemap is 16x16 pixels, the only way to hide them is disabling 16 pixels: Tom and Jerry and Tuffy uses the same tilemap layout as SMB3 (because it uses a HUD in similar fashion) and also scrolls diagonally but it does disable the leftmost 8 pixels using a PPU toggle and hides the rightmost 8 pixels using a column of sprites, so no scrolling artifacts.
God I miss receiving my monthly Nintendo Power and sitting down after school to read every single page in one long reading!! That was such an amazing feeling each time!!
Really love the "talking code" vids. Can't wait for more!
Me too
Yeah. This is the nerd equivalent of a bunch of guys around a fire, drinking beer, and talking about sports. Minus the beer, and fire. Presumably.
@@nickwallette6201 sitting around a smoking LED, drinking soda
It's kind of interesting to me because people have always said that the Master System was superior to the NES. I'd look at the games and used to think "Hmmm not sure. Maybe as far as color goes but not much else, if anything". The thing is though that the Master System has most of these MMC functions built right in to the base hardware. Wonder Boy and Enduro Racer scrolled diagonally and they were fairly early games. Golvellius did the MMC5 vertical scrolling partitioning thing. You didn't need to hold reset to save your game. The biggest limitation of the console might have been the leftmost 8 (16?) pixels had to be masked off to hide corruption during horizontal scrolling. Oh and the letterboxed aspect ratio of every single game due to the lack of sufficient vertical resolution.
I agree with every detail except I can't remember anyone ever saying the SMS is better. Well, ok, there was one guy who went all in SMS from the start, but he was kind of retarded. I never once in my life held down reset.
SMS only had 2 good games, I think. Phantasy Star and R-Type. Expensive, though.
If you look at SMB3 on emulator, you can see the same corruption for horizontal scrolling. Due to overscan on CRT TVs, it was not an issue at the time. IIRC what is happening is the systems aren't entirely capable of scrolling both directions simultaneously, so they are scrolled in one direction, and the other direction the tiles are loaded on the fly, and are visible when doing so. Horizontal corruption was chosen, because the top and bottom were used for displaying the HUD, so corruption would be more noticeable.
It's like I'm back on the playground all over again... Where's Dave when we need him?
"SMS is superior" is a very common claim on Sega forums and in places were SMS held a significant presence, like Europe and South America. It's not so clear cut. If you take NES mappers out of the equation, SMS has a clear technological advantage. But if you include the mappers and, probably more importantly, include the greater commercial pressure to produce high performing games on the NES compared to the Master System from the late 80s through the early 90s, the NES games technologically exceed SMS games, in my opinion. After all, cutting-edge games were clearly moving to the Mega Drive and PC Engine by then.
Something that always amazed me was Phantasy Star being a 4-megabit game in 1987, about three years before you'd see such a thing on the NES. Mappers were nascent, buggy, and otherwise primitive then, and games a quarter the size of Phantasy Star were then considered "big" by NES standards. Therefore, it'd be difficult to claim that the NES was technologically superior during that time period.
Wait, there's a jumper on the cartridges that signify horizontal vs. vertical scrolling?? What if you removed the solder from horizontal on Super Mario Bros and instead soldered the connection for vertical scrolling? Could you do a quick vid on that???
This is so cool!! I had heard previously that the scrolling direction in older games was determined by a soldering connection on the circuit board, but somehow it didn't click that that would prevent ever scrolling along more than one axis. It was cool to see how it's the additional hardware that games that do that have in them that makes that possible. And I was also really interested in how the MMC5 fixed the need to hold the Reset button when powering off a game with save data, and impressed with its ability to do multiplication. Thanks for this video! Please do another one on the MMC5!
One of my favourite things about old cartridge circuit boards is finding the company logos on chips or cut out of the solder mask. Konami did it a bunch especially with famicom boards, and there's a "hidden Mickey" made from test points on one of the Disney titles (if I remember it was actually decorative and not just a by-product)
There were a number of games before Mario 3, and the MMC 3, with multidimensional doing though, especially RC Pro-Am and Wizards & Warriors from Rare. It's known that Rare was the only company in western territories that Nintendo allowed to use their own mapper chips.
I've heard that, too, but it looks like there are others. For example, it appears that the NES-DRROM is just the TENGEN-800004/MIMIC-1 but a die-shrink version manufactured by Nintendo.
Edit: I think I should say "package shrink" instead of "die shrink".
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 Huh. That is new information to me. Interesting!
I read this article when I got my copy of Nintendo Power in the mail. I was 10 at the time, and almost all of it flew over my head, but I found it fascinating nonetheless. I hadn't seen that level of technical detail in Nintendo Power ever before and thought it was cool that they bothered to publish such a thing.
I always felt like Punch-Out! was kind of primitive in its presentation, but knowing how the MMC2 works now, it really seems like it was pushing the system's limits at the time. Neat stuff!
Yeah me too,but even with mario 3 and castlevania 3,they look simple to the nake eye(just as simple like those hana barbera cartoons from the 60’s) BUT on the technical side they are very complex as hell,like swapping tile sets and changinging scanlines on the fly etc,,, it’s incredible that even such old school feeling games turned out be technically sooo complex.
Not sure how one can read that and wonder what happened to the MMC4. We would only learn years later that, it was a slightly better MMC2, and it was only used on the Famicom (for the three Intelligent Systems strategy games, Famicom Wars and the two Fire Emblem games).
In the FE games, the character ROM bank switching I believe was most used for an even easier to see example: tiles FD and FE, which are the two tiles hard-coded in the mapper to activate the bank swap when rendered, are the left and right text window borders. So, essentially when the left and right edges of text windows are drawn, the game will automatically swap to the font ROM bank at the start of the window and back to the main screen graphics ROM at the end).
Damn. Now THERE's a way to save memory and cycles.
In 1991, I had an Atari 7800 and was jealous of my friends with an NES. Sega Genesis might has well been a private jet.
I remember this article from back in the day, I found it fascinating
Seeing this makes me want to go dig out my classic Nintendo Power magazines. I remember this section when I was a kid and had interest, but was still too young at the time to understand it all.
This stuff is for hardware designers, game designers rarely know much about these things
@@ThexXxXxOLOxXxXx This is very true today. But back in those days, the game programmers definitely had to know this stuff in order to write software for the hardware. Remember that this was before high level languages like C or C++ were used to write games. You would have had to write assembly code, and you would be operating essentially on the bare metal.
@@michaelcalvin42 Damn Scientists xD
@@michaelcalvin42 Agreed. It seems very complicated yet interesting at the same time. When I took classes for computer, networking, and some programming courses, although the topic was outdated, we learned quite a bit on how old school limited hardware functioned and the limitations it had. I think learning that aspect of things made understanding everything today make sense. Having deep understanding of the hardware itself allows you to do some amazing things in software that original hardware makers thought were probably not possible.
@@Epic_C Honestly, even when you're working on modern systems in high level languages, it's good to understand how the machine works. You can implement a lot of optimizations if you respect the hardware.
Amazing overview of NES mappers! If you look closely at the Nintendo Power example image of Castlevania 3, it doesn't use per-tile attributes from MMC5 (aka 8x8 attributes). In fact, Castlevania 3 doesn't use that feature *at all*. This is because Castlevania 3 was originally released on the Famicom using the VRC6 mapper, and used its expansion audio for the glorious soundtrack on the Japanese version of the game.
For vertical split screen, you can add Bandit Kings of Ancient China to the list of games that use it. That game uses it for the credits scene to scroll the names next to some nice images.
Here is a video link showing the Bandit Kings of Ancient China credits: th-cam.com/video/yyn1NwHSf0k/w-d-xo.html
@@hahahaspam That link appears to be running from an emulator that doesn't show the graphics correctly. Here's how it looks on an actual cart: th-cam.com/video/f84JRtV1_HE/w-d-xo.html . Note the stars actually scroll through 8 pixels in a loop.
@@greyrogue2999 Interesting fact: the way the Bandit Kings ending looks on the emulator, with stationary stars, is probably how it was *intended* to look like by Koei! The reason the stars scroll in a loop like that is because a jumper needs to be configured on the E*ROM PCB to fully enable the split-screen feature, but the Bandit Kings PCB does not have that jumper set. It's most likely that Koei simply forgot to specify the jumper setting when they ordered the PCBs from Nintendo, and nobody noticed that the effect was wrong before the cartridges went to market because the effect is only used in the ending.
I was never a console gamer back in the 8/16 bit era, but I find it fascinating that the company's own magazine would share even shallow details about their device's inner workings to the consumer.
I like how you said we skipped those pages as kids. Because that is exactly what I did!
15 year old me came back watching this and profusely thanks you for expanding and correcting this article. It was exciting to have flashbacks to the article before you opened to the page. I knew exactly what you were going to talk about. Considering how 45 year old me is becoming more absent minded is an unexpected but welcome reminder of time and aging. Thanks for another great video.
Fantastic research and explained well. Thank you.
I look forward to the MMC5 video.
16:51 For the longest time, I have always wanted to know why the NES required players to hold down the Reset button while pressing Power to save a game properly. As a matter of fact, I would like to learn how game saves work in general, how they evolved over the years, and its effect on the password system. Could there be a video about game saves in the future?
Seconded
Younger then i loved articles like this , and loved to learn how these magical games worked... I love to lean my entire life.
Seeing that SMB board made me wonder: what would happen if we switch the soldering from horizontal to vertical and then start the game?
Find "Fancy Mario" SMB 1 rom hack. As far as i know it's changd scrolling. If i'm wrong please someone correct me.
I'm honestly surprised the OG games had to solder that. Pretty big oversight.
Thanks for doing these vids! Grew up with the NES, and always find the "under the hood" stuff almost as interesting as the games were themselves. Actually found a "How to Make an NES Game" tutorial online that I just started plodding through, though Assembly is a bit outside my current area of experience.
As a little kid, I had convinced my parents to do the "Fun Club" thing (at least I assume I did, maybe they were still into games enough to do it themselves), and when that ended, we were given Issue 1 of Nintendo Power as a way to "entice" people to subscribe, I suppose. We didn't until later, so Issue 20 was the first one I had after that. I remember reading that article, but considering I was around eight, and didn't have any sort of programming experience, I had so little information to work with that the majority of it went over my head. I'm thrilled you went over this, even now my knowledge of NES hardware and mappers is based almost entirely on your videos. ^_^;;
Great teardown! Keep em coming. As we see more and more OG hardware fail, we'll all be relying on emulation more and more. It's breakdowns like this that makes sense of it all, but also uncovers just as many mysteries...bravo Man!
I imagine them using words like "Game Pak" and "Control Deck" was to distance themselves from "video games" after the whole video game crash in the 80's. Kind of like how EA tried to call loot boxes "surprise mechanics". Like, it's not a cartridge it's a "Game Pak", and it's not the console it's the "Control Deck" and it's not a video game it's an "Entertainment System".
You also had a "Cassette Deck", so it fit in with the times, though "Control Deck" sounds bizarre today. I grew up on NES, and don't remember hearing the term though.
Another note, the NES was much larger than the Famicom, and was meant to look similar to a VCR.
I don't know about kids in the US but we always just called the NES a Nintendo. It wasn't until the internet and youtube did I start hearing people call these consoles NES and SNES.
Even in old movies TV shows when they were rarely mentioned were they simply referred to as Nintendo and supernintendo. So I don't know when using the acronyms became standard.
Nintendo actually ran some magazine ads saying "there's no such thing as a Nintendo" and asking people to please use the correct names. Probably they were worried about a law where if your brand name is commonly used to refer to the product in general rather than your brand specifically, you can actually lose the trademark.
I imagine Control Deck was thought up by the same team who decided to bundle it with a little robot and say look, it's not a video game, it's a toy robot that uses the TV as a user interface!
@@renakunisaki I don't see how it could interfere with a trademark. And if it did it's not like all consoles were called nintendo. Just their consoles. Same for Sega consoles.
My guess is it might be something to do with Japanese culture and how it contrasts with western culture. Especially in regards to nomenclature and formalities.
Sick timing, I've been on a Nintendo Power kick the past week and 20 was the first issue I looked at, simply because it was the first issue after going monthly without a guide padding out odd-numbered months. I noticed that article and thought it (and this video) was interesting even though a lot of it goes over my head. Even better are the illustrations of Mega Man in the article before it.
Very good, man. Love this in-deep videos as well some callback from the time when everything we had as news on gaming was in the pages of gaming magazines! HAHAHAHA
I'm amazed that Nintendo USA had the confidence to present such detailed technical information to their customer base, which consisted primarily of kids. Thank you for this great video!
I have this issue, and several other years worth of Nintendo Power in boxes in my garage. I remember reading that article back in the day!
This was really helpful to understand NES mappers, more like this please. Thanks for the video
As a carpenter and finisher for almost 20 years...I have no idea what you're talking about. But i have been playing games for over 30 years so I've dabbled into the idea of coding so at best...I have no idea what you're talking about 8-) I'm subbed to you for a reason as this is first of all produced to a 5-star spec but also super interesting.
Your videos are top notch! So well done and enjoyable. Thank you for the great content
It's understandable that once you start adding more features and require more mapper registers, it's better to go with a dedicated IC logic chip. For BNROM all you need is one bank register, it switches the entire 32k ROM space as a single block. All the circuit needs to look for is any write from the CPU where the highest address line is high (any write to $8000 or higher). But if you also want to say, switch CHR, now you'd need to start looking at the highest (A15) + 1 address line (A14), so that you know if its a mapper write (A15) and then you select if it's a PRG or CHR write (A14). You need to start adding something called a 'decoder'. In other words it's just a selector of what chip or other part of the circuit needs to be listening in on what the CPU is saying. The selected 'device' can let the CPU data bus contents in, and voilá, you have a bankswitch.
I remember reading this when I was a kid. I had no idea what the heck it was talking about, but I found it fascinating nonetheless.
Great video as always.
Can you do one comparing the sprite capabilities of the SNES and Genesis, because I never understood why the Genesis felt like it could put more and bigger sprites onscreen when the SNES supposedly has the better sprite capabilities. 128 sprites onscreen, 32 per scan line, 8x8 - 64x64 vs 80 sprites onscreen, 20 per scan line, 8x8 - 32x32 on the Genesis.
Also the SNES per scan line capability allows it to draw sprites across the entire screen horizontally yet I've seen SNES games flicker of far less.
Hmm. Seems like a good idea. Sometimes it is a tough decision to decide whether to do two videos on two consoles (sprites for SNES and sprites for Genesis) or take a single subject - "sprites" - and mention multiple consoles in the video. It depends on how technical of an explanation it requires.
For instance - Talkin' Code episode 3 here is definitely based on Nintendo Power and is therefore a sampler. I could still do separate videos on NROM, UNROM, MMC1, etc...
Anyway - thank you for your suggestion, Yo D. I am just thinking out loud for you and any others that might read this response.
@@DisplacedGamers No, Im glad you're interested. And while I would prefer a straight up comparison. Separate shows of both systems capabilities would still be nice. Heck, Im a pretty technical guy, so the more the merrier for me.
Having grown up with Nintendo I've never really seen much explanation of the technical capabilities of Sega and other systems, so it would be really neat to see videos about them!
Absolutely fantastic! I could watch these kind of videos all day over watching TV and movies...
I think I just found my new favorite channel.
Thank you for making these videos! They are fascinating
Love the explanations and they're always appreciated!
I remember reading that issue of Nintendo Power. Back then I had all of the issues of the OG Nintendo Fun Club magazine and was a NP subscriber well into the N64 days.
I has always found it very interesting just how much the NES/Famicom evolved over the course of its life through the cartridge alone. I don't think any other game system ever had a similar kind of evolution. IMO maybe the Atari 2600 over the course of its life.
If you compared some of the best 1983-84 Famicom games against those made in the early 90s you would see a massive difference. That evolution often times lost on people these days who only compare the supposed "best" of each console to the "best" of another console and ignore the timeline of when those consoles and games were developed.
SNES expansion chips were a similar case.
I'd say the 2600 evolved less but probably would have had a similar story if not for the game market crash. Pitfall II and its display processor chip, basically an early version of a mapper, didn't make it in time for the console's market viability. It that and technology like it managed to revitalize the market in time, the 2600 may have evolved to the point where it could have remained competitive with early NES titles, much like the NES managed to hang in during the early days of Mega Drive and PC Engine.
I remember when Super Mario Bros. 3 was released and being completely blown away with what seemed like an astronomical jump in what NES games could do. At the time I was too young to really understand that difference with the MMC chips. It's definitely great to look back on this stuff now that I actually understand enough about it to appreciate then advancements.
Geez DG this brings me back. My brother had RC cars.
And by the looks of it one US game magezine article couldn't compete with marketings influence on the gamer culture and succumbed to it themselves and named their successive console the Nintendo 64. I guess if you can't beat em, join em.
11 year old me read that whole article. So much of it was over my head. But I remembered MMC2 was weird and used in punchout. MMC3 was good for split screen scrolling and castlevania 3 used it. And then I did jack all with that knowledge until in more recent years I saw a video about someone making a NES cart within the decade and using so little rom and I was going "hmm I know of NES games with more ROM" digging in wiki and stumbling on MMC and going "I KNOW THIS!" And reading up on the hardware and actually understanding much better this time through. This video cements it. Why the hell I remember this stuff, and the locations of all the stuff in Zelda 1 while I can't remember where I left my glasses an hour ago is beyond me.
I say that and MMC5 is CV3 ha, I'm a fool regardless.
I remember this article from Volume 20. Nintendo Power was one of the few magazines I actually subscribed to. This technical article was always one that mystified me a bit.
This video answered the question that I had from the last video about scrolling in SMB 3. I can't wait for the video on the MMC 5 chip. That one sounds interesting.
I remember seeing that article in Nintendo Power and found it very interesting even though at the time I didn't really understand it. It's nice to go back over it with an expert!
I love this channel.
its crazy how the orientation of how the game scrolled is set via solder-blobs on the PCB, surely something like this could have been set via a bit in memory.
i remember when things used to be Bits and shifted to Bytes and internet companies tried to shaft people by saying your few dozen Byte download rate will go UP to several hundred BIT download rate (which was actually around half as fast when you did the math)
This is great! Looking forward to that pattern tables video!
So here's my question about the MMC3 allowing scrolling in all directions: Raid on Bungeling Bay, an NROM game released for the Famicom in February 1985, also allows multi-directional and diagonal scrolling from an overhead perspective. How was that accomplished? It's not as smooth as SMB3 but there's got to have been some trick.
probably a similar way to smb3. In all actuality, smb3's scrolling does not rely on the mapper at all.
*It’s crazy that the Genesis had been out for* a couple years *by this point*
Also please make a series on the MMC5
That's really cool seeing how the inside of Nintendo entertainment system cartridges evolved.
Now I'm wondering if there's a similar video covering the development of Sega Genesis cartridges.
Would be interesting if you can cover some old compression algorithms, heard Mr. Iwata saved the Pokémon Gold/Silver team lots of space with that, so they could implement the whole Pokémon Red/Blue area as well.
Same as me, I only know Princess Toadstool and King Koopa when I see them today at 40 years old.
Fast forward to 2022, we still use memory pages, and the same idea as bank switching. Also, the fluidity of how memory and such works with modern CPUs is quite amazing.
Super interesting, thanks!
Great stuff! Keep it coming!
I read that article when my copy arrived in the mail all those years ago. I found it very intriguing.
I've always wonderd how the MMC5 actually does the work of making each tile have its own palette because that 4-tile grouping scheme was pretty deep down in the PPU and there isn't enough space in the nametable to make room for 4x larger color tables.
It's a shame the NES didn't have the audio lines connected, so developers couldn't use its sound expansion. Castlevania III's music, while awesome on the APU alone, was incredible in Japan. Konami could've made it /almost/ as good in the US with the MMC5.
Interesting stuff! Thanks for sharing!
17:50 I've wondered: is additive/looping multiplication really how they did it? It seems obvious to use lookup tables, especially as ROM sizes grew and additional work RAM became available. This deep into the NES' lifecycle it feels natural to use storage to ease CPU burden whenever you could. I've also heard that the MMC5 was very underutilized so I'm not sure how regularly the multiplication function was utilized.
This article was one of my all-time favorites from Nintendo Power. I really enjoyed technical articles and it was rare to get this level of insight. In fact, until third party documentation was being produced much later by people like Chris Covell and Kevin Horton starting from the mid-to-late 90s, this article was basically by entire basis of how NES games worked.
For simple multiply and divide, you can use bitshifting to achieve powers of two. That covers nearly all the things that you see get multiplied in performance-sensitive situations in NES games; for something like an RPG you don't have to optimize it. Small LUTs do often appear for the rest. One of the characteristic things about 8-bit games is that they would design out the need for granularity, and hence any elaborate usage of math. Thus the tables, when they appeared, were often really small, but formed the basis of much of the gameplay and could combine a great deal of math into input/output pairs. This is how the original Pong operated: a small table of ball velocities using mirroring to further optimize space.
There are quite a few apps on 8-bit computers that had to opt for the slowest ways of doing math, symbolic manipulations, etc. because their primary objective was to optimize for size, and they couldn't use the shortcuts games did.
@@JH-pe3ro Thanks for confirming; this is what I expected to hear.
I remember reading those pages in volume 20 of Nintendo Power, and I thought they were quite interesting, although my mind at the time couldn't make heads or tails about most of what it was explaining. (And my brain is still sorta lost on much of the technical stuff even now. :P)
Oh my god you uploaded
while a lot of the info goes over my head, this is still super interesting!
It was this articile that I ever knew what a memory mapper was when I was a kid. Outside of Nintendo power, Nintendo made no mention of MMCs. It wasn't on the game box, it wasn't in the manual, it wasn't on the cartridge label and it certainly wasn't mentioned in-game. Ironically the same thing would again happen in the Super Nintendo era. Mario Kart using DSP1 Megaman X2 uses the CX4? No mention of it anywhere on the box, manual, label or game. Only the Super FX chip was ever mentioned.
Awesome video!
This was really lovely :)
Still have this issue after all these years.
I literally never heard anyone call them game paks in the NES days.
As for that exact issue of the magazine, I remember really wanting to understand the article on different chips and whatnot, and get interested in the technology, but it was a little advanced for little me.
Something to clear out: diagonal scrolling is NOT a feature of the MMC3, even the most basic NROM game could do it. But scrolling in two directions AND showing a fixed status bar like the one from mario 3 was almost impossible without it.
Also, that kind of scrolling requires larger levels to be interesting, which the MMC3 helps by having slight advancements in bank switching, like all the MMC chips.
It was only almost impossible because of the terrible support the NES has for raster effects. Unless you can guarantee a solid pixel in the background at all times, there isn't a 100% accurate way to know where you are on the screen. This is one thing MMC3 added with its scanline counter.
@@binguloid yeah, and there is also a way to make a very finnicky scanline counter using the dpcm channel, that way you dont need to know what's already on screen.
I recently made a game using that technique, but I dont think any games of that era used it.
Princess Toadstool and King Koopa. I still find it perplexing how the western market had one name wrong and one name right, then did a flip flop and got Princess Peach and Bowser, one name wrong, one name right.
This stuff is pretty interesting, I'm learning to write code for the ZX Spectrum Next - which is not a NES - but some of the concepts are strangely applicable.
So interesting, great video. You mentioned on a Podcast with Retro RGB about how the SNES CPU could be tricky to work on. I would love to hear more on that. Any future SNES videos coming?
How did you resist the urge to swap the solder strap from horizontal to vertical on SMB? Would it do anything? I need to know.
good video, and I would enjoy (if possible) a followup that covers the mmc4 and some of the mappers, specifically the vr6 since it was used in Castlevania 3 and the mmc5 was used instead for other regions
"Memory Management Controllers" It's just like the paging provided my modern Memory Management Units.
"...comparing it to adding pages in a book..." _I was joking!_ :O
Honestly a little surprised a Nintendo Power article got so technical. No 6 year old could understand this stuff ;)
MMC5 truly was a real-deal coprocessor, however never fully utilized by devs since it was too late...
Excellent video as always, but the American Mega Man box covers (in this case Nintendo Power front cover) always give me the creeps. They are cursed!
I kept sending extreme close-ups of the faces on that cover to one of my friends as somewhat of a "boo!" because of how odd they look.
Go look up the European cover for Mega Man 3, lol. Wily's face on there would have scared me as a kid
8:47 lol I actually got 4 74HC32 ICs in a surplus Radioshack kit I bought like 5 years ago. Funnily enough, I think they're counterfeit because the chip number and other numbers rubbed right off of it if my fingers were the least bit oily. Like if I just scratched my face and I'd been sweating, that would be enough to rub the number right off of the chip when I press them in to insert them. No laser etching. Which you'd think Texas Instruments could afford. Also that's one of the signs of counterfeit chips I've learned about since finding out how sadly common they are online. I might never have known some of my other chips were counterfeits. Except maybe for the ones where the Texas Instruments logo is a picture of the United States. I guess they don't know what Texas is in China.
Love the borg refeance. lol
I was 10 when that issue came out. I was hardcore Nintendo Power reader but I don't remember that article at all.
I had no idea that the mirroring configuration was controlled at the bus level like that. What happens if you take an UNROM cartridge and switch the mirroring configuration from H to V?
Also when I was a kid and Volume 20 came out I *obsessively* read those four pages, because it was definitely the kind of nerdy information I was all about. And I loved how after that Nintendo Power usually published mapper stats as part of their review blurbs.
I was watching some videos of Mega Man 3 and noticed something that always bothered me as a kid. On the robot select screen, there's some distortion on the lower-third, right-half portion of the screen. This distortion repeats itself on Dr. Wily stage 5 and sometimes when opening the weapons menu (always on Dr. Wily stage 6 but maybe in other places too), both of which also trisect the screen into thirds. Might make for an interesting explanation video, or maybe a part of an examination of other graphical artifacts. I would also be very interested to know why the top spin weapon is so twitchy. Sometimes it hits and drains either all of its weapon energy in a split-second, all of your enemies' life in a split-second, or does not hit at all. Thanks for your excellent videos!
First to say thank you
I won't rehash the already stated things about how excellent this video is. But I hope that the younger generation that sees this - zoomers and late millennials - may appreciate that these games are amazing while also being about as big file-wise as a basic essay's worth of Word document. I can't post it here but a simple jpg of the iconic Super Mario 1's first screen is actually many times bigger than the actual game.
That RC car analogy was smart, even if the other explanations are oversimplified and, in the case of compression, just wrong (what the Tetris playfields illustrate is more akin to defragmentation-grid overlays on the two playfields with block chunks and empty spaces over the whole width and height being different numbers added together based on block type would work better as then the "compressed" example would eliminate the zeroes of the empty spaces). And NP's bit message was basically "bits only matter as much as how well they're used, and we know how to use 'em". Also smart.
And it looks like that MMC3 scanline interrupt thing was the predecessor to the SNES's HRAM trickery that, among other things, let that system's Mode 7 really shine.
One question, though: where was any sort of MMC4? Was there an early version that was later scrapped? Japanese superstition against the number 4 (it's "shi" in Japanese, which also means "death")? Or was the MMC5 just that much more advanced than the MMC3?
Nesdev shows that MMC4 did exist, and was basically an upgraded MMC2.
Curiously, the Game Boy was very similar - MBC1, 3, and 5 were widely used, but 2 and 4 were much less common.
@@renakunisaki Before the Windows curse, there was the Nintendo memory controller curse. :
Excelent!
Good vid: DIg it very much. :-)
I miss Radio Shack. Maybe it's just nostalgia because everything can be bought online but it's different browsing in store and finding interesting things.
Love this stuff. :D :D :D
This is an impressive article for the time and for a simple Nintendo magazine😮 . it's a good idea to share it here.
Perhaps I misunderstood (my English is bad). Are you saying that the Multi-directional scrolling of SMB3 is due to MMC3? I've heard this many times before but never understood this allegation.
In my opinion Nametable Mirroring and scrolling are two very different things. Multi-directional scrolling is a native part of the NES hardware functions, no matter the mirroring. There are even games with multi-directional scrolling without a mapper (Star Force, Ikki, Raid on Bungeling Bay...).
I'm sorry if I misunderstood this part of the video 😅.
2:45 Megaman and Rush look, uh, Daliesque....
Now I'm curious what would happen if you desoldered that horizontal scrolling bridge and soldered the vertical scrolling one and tried playing Mario... or more easily if you changed the settings in an emulator :p
Go look up "Mario Dream Mary" - that's exactly what you're looking for. It shows what the Mario 1 cartridge plays like with the mirroring pads connected backwards.