A Brief History of the NES on a Chip: Betcha byte a chip | NES Works Gaiden
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.ย. 2024
- By request of Joseph Adams, I've attempted this episode to explore the history of (and explain the concept of) devices powered by NES-on-a-chip tech. I'll admit up front that this is by no means a definitive or comprehensive history, as a considerable portion of this topic falls into poorly documented spaces: Unauthorized clone consoles, piracy-focused devices, and ventures in territories veiled behind other languages and cultures (not to mention less methodical documentation than you see for mainstream Western/Japanese consoles like the NES itself). Hopefully I've still assembled an accurate and interesting enough narrative to justify the time and research involved...
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Technical detail: the epoxy used to cover chips is actually very simple to remove. Just heat it with a hair dryer or heat gun for a few minutes and it will return to a viscous state after which it can be removed relatively easily without damaging the circuit board.
This "protection" actually feels like a projection of the mental state of the creators of such machines. Having somewhat stolen somewhat else's IP, they felt the need to protect themselves from others stealing theirs... As futile as it was revealing.
Great video, keep up the good work!
In Italy, famicolnes are always remembered for "the Polystation", a fake Playstation (both PS1 and PS2 models were made) made to trick grandparents into buying it as a presdent for the future disappointment of their grandkids.
Ha, "polystation" reminds me of the stuff Ashens used to review. An NES works have been a technological improvement over the one he reviewed.
Il mitico POWER PLAYER SUPER JOY
Canadian here - oddly enough for me, these types of games and cartridges had an odd habit of showing up at flea markets. I got to play games like Nuts and Milk and "Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa" (which was renamed "baby mario" on the bootleg I had) way back in the 80s, without having any real idea of what they actually were.
The variety store near my house rented these out, along with a pin converter. I think my first time playing Super Mario Bros 3 was via a rented Famicom version.
In the Balkans, the Famiclone of choice was "the Terminator." Pretty much how the majority of people know of NES games, as Nintendo didn't really have a presence until the SNES.
unless you brought one home from the UK, Germany or the Nordic Countries, where Mattel, Bienengräber and Bergsala respectively distributed the device.
Hey Bear, how much do you remember of the NES clones and their widespread use in Yugoslavia? I only vaguely remember seeing a lot of yellow cartridges everywhere when I was a kid, but at the time I figured they were only for Mega Drives, since I do remember the Mega Drive was really big in here.
@@SEGAClownboss From what I remember, the Terminator was the biggest one, but there were famiclone molds based on the actual Famicon, on the PS1 and there was one that looked like a very convincing Mega Drive. But they were all compatible with the same yellow cartridges.
@@EnbyeonTTV The yellow cartridges are only for Famicom games correct? Did any of them hold Mega Drive stuff?
@2:09 Hey from Taiwan. Here's a little more info on the Little Tyrant.
小霸王 (xiao ba wang) is a term used to describe a local warlord that doesn't have much territory but has absolute authority over the small area in control. The figurative definition describes an only child (or only male child) that gets whatever he demands of his family.
This kid could be a true nightmare, but could also be used endearingly the way an adult in North America might playfully describe a kid with a good birthday haul as "spoiled".
While we're on the subject, the genuine Famicom in Taiwan is known as the "Red-White Machine" (紅白機 hong bai ji)!
Cool. So, it was a kind of tongue-in-cheek title. I like it.
Nice, thanks for the info. I looked up the name of the system to be sure the sources I'd read translated it accurately, since it seems a little strange in English, but obviously Google Translate doesn't provide the cultural context to explain what it REALLY means.
Regarding ASICs vs discrete components - back in the 90's if you wanted to play full quality MP3s on your PC you'd need a full on Pentium PC, but in the early 2000s there's portable battery powered ASIC based MP3 player systems, and they cost hundreds instead of thousands for a PC.
Echoing other commenters - first time I played Famicom Lode Runner, Nuts and Milk, and Yie Ar Kung Fu was on a dedicated fami-clone in the late 80's while visiting family in South America. All my cousins had a famiclone with built in games - those must have been CHEAP.
They all had a bunch of nrom games and featured Contra (only one with a mapper chip) as a headline title. A relative had a clone 2600 with dozens of games built in. It didn't have a menu, just a button on the back to switch games.
edit: Ah that's right - you're running this through a Framemeister or similar - you've just captured the highest quality famiclone video EVER. 😁
Now you have me wondering about "lost to time" questions:
A team of hardware designers created the NOAC design but who they worked for or their names is unknown. Where are bootleg chips manufactured? Was the NOAC chip pirated itself?
Why did ASIC (black epoxy glop top chip) versions of SNES or Genesis never appear?
Ah, my first home console was the Coolbaby Family Computer System, which I bought for 20 pounds in 2017. A strange mix of perfectly working games, weird Japanese exclusives like Abarenbu Tengu (Yes, I know it was Zombie Nation, but this version was an exclusive), weird homemade stuff, bad hacks, good hacks and basically everything inbetween. It's a weird machine. You can go from a perfect copy of Super Mario Bros 3 or River City Ransom, to the a hack of Jackal where everyone's the ship from Galaga, to bootleg ports of Mortal Kombat II and Sonic the Hedgehog, to things like "Warehouse 13", a badly made Soviet Sokoban clone. All in HDMI! I don't recommend it, but if you end up with one, don't chuck it in the bin straightaway.
Some of those NES on a chip licensed for plug-and-play device games have been dumped, despite the difficulty of the epoxy blobs. Where there's a will (and a challenge) there's a way.
Woah really
One of the most fascinating things here, to me, is that the prevalence of Famiclones and NES-on-a-chip created new NES ports of games. It makes me wonder if those could be extracted and run on real hardware... or if they could get some additional, official releases on console compilations alongside their regular versions
Nice video! This is sort of my area of expertise, so I'd like to offer some additional info/context/clarifications:
It's likely (though not confirmed) that the first Famiclones probably came from Taiwan's Bit Corp, who patented the first NES PPU clone alongside UMC (who later acquired at least some of Bit's assets and staff, if not the whole company). UMC would be the biggest provider of clone NES chips for a long time, including perhaps the first NOAC and even an enhanced-colour-depth version seen as early as 1997, which almost certainly served as the inspiration for the ubiquitous VT chips made in the 2000s onwards.
Incidentally the current top-of-the-line is probably the VT369, which includes a second CPU core with built-in ADPCM decoding and seems to be loosely backwards compatible with all previous VT chips, including the 6502-but-not-NES based VT168 line used in a number of plug-n-plays throughout the 2000s.
One other advantage of the VT chips is their so-called OneBus technology, which means manufacturers can create a console with built-in games using only a single ROM chip, not requiring separate PRG, CHR and mapper chips like you'd find on a typical NES cart. Of course that was another significant cost reduction, and all of today's NOAC handhelds and plug-n-plays use this tech. (It's also meant manufacturers were able to move towards using cheap recycled flash chips to store their ROMs, which are thankfully much much easier to dump than the old epoxy globs)
Subor, while maybe not the first Famiclone maker worldwide, was definitely one of the first in mainland China and the most successful there by miles. Its founder Duan Yongping went on to found BBK Electronics, which began in the clone console industry too but rapidly expanded and today is the parent company of the OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo and Realme smartphone brands.
The idea of using Raspberry Pi boards in cheap consoles has not really taken off among Chinese manufacturers, but you're right to say the tide is turning slowly away from NOACs, instead they're mostly shifting towards using low-end ARM chips on custom boards, sometimes using a poor NES emulator to run the exact same games the NOAC devices would've run, *worse* than the NOACs ran them... But NOACs are still thriving as a cheaper option.
Oh and modern-day Famiclones are just about hitting that 1000-in-1 mark for real :)
I don't have it at hand, but Bunnyboy apparently did extract the ROMs from of of those plug 'n' plays and there's a great photo of all the wires he had to get through the epoxyblob to do it. Apparently, that was the first and last time he expects to do that.
I saw something about that, but I couldn’t remember who did it or find the info in time to include here. Ah well!
OMG :D one of your viewers sent me here - I was featured in your video - nice to know that now ;) I love my Subor Xiao Ba Wang famiclone thingy ;) Great episode :D
Thank you for posting videos of game systems that are otherwise difficult to find information about!
@@JeremyParish My pleasure to help you here ;) I love such old tech, especially my old Apples but also such interesting gaming consoles. :)
I used to go to Swap Meets a lot and have always seen Famiclones everywhere there including the infamous Super Joy 3 system and had even own a couple of them but broke instantly due to heavy usage.
I had no idea the direct connection between a specific Taiwanese famiclone and the Pegasus in Poland was known. Thanks for bringing that up! I was always curious as to how the Pegasus came about, since Pegasus carts and designs have a very specific and unique flavor that you don't see on a lot of Famiclones.
I love that Hong Kong actually got both the Famicom and the Nes, and its Nes cartridge were ina different (warmer) shade of grey!
I'm from Brazil and my famiclone back in the early 90's had two cartridge slots. One for nes cartridges and the other for famicom cartridges.
It's because of these famiclones that I think the sega dominance in Brazil is kinda of wrong. Sure the master system and mega drive sold much more than the official nes but famiclones were very popular in here too. I remember that around half my friends played an nes clone and the other half had sega consoles. But I only knew one kid who had an actual NES.
a rigor seria isso.
In South America, or at least Argentina (where Sega and then Sony had better grip of the market) the Famicom clone console of choice was very creatively named "Family Game". There were some more famiclones and stuff like that going around, but if you ask a kid of that time what console they had, they would invariably talk about "la family". Of course it was almost the same as a famicom, and they even had the colorful, small cartridges instead of the big grey bricks of the NES (of course, many of those were bootleg 1000-in-1 kind of deals)
As an extra fun-fact, a popular game in those bootleg carts was called just Circus (which now I learn the full name is Circus Charlie). Pretty weird which games turn out to be more popular in specific countries or cultures.
I remember that circus charlie game.. it sucked lol!😁👍
I once got a crisp new famiclone for my 6th bday called "somga" and it was shaped like a genesis M2
It had Mario hacks up the ass but boy was it fun
Shout out to Raspberry Pi for being so damn cool.
This was really fascinating and different! I really enjoyed learning about the timeline you laid out. FGPA kits are really versatile! I keep hearing about DIY music synthesizers that you can build based around them, with varying degrees of customizability. I always love your videos, but this one was unexpected and really great. You're a master documentarian, with just the right blend of knowledge, subtle and not-desperate humor (for lack of a better term), visual sensibility, and a great narrator voice. You can really tell you're an actual writer, and not just someone who likes video games and has acquired a reasonable amount of your native language. The combination of all these elements makes your work one of my most indespensable TH-cam channels. Thanks, as always, for the time and effort you put into your work. Your videos helped me get through some really rough times for my family, but I'm happy to say they are just as enjoyable when things are going along fine haha. Thank you!
Ah I missed this one. Once again I am so flattered to see so much of my content get credited in the b-roll.
I have been fascinated with clones of the NES for decades. Growing up, my uncle had an NES that looked vaguely like the one Nintendo made, but it was a bit smaller, and notably had a spring loaded cartridge door like a VCR rather than the simple hinged door of the real NES and said "COMPUTER VIDEO GAME" on it rather than the word Nintendo anywhere.
Over the years, I've tracked down literally dozens of clones. As Jeremey said, the earliest ones from around 1987 were discrete hardware clones that took every component from the Famicom and copied its function with an identical off-the-shelf component, one to one. This worked for everything except for the two custom Ricoh chips - the 2A03 CPU and the 2C02 PPU. These chips were cloned when the Chinese clone makers first took the real chips, dipped them in sulfuric acid to remove the casing, and then studied by hand the chip die. This reverse engineering process was done without the aid of computers and resulted in errors in both chips. However, the errors weren't significant enough to stop the function of the majority of games.
As the years passed and single ASIC logic became available, all future clones simply took the flawed original clone designs and molded their future designs with the same flaws. Still to this day if you buy a Famiclone on Aliexpress, it will carry the same flaws as a clone from 1987.
It's only been in recent years where efforts have been made to clone the NES hardware properly with the Analog NT and the much more affordable RetroZone AVS with FPGA technology, and of course, NES emulators run well on even the lowest powered of single board computers like the Raspberry Pi Zero.
While both of these options are great, I wish for clone makers to take another shot a making a NOAC - this time with modern reverse engineering tools. If the NES hardware was truly cloned properly, NOACs could serve as affordable means to play real cartridges and offer an experience absolutely identical to the original hardware. NOACs are a good idea. It's simply that all of them share the same flaws from their 1987 origin.
11:57 I like the little nod to the MiSTer FPGA.
I have two eastern European famiclones: one is designed to look like an AV Famicom, the other like Super Famicom. The most redeeming quality for both is that apart from playing any NES carts, they have a hidden Famicom port that can be accessed when the consoles are screwed open.
This is so cool. I love hearing about bootleg systems and roms. Especially arcade ones. The history of SF2 clones is really neat.
Great episode, Jeremy! I learned a ton.
Thank you Gorbachev for Pizza Hut and Dandy Lion!
"Little Tyrant" is the best name for a console ever.
Also works for a rap artist
My story with videogames also started with Famiclones. At the Xmas of 1995, I got a Family Video Computer, the Creation. I remember fondly the games that included: Contra, Super Mario Bros., Tetris (Tengen), Soccer, Battle City (called Tank), Duck Hunt, Wild Gunman, Hogan's Alley, Lode Runner, Road Fighter, Binary Land, Ice Climber (called Ice Man in the device), and I think that was it?
Afterward, I knew more games thanks to the multi-game cartridges, like Galaga, Galaxian, Nuts and Milk, Dig Dug, Othello, Adventure Island, Gradius, Hokuto no Ken, Solomon's Key, etc, etc, etc...
Heck, I was fortunate to get a multi-game Mario cartridge that had Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario Bros. 2 (as Super Mario 5), and it also included Armadillo (Super Mario 4), Tiny Toon Adventures (Super Mario 6) and M.C.Kids (Super Mario 7), and there was like an specific button combination or something that allowed for some sort of stage select. Sadly, my first Creation suffered from a nasty bug that didn't allow me to see the floor of the levels clearly, so it was kind of making jumps of faith.
On June of 1996, I got a SNES, and then the rest is history.
This episode is unofficially dedicated to Frank Cifaldi, a true Famiclone aficionado.
That’s why he gets a citation!
One of your best episodes ever Jeremy! Everything was spot on.
Oh those horrible Super Joy systems. I could still find them in local stores up until last year, but a lot of the shops that had them for sale closed up due to Covid killing their business. Nowadays it's much easier to just get a USB powered Pi clone loaded with emulators.
I still find NES on a Chip devices at my local flea markets, and I pick up anything that hasn't been emulated to send to dumpers. I've been very lucky and the ones I've sent have all been dumpable but I've seen some truly awful globs on these things. They really are the stuff of nightmares.
Wasn't the NES here in England, at least not in shops, you could get 'em on market stalls etc., but there was an "Atari 2600 on a chip" system sold in stores called TV Boy that was completely wireless. The system was built into the controller, it could be powered by battery, and had an RF modulator and antenna, so you could tune in to it without needing to connect via cable. Of course, it had RF out and a barrel jack connectors for playing wired, too, as well as a standard 2600 joystick port for a second player.
It had over 100 pirated 2600 games built in, mostly Activision ones with the Activision logo hacked out.
10:56 I actually extracted the CPU asic as a silicon die and im currently studying its internals.
It could be possible to dump the games from the NOR flash memory since it uses SPI communication.
8:45 Tell that to my parents, when way back, they purchased a Super Joy for me and my brother for Christmas and claimed we should appreciate it and had no right to complain about the present even when we knew it was garbage and they didn't. And trying to explain to my parents that these were actual Nintendo games that were stolen and bootlegged on this system just elicited nothing but either blank stares or confused indifference from them.
P.S: Now that I remember this story, it also reminds me of a similar losing battle to my parents for years who forbade us from ever playing video games on the main, good tv of the house and only allowed us to hook games up to small tv's or black and white old things they had, because "video games mess up the tv" and were convinced that an aunt of ours had "weird lines on her tv because she played Atari on it and that's why". We were NEVER allowed to play any video game system on the good tv. Not until I moved out and got my own apartment had I ever gotten to play my consoles on a large or modern tv, ever.
@@the-NightStar I guess your parents must've been stupid then.
I remember seeing a game controller with 500 games built into it at the mall. It had several games that never got released on the NES in America, like Mappy and Arabian. That’s where it’s good points end, as it had a game called Ninja Turtles which was a horrible hack of Donkey Kong Jr.
My personal favorite one of these devices is housed in a shell that looks like a penguin and its eyes glow red when you turn it on. It also has a 30-pin slot on the back for Famicom carts even though I got mine off a clearance pallet in the US...
Celebrating the 25th birthday of the Nintendo 64 in the best way we know how.
Yeah, happy 25th anniversary to the Nintendo 64 (a console I never had). I got a PS1 instead since I wanted to play Final Fantasy VII (I like that all PS1 original Final Fantasy VII is available for the Switch)
NES on a Chip, aka the forbidden Pringle
I bet you there's a bootleg console out there somewhere called "The Forbidden Pringle."
A little Yobo FC that I found in a music store for 10 bucks in the early 2000's is what got my to rebuy my old NES games and kicked off my video game collection. If it wasn't for these NES on a chip clones I may have never done so.
My CVS carries a few cheap My Arcade "retro console with 200ish games!" products in portable and console-in-a-controller forms, and I've always been weirdly tempted by them. Maybe next time I'm over there I'll go ahead and drop the twenty-ish bucks.
It is weird that you're covering this topic today, in my own writing I'm revisiting the old systems-on-a-chip designs that arose to compete with Atari's Pong console, which basically were the video game industry before the introduction of the Atari VCS (later 2600).
the aesthetic of this show keeps gettting stranger and stranger. and i'm here for it
Just one small thing to point out (sorry I'm not a Karren I promise, don't hate me)
ARM wasn't designed as a mobile CPU first.
It's instruction set is light and this make it good for mobile but it was designed for the Acorn Desktop computer by one person working for Acorn in the uk.
It used so little power that when they tested it they were surprised to find it worked before they had plugged it in (phantom powered from it's peripherals)
(Acorn RISC Machine or ARM with the RISC standing for Reduced Instruction Set Computer)
Mobile came many years later but the chip is mostly unchanged.
The film MicroMen is a good depiction of that time in the early 80s.
I miss my a3010.
Found this video when I searched "nes fm chip". It was a tangent for me, but quality content. Liked and subscribed.
Thanks! I think you want to find Lagrange Point. So far as I know that was the only NES/Famicom game to include FM synthesis.
I remember watching Micro Genius commercials on TV as a kid in the early 90s. It was animated and everything.
I remember back when I was a young, dumb kid, my friend has one of these, and for some reason I thought they were Sega Genesis games.
i still have nmy black subor famiclone ^^ too bad the adapter pins are too short to reach into my modern electric sockets lol
Star Trek assumes our space-faring descendants will be playing these fully immersive pseudo-reality games, but, in truth, Captain Picard would probably just run a NES clone through the main viewscreen.
It also assumed humanity could overcome its innate selfish self-destructive nature, so
I saw a famiclone that looked exactly like Famicom except for having 4 rather than 2 main buttons. It even had a sticker saying 8bit all over, I picked on it and under it said 16bit... It even came with a 1000-in-1 cartridge looking like a Famicom cartridge. Would be fun to test it and see if it could play actual cartridges...
Average White Band!
I love these little blips you sneak into the beginning
My friend had a famiclone in a Sega Genesis/Megadrive case. It played the original Super Mario at half speed.
Fascinating...
I recognize the setup of Ogreish Flower; it looks a lot like the shareware game Zeek the Geek.
Was that phil collins drumming live at Montreux
76000 in 1... I bet that device was good if for nothing else then for laughs.
interestingly, back on the day the compatibility problem was unheard of here in russia. have the clones got worse over the years? i wouldn't be surprised if many of the pirate carts that were floating around were made even before nes-on-a-chip came into existence.
They sure got worse over the years. The real Dendy or Subor from 1994 or 1995 is leagues better than "Dendy's" from 2000's. Early clones were basically copies of the real Famicom design with some needed changes to accommodate the conversion to 50Hz PAL system for Russia. They had excellent sound and video quality on par with the real thing and very good compatibility. But as time went by they put less and less components and effort into making them. This usually manifested in worse and/or glitchy sound, poor video quality with great amount of digital and analog signal interference (or noise). Compatibility was all over the place. That's not to say there weren't any good clones in the 2000's, they were just more rare.
That "My Arcade" variant looks like a very early precursor to the Wii U gamepad, doesn't it?
My Arcade is a more recent line, so it's more like the other way around.
Does anyone know of any chips that can be purchased? I reckon these could be the basis of a nice little kit for learning electronics
There was a Pegasus GameBoy.
8:40 I found that exact model at a random chinese convenience store! I think it was about 20 bucks? the gun broke the day I got it of course but I mean I've always wanted to own at least one of those systems just to say I have it so mission accomplished I guess?
Pin Bot! HECK YEAH!
3:03 The Dandelion? Was that a deliberate pun?
Dendy line.
@@JeremyParish I know, but considering your penchant for puns and weaving wordplay through your Works series, I thought it might be another example of such.
That n64 controller full of broken nes games.....my nan had that I used to play it when ever I visited her flat.
My first Famiclone! Bought it in SF Chinatown in 2003
NES On A Chip going away? HA! No it's alive and well in the cheaper mini-arcades. One of the most fascinating being the Wal-Mart exclusive Rampage which is the NES version of Rampage but with the arcade title screen and missing character Ralph added back in. That said, the Jakks Pacific plug 'n plays specifically were usually SunPlus chips and not NOAC which was why they were often NEAR arcade accurate but not exactly. It's actually the more modern plug 'n plays you can buy at Wal-Mart now that use NOAC and it's depressing: The Jakk's Pacific Ms.Pac-Man Plug N' Play from nearly 10 years ago was sold at the same price but is VASTLY superior to the ones on the market now.
I looked but could not find a lot of this information-do you know of a centralized resource for SOAC/plug ’n play tech info?
I remember the drama around the Generation Nex having a tighter cartridge slot and everyone being worried it was going to wear out your cartridge contacts. I think my brother still has one
I guess some things never change. That was recently a source of immense hand-wringing with an Analogue console.
Nintendo wasnt in South Korea because all Japanese electronics were banned for a very long time.
They are lots chips.
The talking segments are shot like a nefarious manifesto circa 1998 of some kind
Just wait until my Max Headroom mask arrives
@@JeremyParish Wouldn't it be great if it was you who was behind that mystery broadcast.
It wasn't was it?
when you said a rhaspi is as strong as a modern pc i laughed
what’s funnier is that it’s true tho.
What, you didn't play Super Mary growing up? That's the problem with the patriarchy, man...
I don't collect consoles, but I totally want a
" little tyrant".
good news jeremy mame is kick the nes on chip but
Hey bud, I think you may be having a stroke. Please call 911
Wait.. so are there Intellivision roms out there that I can play on an NES ever drive?
Assuming someone has dumped them, which is probably not the case.
Wtf is up with the opening picture
What about it? The intro to every video is supposed to resemble an 80s TV, flipping between channels, and even watching home video VHS footage. It's all about the mood it sets. It's deliberately poor quality to have the vibe of being a kid in the 80s and 90s again. I like it. It's just a fun little thing he does. The clips of him talking only take up 1% of every video, the actual game footage is always high quality and that's ultimately what matters. Since this whole channel and project is cataloguing every single release for these consoles. This channel will become a museum of retro games that people will be watching decades from now.
@@duffman18 that's what I didn't understand why it look like that so rather than be a total jerk you could have just explained it for people that might not understand
@@dsan558 There is a strain of unkindness that runs through the comments on these videos, unfortunately.
D San just leave if you hate everything you come across
@@user-yk1cw8im4h for a simple question? Nah I won't be bullied. But I will wait a little longer to become a patreon supporter now
0:15 unoriginal comment challenge:
𝐂𝐚𝐧'𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐨 𝐢𝐧 𝐎𝐡𝐢𝐨
china is fucking amazing
Big fan of their noodles
I used to wait for wednesday to watch the new video. Today I Just forgot It. Content Is Always less interesting with these endless gaidens... IDK...
Ok, hope you find something more interesting to fill your time with.