Why does an NES cartridge have two ROM chips inside?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 มิ.ย. 2024
- A look at one of the more unique design decisions of the NES.
More info: / 22735126
Music: rainwarrior.ca/music/classic_c...
Sources and game list: gist.github.com/bbbradsmith/e...
Chapters:
0:00 Two ROM chips
0:42 Hardware
2:52 CHR ROM for graphics
4:29 CHR RAM for graphics
5:32 A fun thing to try - เกม
Congratulations, you made those NES games look like modern "retro" games
Haha, yes, you nailed it.
I hate this modern "retro" look, which looks nothing like retro games looked like.
It exactly resembles Atari 2600 graphics!!!
At best it looks like a PICO-8 game, at worst exactly like an Atari 2600.
Err. No. Your reasons for the slot-loading mechanism existing are incorrect.
This should be blatantly obvious for two reasons - the Famicom, and the late era AV famicom and Slot loading NES.
All of these have conventional slot mechanisms.
No, the design of the western NES can be directly attributed to the US game market crash of the early 80's.
This is also the reason early versions of the NES were only ever sold with ROB, even though it's an accessory that doesn't do much.
ROB was included so the NES could be interpreted as a toy, and the slot-loading mechanism makes it resemble a VCR, and gets away from the image of top-loading cartridges people associated with 'game consoles' such as the 2600.
Even the marketing terms pointedly tried to avoid calling the NES a console.
Meanwhile, the Famicom ignores all of this, because the crash and associated negative image of 'game consoles' never happened in Japan. (or Europe for that matter, but I guess they still felt the US design worked better for Europe. The European SNES meanwhile is effectively in a Super Famicom case with different labelling, even though by virtue of needing to output PAL the internals are different, while the US model is in a unique case design even though it's internals are almost identical to the super Famicom.)
The slot-loading mechanism actually makes the system less reliable, and is the most common source of failure in the system, but it makes no sense to say it existed because of concerns about the number of pins.
There's a discussion of this a little further up. Another commenter above made some suggestions about the different angle and added torque from the length of the cart. Gravity acting against the top side of the pins also seems relevant.
Yes, it was simply a stylistic choice (for the US market) and actually lead to more problems than solutions.
That still doesn't make sense. There's no reason why you would want to put more torque on the top pins in comparison to the bottom pins. They made the cartridges that large (which are mostly just empty space), and they made the slot ZIF to make it seem like a VCR. That's it. There is no technical benefit to doing what they did. It was completely marketing.
@@lilmul123 okay but it stands to reason that putting the catridge in horizontally had challenges, otherwise they could just make the catridge go straight in instead of having to push it down.
actually, it would make sense to put more torque on the top pins in this configuration. gravity would probably eventually make it so the bottom pins have more give, thereby making it harder for the top pins to actually reach the contacts.
Brad Smith then explain the NES 2
Always a pleasure to see a vid from you. Thanks!
Such an awesome breakdown of how things work inside my NES cart! Thanks especially for answering my Twitter question about the surprise low-res mode that my NES showed me once. I knew I asked the right guy! Respect! I subscribed!
So... You turned a NES, into a better version of an Atari 2600?
Actually the NES could have (in an alternative universe) been the next "Atari 2600"...
The Atari 2600 itself was obsolete by the time it came out and lasted a LONG time - better part of 10 years. During that time it had all sorts of competition from earlier models that had more options, like the Magnavox Odyssey 2 to the similar but better Intellivisoin and Colecovision.
@@benb3316 What the heck are you talking about, dude? The Atari 2600 was released in 1977, the Magnovox Odyssey 2, 1978, The Intellivision, 1979, the Colecovision, 1982, only the Fairchild Channel F came out in 1975, but the Atari 2600 can outperform that console. The Atari 2600 lasted for a decade because, by the time its closest competitor was released, the 2600 had been released for well over a year, and already had a substantial library of arcade video game ports. While its competitors can do more, it was hard to convey to a tv audience over a 30 second commercial, when you're comparing "blocks" (big pixels), to blocks. Two, the video game industry crashed hard in 1983. It didn't recover until Nintendo advertised the release of their video game system as a an extension of their R.O.B. the Robot "toy" in late 1985. The NES left store shelves as soon as they were avaiable in 1986, which leads us to... *dun-dun-dun-duuun* 1987. ...THAT is why the Atari 2600 sold for a decade. That, and the Atari 5200 and 7800 did not improve upon the Atari 2600 experience, to make them worth being bought, compared the cheaper Atari 2600.
@@badreality2 This is what the hell I'm talking about - th-cam.com/video/2q5_RgSCjBo/w-d-xo.html
Nintendo wanted to partner with Atari - I think it was after the crash but Atari still had such brand appeal and it was just that games were dumped and few new ones made. But Atari got paranoid and backed out so Nintendo just made their own system. Sounds like business decisions on the level of Blockbuster video deciding not to buy Netflix.
So, yeah a NES is essentially well given the time it's closer to a PS3 vs a PS1 but look at the games or how they had to sacrifice to program for them - it really is the pinnacle of the Atari technology before it morphed into the "Bit War" graphics race that then morphed into today's PC based/high memory/graphics card systems.
Another fun vid is this - people putting a game on 40K - and this was done recently - th-cam.com/video/ZWQ0591PAxM/w-d-xo.html Even lots of cool "Homebrew" where they make games that run on 2600 and in a shadow resemble famous modern games like - heh - HALO... Lotta respect for them, but thank G-d for modern systems though I do like "Retro" imagery if done right.
@DoddoSonic Not sure about that - also a matter of what you could do with said ram and resources. I think the Atari was super limited in total memory though they eventually made some chips with ways around it but it was still fundamentally crippled from any expansion - no way to say make an Atari 2600 full Zelda port even with today's memory. Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite games were that system, I actually skipped most of the NES and jumped to Sega 16... That felt like getting a PS3.
But - even for systems made earlier, some stuff could be done no way an Atari ever could do.
For instance, here's a "Pac-Man" clone that they sued over that came out a year ish before Atari 2600 - th-cam.com/video/W8YlmDqs4Z4/w-d-xo.html I doubt you could do this with a 2600
Fantastically informative and cool video man, an honest thank you for sharing! :D
Excellent video, glad I found your channel. ROCKET SHOES!
🚀👟!
I've heard that it was meant to resemble a VCR with it's front loading mechanism.
Video game crash in US happened just two years prior. I haven't heard of anyone having problems with their Famicom in that way even today 30+ year old hardware, so only if it was based on front loading because someone thought that it would be better... turned out to be worse with the connector needing to get changed is very common with the NES.
I for one wish they would have kept the Famicom design but launched it in other colors in the west.
that filter looks cool, maybe you can call it atari 2600 filter XD.
I searched for 10nes chip looking for content.
All but two videos (other I had seen before) were about tech issues with it, not general knowledge sharing.
I heard your voice and subbed at once. Keep up the great work.
This was progressively more interesting and entertaining the longer i watched. Really cool.
Great video, congratulations!
The reason why they used that connector wasnt cause of concerns over strain, it was because they wanted to make it look more like a vcr and less like a console because of the video game crash in north america.
The famicom in japan uses almost the same cartridges, slightly fewer pins, and that just has a traditional connector. And larger connectors already existed before then, so its not like nintendo was going into uncharted territory and had to be careful.
The python script for the graphics simplifying is awesome, lots of fun. The mario games and punch-out come out looking great
Great, simple explanation!!!
I find those mmc chips very interesting enhancement chips and those chips do expend the rom ram size of the nes trough bankswitching in different ways thus allowing for bigger games with better graphics & more and better dpcm sounds.
The Nes is the best pixel console ever. So much variety. Unfortunately this also makes it hard to do homebrews because the system can only see 40k of additional memory in the control deck at one time. It's 1983 hardware and while incredible compared to the competition at that time, without chip upgrades the game's are very limited.
even the nes audio can't ruin Clair de Lune.
my famicom runs it just fine
Ohh, this video is informative AND fun!
BRILLIANT CONTENT. THANKS !!!!!
Nice explanation!
That's quite cool. Makes for a very good 'guess the game' challenge.
Love the beginning passepied remix. First heard that one in Belmonts Revenge, never knew it was a classic until recently
Because one is used by the tile generation hardware, and one is used by the CPU. It allows the PPU to concenrate on generating the screen image without competing with the CPU for bus cycles to ROM/RAM.
I understand the tile generator was basically a repurposed text generator.
I hear an 8-bit version of Debussy's Passepied in the background! What's it from?
And Claire de Lune a bit later. :)
It's from an album of classical music for the NES I made a few years ago:
rainwarrior.ca/music/classic_chips.html
@@Sakanakao Passepied is a gem, I especially enjoy the orchestral version.
bro why is there an echo in the background?
I live in an empty corn silo.
@@Sakanakao oh ok, just wondering
@@Sakanakao I would have guessed a grain silo.
he is god
@@Sakanakao HAHHAHA
very cool, could be the mosaic effect the same implementation as the same effect in kirby's adventure ?
Yes! I believe it's pretty much the same idea.
@@Sakanakao W-What? Y-yes....?
You should do a tutorial on 6502 coding for the NES, it would be greatly appreciated! Also, how did you learn NES development? I know a few basic parts of a few basic languages, and wondering how to make an NES game.
I have been planning a tutorial series for a while, but I'm still working on it. For now the best place to learn I think is the forums at nesdev.com
@@Sakanakao thanks man! Your a legend! Hope you get that series out!
Do a search for the Nerdy Nights tutorials. They are easy to read and cover a lot of ground.
Watch this:
th-cam.com/play/PLrOv9FMX8xJHqMvSGB_9G9nZZ_4IgteYf.html
I really loved the video!
I don't hate it, but why the heck the subtle reverb effect on the voice? XD
Edit: I'll just pretend God is telling me about cartridges.
Reminds me of Neo geo MVS, AES carts. Their architecture contains 2 boards. 1 board set PROG is for program code and the 2nd CHA is for Graphics, sound...This is very similar to the 2 roms in a Nes game.
Yes, it was common to do things that way for arcade machines, and Neo Geo's console inherited that from its arcade counterpart. It's the only other home console I know of that did it this way besides the NES.
I appreciate how this video starts with a technological choice and then underlines its relevance to design and play. Even if it oversteps the history a little, like with the connectors, this framing device is a good way to dip into different perspectives.
One thing I'd add: the usage of ROM/RAM chips was complicated by a shortage in 1988 related to shifts in international policy and the goals of Japanese chip factories. At this time, since Nintendo controlled the manufacturing quantities of third-party titles (per their contracts with outside developers), there was some speculation that the company reduced the availability of non-Nintendo games in order to secure chips for their own. Might be part of why the number of third party titles per year rose significantly as the 90s arrived - but then again, perhaps not! There are a lot of factors behind putting a game on shelves, and I don't mean to set anything in stone here. Just raising a few interesting historical fulcrums.
YOU ROCK
You're a legend who did great work especially on Star Tropics ... but you're not right about the NES's loading mechanism. Nintendo of America didn't want the NES to look like the Atari because the NES was due to launch after the videogame crash, so they gave it a high-tech look like a VCR (which was hot shit at the time). In Japan (and later in the US) they used a regular top-slot mechanism and it was much more reliable.
Judging by that echo, I'm going to assume this video is haunted.
I really love videos explaining how older hardware works. is quite useful when you are building an 8 bit System yourself.
also i thought the NES uses a PPU (Picture Processing Unit), GPU is more of a PC thing and the term itself wasn't used at all in this time
Yes, Nintendo's term for that component on the NES was "PPU", but that's their own special name for it. I am making a comparison with other systems (they all have funny GPU names like VDP, RSX, CGA, Denise...) and I wanted to use a term that people today would understand.
@@Sakanakao well personally i think it would be better to use original names in case people want to learn more about the matter. and learned about a GPU here and every datasheet and WIkipedia article about it calls it PPU, it could be confusing
but besides that i would really like to see this becomin ga series about NES hardware stuff. kinda like how this guy does with the SNES th-cam.com/video/57ibhDU2SAI/w-d-xo.html
Gpu would be an anachronism. The display processor really doesn't process anything. It just sends out bits according to some display standard and the part that does that in modern graphics cards isn't the gpu
That python script is awesome, I love blocky gfx
Great video! Thanks!
What are the games at 2:29 and at 2:32?
Please check the video description for a link to all sources.
Fun fact- you don't have to click the cartridge down. It was Nintendo's intent to change the opinion of the public after the video game crash in North America that buying the NES was special and wasn't 'just a toy.' What else loaded something and pushed it down? VCRs.
The NES still has a Work RAM chip and a separate Video RAM chip.
Can you go the other way (in an emulator, of course) and replace the character ROM contents with higher resolution up-sampled data?
There is an emulator called HDNES that I think was built around this principle.
7:07 is that purple shep from ExplodingTNT
Great thnx
Thats rad. I womder if anyone used this to make atari 2600 homebrews.
Was the nes the only console were games had the data devided over the chr & prg chips inside it ???
It was common in arcade machines. I'm pretty sure Neo Geo did this as well, but it was sort of an arcade style design. I can't say nobody else ever did it, but it definitely wasn't common, to my knowledge.
what asembly IDE are you using?
does anyone know some realy great Asembly IDE that would have debugger, maybe some plugin support, build in PXE server for quick testing (if you are writing OS from scratch)
Where I showed some assembly code it was in Notepad++. For NES debugging I recommend Mesen and/or FCEUX. I don't have an all-in-one IDE.
Thanks
You think you could show us how do you create a simple Hello World for the NES, put in on the cartridge and test it in real NES?
BTW: how were games on NES written and tested back then, was there a cartridge that allowed games loading from PC? I though there was an NES emulator in the old days
Err. Yes. Your reasons for the slot-loading mechanism existing are correct.
I have not figured out how to activate any of the Easter Eggs in Lizard yet. One of these days. :)
the zero force connector doesn't exist on the original famicom - why do you think that they worried about the stress of the contacts when they didn't have problems with it in japan?
The NES cartridge has many more pins.
@@Sakanakao I'm not convinced that going from 60 to 72 pins would add that much more stress to the connector.
Also, Nintendo did even release a top loading version of the NES which doesn't have the same problems with the connector as the regular version :-)
Anyways. Nice videos man! You've got a new subscriber! :D
@@popmongo I'm not trying to convince you it was a good decision. Nintendo thought it was a mistake too, hence the top loader (and every NES clone ever).
I think the ZIF socket may have been needed because the cartridge is angled in weirdly due to the front loading mechanism, which is something they wanted to do to make the device appear more VCR-like and less like a game console. The cartridges also have a lot more lever torque due to how long they are, again a marketing driven decision as opposed to the low height Famicom carts, so any force applied to the end of the cartridge is amplified at the socket - but indeed, top loader works fine so there's that.
@@SianaGearz Ah, I like that thought. Gravity acting against it necessitating extra pressure to keep the top half well connected? That makes sense.
1:45 what game is being put into the nes?
It's a music cartridge I made called MOON8. There's a complete list of games in a link in the description though.
What was the last game being shown there?
At the very end of the video is footage from my own game called Lizard. I put a list of sources in the description if you're curious about any others.
@@Sakanakao - Thanks, I would like to check it out. I'm getting a bit tired of 8 bit pixel art games, but perhaps all that was needed was an aesthetic change to 4-bit pixel art. :-)
Why do I hear a echo in the video?
Simon belmont, not trevor :)
Oh no! This was the work of vampires.
What's the game at 4:25? Looks very Metroidy.
I like the chiptune Debussy
What do you think about NES Maker?
I haven't used it but I hope people make some cool stuff with it.
The echo effect is only in the right ear!
Play NES games on Atari 2600 with this simple trick! Console manufacturers hate this!
The really absurd ting on the NES is that they added so many more pins but REMOVED the sound routing through the cart. Just, why?
Technically they added 10 extra general purpose expansion pins, which COULD have been used for audio, but they were routed into a hidden connector on the bottom (under a plastic tab you had to break off). The audio connection is there on that hidden port, but nobody ever built and adapter for it*.
(* some homebrewers did make one fairly recently.)
@@Sakanakao Some of the extra pins were used for that bastard lockout chip that Nintendo stuffed into the NES.
The fact that they rerouted the expansion audio to the unused connection on the botton of the system implies to me they were considering something like a US version of the Famicom Disk System.
Congrats you have just made NES censored edition! XD
6:26 That's Simon, not Trevor
Can you make that script for SNES games?
No, the SNES didn't have ROM graphics like the NES.
6:27 That's not Trevor, that's Simon Belmont.
All you Belmondos look alike to me.
Teenage Mammal Nice Chipmunks 2?
The Arcade Game
like that's seriously an old rom hack
What are all the games shown in the video starting with punchout to the end of the video?
But, wasn't add-on hardware common in cartridges at the time for everyone, not just Nintendo? That practice was going on IIRC until the DS, but was mostly prevalent in the 80s and 90s systems.
DS did have some add on hardware, it isn't common but there was some examples. Remakes of Pokemon Gold and Silver had IR ports, one Japanese only title had a GPS device used for Star Gazing, and one cart had bluetooth added
Sorry, I should have phrased that better. I meant that add-on hardware was common since the NES by just about everyone who made cartridges, and while it certainly was much much less common by the DS era (especially since by then they were "cards" not "carts" and operated fundamentally differently than carts used to, being just storage rather than an actual extension of the system) it was still happening by then.
7:00 Super MissingNo Bros.
Haha. I see your face at 4:09.
What's the game at 4:26?
Metroid Rogue Dawn. In the video description there's a link to all the sources used with more information about it.
@@Sakanakao ok thx
4:27 Super Metroid on NES??
Me suscribo
5:22 this thing looks like someone has hand-drawn the exposure film for etching. Was this thing mass-fabricated? Because this looks like an unnecesary amount of acid getting saturated etching away parts of conductive layer in places that play no role in insulation anyways.
It's a professionally fabricated board, but the layout definitely looks hand drawn. Sunday Funday was a mass produced game. I've seen similar boards before though, you might take a look at the NES and Famicom controller PCBs.
Here's the photo source, BTW, if you want to look at the back of the board too: bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/profile.php?id=961
"Jack, is the PCB ready?" - "Yeah, I just need to draw a few lines" - "Ok"
**after acid vaporized and cleaning**
"Jack?" - "Yeah?" - "You are fired"
Do not attempt to disassemble*
*failure to comply might result in damage to eyes and psyche
jk
3:10 holy fuck
What game is at 2:17?
Metal Slader Glory. There's a complete list in the sources link in the description if you're curious about any others.
Oh, thanks. Completely missed it in the description. Typical TH-cam commenter ;)
Game name at 4:24?
Metroid Rogue Dawn, but there's a complete list in the video description.
Can I use Python to make an nes game am currently learning python right now
Surprisingly, you can, but it's more of a proof of concept: gutomaia.net/pyNES/
Actual NES development is done in 6502 assembly though. If Python is riding a bicycle with training wheels, assembly programming for hardware as old as this is like completing the Tour de France. You can learn it on your own, but you need a solid grasp of programming and mathematics, basic computer hardware and NES hardware limitations in particular.
@@no1DdC I would say it's mostly the PPU that makes it tricky, not the 6502 asm.
@@totallynotabot151 You're right. It's just that assembly in general is such a huge step up from Python that delving further into details isn't really necessary at this point.
Please make a video explaining how PPU works, in plain english.
Neo-Geo cartridges actually have up to 16-32 ROM chips. It has two boards-1 reserved exclusively for Characters, the other is for all the sounds the game needs for a driver and the program it executes. Games for that system can be as big as 716 Megabytes-homebrew devs like NGDevTeam & Neobitz are able to squeeze more power out of that system-some even stretching to the THOUSANDS! Why I love the Neo-Geo is why I also love the NES-expendabiility! After all, it’s not about your resources but your resourcefulness!
genesisn't*
whts the fun of ruining the gameplay by shitting the resolution??...
PPU not gpu.
Your argument about the extra life due to different coprocessor sounds kind of bogus because both the megadrive and the superfamicom had cartridges with coprocessors, like the SuperFX or the SVP. This design is totally unrelated to the coprocessor/mapper situation. In fact coprocessors slowly faded away in the next generation because the consoles were usually already plenty overpowered and extending their capabilities meant making the carts super expensive (see the examples above). |That's why SEGA tried to "standardize" them into proper upgrades instead of shipping a copy on each cartridge.
This is factually inaccurate. Specially at the beginning if you factor in SuperFX chips on the SNES. Plus the original Famicom doesn't have that connector nor does it need it.