Vintage Computing

The article didn't include any pictures of Famicom carts, but basically, they're about half as tall as NES cartridges. I haven't popped open any NES games, but I'd have to guess most, if not all NES games just used a Famicom sized board to simplify manufacturing. Here's a comparison shot of the NES and Famicom versions of Super Mario Bros. 3:

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/smb3j_label/nesfam_2_large.jpg

While most later systems featured mostly standardized cartridge designs, Famicom carts wildly vary in color and design from publisher to publisher. They're quite pleasing to look at:

http://famicomblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/aesthetics-of-famicom-cart.html

Another piece of trivia: The Famicom had a 60 pin cartridge port, while the NES had a 72 pin cartridge port (iirc they removed a few pins, relocated a few from the Famicom's bottom port, and added pins for the lockout chips). A few early games literally consisted of a Famicom game board plugged into an internal 60-to-72 pin adapter. So, for a while, the cheapest way to get a Famicom converter was to rip apart a cheap game like Gyromite and hope it was part of a certain run. You can see the converter clearly here:

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/gyro/gyro7_big.jpg

As for technical details, you're mostly on the dot, but most later games also featured mapper circuitry to allow the NES to address more memory. Some boards used simple 7400 series, while others used customs ICs, some of which were…

I agree, reverse engineering some of this stuff is hard. I had been studying economics & systems design and put lots of interacting feedback loops into SRE so it's sometimes hard to tease out the individual effects. I've put some notes up here for anyone who wants to clone it http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Design.html

For a quick “where are they now”:

- Barren Realms Elite --> Mehul (my brother) moved from BBS games to web games, with Earth 2025 and then Utopia, and then a web portal Swirve.com, and then he got out of the games business and ran a coffee shop, Dominican Joe in downtown Austin (but it was just sold)
- Legend of the Red Dragon --> Seth Robinson (who I finally met this year) moved on to PC games, then mobile games, and now runs a successful MMO called Growtopia (but it was just sold) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Technologies
- Solar Realms Elite --> I got out of the BBS door world and went to grad school, interested in teaching. I now write interactive tutorials at redblobgames.com, starting with game development but I want to expand into math and computer science. SRE's wikipedia page got wiped by the deletionists http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/922 but was preserved by http://breakintochat.com/

RAM was very expensive then and 16 bit CPUs weren't that much faster to justify the cost if you were aiming for the home market.

Both true, which makes this an even more baffling choice -- why pick the more expensive, state of the art 16-bit CPU* that you're getting little or no benefit from + 16K of extremely slow-to-access combined video and system RAM? You could have used a cheaper 8-bit CPU and maybe for the same budget have fit 4K or 8K of system RAM on the bus + some amount of dedicated video RAM for the VDP. This would have been faster and more useful in nearly all real world applications, make for a much cleaner board design, easier development, and probably cheaper. That's what everyone else did.

Then again, what was this machine's target market?

Home computing, so yeah.

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/ti_cosby_large.jpg

* The reason is probably that TI wanted to show off their state-of-the-art CPU tech and be able to point to the spec sheet and say "look, it's 16 bit! All our competitors are only 8 bits -- that's half as many bits!"

Yeap, pretty much. It doesn't recreate the difficult-to-move "thunk" of TVs without remotes with separate VHF (2-14) and UHF (15-36,38-69) controls.

- Married with Children

- The Simpsons

- Fresh Prince of Bel Air

- SNL

- Airwolf

- Knight Rider

- The A-Team

It doesn't recreate standing and pointing in just right pose adjusting rabbit ears. They were impossible to tune them because touching them changes their parameters greatly. Some people put aluminum foil balls on the ends.

Many older TVs supported NTSC UHF (OTA) channels up to 83 and beyond, but the maximum channel was 69 because 70–83 were reallocated in 1983.

To hookup a Nintendo or Atari (NTSC) to an older TV, a box like this would be needed to switch between the console and the OTA antenna.[0] Some of them included an additional switch to select either channels 2 or 3. In the transition to coax, sometimes they would have or need a push on matching transformer to work with newer TVs. Nintendo released (included?) a coax-only auto switch.

0. https://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/tvswitch_2_large.jpg

Linking to illegal derivative works probably violates the rules of that forum but fortunately linking isn't a crime. The below links may be patches and not the ROM itself. The ROM itself can be found on your local torrent site, probably in a pack that includes every SNES or NES ROM!

Brutal Mario: http://www.smwcentral.net/?p=showhack&id=1012

Extra Mario Bros: http://www.derok.net/nes-roms/super-mario-bros/extra

Sonic 2 Long Edition: http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=11648&st=0 (try PMing people in this thread or going on their IRC channel)

Zelda Parallel Worlds: http://zeldaparallelworlds.googlepages.com/

The Second Reality Project: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/41/

Sonic Megamix 3.5 (4.0 isn't out yet): http://info.sonicretro.org/images/3/3f/S1MMU.rar

Super Metroid Redesign: http://drewseph.zophar.net/

Mario Adventure: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/63

I 'member scouring flea markets for one of these back in the 2000s by bringing a non-adapter copy of Gyromite with me and weighing them by hand until I found one that was ~25% heavier: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/23/how-to-tell-if-a-copy-of-gyromite-has-a-famicom-adapter-in-it

> NES and Famicom cartridges

They are Game Paks and cassettes, respectively. Of course it's obvious what the author is referring to, but I really enjoy seeing the term “cassette” used for something that doesn't contain magnetic tape, so please pardon my pedantry :)

Peep the Famicom system manual where the cartridge connector is straight-up labeled in English as 「ＣＡＳＳＥＴＴＥ ＣＯＮＮＥＣＴＯＲ」with katakana furigana (カセット / kasetto): https://ia601903.us.archive.org/17/items/Family_Computer_1986_Nintendo_JP_rev_4/Family_Computer_1986_Nintendo_JP_rev_4.pdf#page=3