The Atari 2600’s cartridge port is actually very limited, and couldn’t even do Phantasy Star above. There’s an 8-bit data bus, 5V for power, and grounds. 13 address lines allow for 8kiB of gaming action– well, actually, A12 needs to be used as a chip select, so 4kiB of gaming action. The Atari 2600’s cartridge port is a model of sheer simplicity. The Fairchild Channel F used the Fairchild F8 CPU, which had kind of a strange architecture with no address bus per se. (Or, depending on your point of view, doesn’t need to) Cartridge ports Championship Bowling is digging into the deep internals of the graphics side of the system in a way Phantasy Star simply can’t. But it offers no technical enhancements to the Master System hardware graphically, Phantasy Star is unable to do anything that launch-title Teddy Boy couldn’t have done it can just do more of it with that big beefy ROM. It’s got a larger program ROM (with a mapper to help out), and a smaller, battery-backed RAM chip. Here’s the inside of the most sophisticated Sega Master System game, Phantasy Star. Have you ever wondered, though, what that means, exactly? What are these additional chips doing? And why did we see this on Nintendo’s consoles more than any other manufacturer? For example, even a more modest title like Championship Bowling uses a “CNROM” board, which allows for larger graphics ROMs than the 8kiB limit in this case, 32kiB, four times the graphics space. The Famicom and NES benefitted from chips– like the aforementioned MMC5– inside the cartridges that expanded the system’s capabilities. Feel free to argue in the comments whether this is any different than if I had just taken screenshots in FCEUX.īut most people know this. But for this post, "NES" game footage captured here is from my RetroUSB AVS, just to give better quality footage. While there is an RGB mod, it's quite invasive and I don't have one on any of my systems set up, though I probably will give one of my Twin Famicoms the treatment eventually. The NES is in some sense a composite-only system. As for the game itself, it’s a text adventure with some stunning graphics, especially when viewed on a CRT. Its MMC5 mapper chip allows for a ton of advanced features. ![]() The largest game, HAL Laboratory’s 1991 Metal Slader Glory, dwarfs even Adventure Island IV with 512kiB of program ROM and 512kiB of character ROM. It has 16kiB of program ROM and 8kiB of character ROM (just like Aspect Star “N”). But much like the ColecoVision pack-in, it only includes three of the arcade game’s four levels, and none of the interstitials (“HOW HIGH CAN YOU GET”). It’s a reasonable arcade conversion, with high quality graphics. Think about the Famicom launch title Donkey Kong. (Between unlicensed titles, the NES-on-a-chip and homebrew, it has never really stopped, either) 1 and 2 came out after a several-year drought, the Famicom was continuously getting more and more games. ![]() That’s a long lifespan, and unlike the PC Engine, whose last licensed game Dead of the Brain Vol. The last licensed game, Wario’s Woods, came out in 1995 in Europe. The interesting thing about the Famicom is that it was released in 1983, and its last licensed game in Japan, Master Takahashi’s Adventure Island IV, came out in 1994. (Though they may have peeked at the prior boards just a bit, and got sued just a bit, but that’s another story) And isn’t it adorable? ![]() Releasing in 1983, just a year after 1982’s Donkey Kong Jr., the first Nintendo arcade game to be developed entirely in-house, without help from Ikegami Tsushinki. The Family Computer was Nintendo’s first console with interchangeable games. Let’s fix that! And answer a simple question I was asked: what’s the deal with special chip games? The Famicom Such be it with the Nintendo Entertainment System: had Nintendo’s console flopped, it’d definitely have a post already. But focusing on oddities like that can disguise the fact that sometimes, even systems that were very popular can stand out for unique design. I often like to cover oddities here details of computers and arcade systems people may not have heard of, that didn’t sell well but had unique or interesting characteristics.
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