And now you know why not all games cost the same back then. While games like Donkey Kong, DK Jr., Urban Champions, and Popeye only cost $40, games that include internal mapper or extra hardware in them such as Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man 2, Castlevania 3, The Legend of Zelda, Kirby's Adventure, Lifeforce, and Super Mario Bros. 3 could cost from $60-$80 due to these included mappers.

The NES needing mappers right out the gate doesn't say anything about how "powerful" it is. The need for bank-switching comes as a natural consequence of the address bus width. Most 8-bit CPUs only support at most 16 bit memory addresses (combining two registers), which means your ROM, RAM and all peripherals need to fit in a 64kbyte memory map. Bank-switching was pretty much guaranteed on 8-bit consoles at this point. In fact, the PC Engine/Turbografx-16 just went ahead and put bank switching into the console itself. I think the NES community referring to chips like the MMC3 and VRC6 as "mappers" is really misleading. These are enhancement chips that _contain_ mappers in addition to other functionality.

Those mappers were a godsend having games in the early-mid 90s running on 1983 hardware really showed what could be done. The Famicom was basically designed specifically to play a really good game of Donky Kong at a reasonable price.

I remember them delaying Zelda 2 half a year due to a “chip shortage”. Now I understand.

To me it’s not an ugly truth - it’s a beautiful hack. I love how much game developers pushed console limits with enhancement chips.

Couple of errors in the video. One, Donkey Kong FC/NES was limited by ROM chip cost, not the console itself. DK is 24KB total, or 16K PRG and 8K CHR to be more exact. Two, CNROM does not increase space to "96KB", where did you even get that number from? Check the Nesdev wiki, all CNROM does is increase CHR space from 8KB to 32KB, that's 4 banks of 8K. PRG is not increased at all. So games like Ghostbusters and Gradius are 64KB total, not 96KB. I'd honestly recommend a re-upload with corrections added. Technical errors are pretty important.

A misconception: Donkey Kong for NES actually used a 24KB ROM instead of a 32KB ROM, and 40KB is the biggest ROMsize no mapper NES titles could get. Also, ROM chips are like SD Cards, the bigger the storage capacity gets, the more expensive it becomes to manufacture, which is why there were only three 64MB N64 games

its a shame we did not get to see the full potential of the atari 7800. The console had some good games. I loved xenohobe, pole position 2, karateka and rampage back in the day

Gradius had some impressive looking stages, like the Moai level, for an early NES game. I can see why it needed a mapper. Great video!

The NES also could only scroll natively in either vertical, or horizontal, even with the mappers to allow multi-directional scrolling. In older games, this was hardwired with a jumper, newer ones programmed in. SMB2 shows this off well because segments only go either one way, or the other. There's an artifact that happens in multidirectional, depending what direction is considered native. For example, in Kirby's, or SMB3, vertical scrolling was locked in, so when you went horizontal, you get artifacts. They covered them up for the most part on the left, but couldn't on the right. You'd see new entities (background, and/or sprites) appear, but they'd have a weird color to them until the full 16-pixel tile comes in. It uses the color palate of the entity disappearing on the other side. If the palate is the same, it appears normal. If horizontal is chosen, vertical wrapping happens. Since the palate is based on horizontal placement, no color shifting happens, but you'll see a wrapping effect. For example, if you scroll up in a game, the next 16 pixels of vertical content will appear at the very bottom of the screen, and wrap around to the top filling in, Once filled, the next 16 pixels of data fills the bottom, and slowly wraps around the top. This also happens in reverse. In some horizonal wrapping, you might get the same effect of mere wraparound without the odd palate swaps, but that didn't happen often. This happens because the NES only had 2 pages of memory, which can either be side-by-side, or stacked. That's why the glitchiness happens one way, or the other. That's also how you can tell which orientation the pages are.

So picture this, it’s 1989 and I’m a senior in high school with my almost 2 year old NES and Fresh Sega Genesis. My friend who was super intelligent and went into the Marines right after we graduated in 1990 kept stressing to me how his Sega Master System had better looking games than my NES. I skipped the Master System because it was out of stock everywhere Christmas 1987 and settled for an NES. Don’t get me wrong I had so many good times with the NES and looks aren’t everything but it doesn’t hurt if ya got both. My Marine friend has since passed away of brain cancer but he was right and I look forward to meeting him again in whatever capacity and telling him so. Great video, you brought back some good memories. Have you done a video on the capabilities of the Master System?

The main reason behind the NES's success wasn't so much what it could do graphically, but what it could do with its sound and music compared to its contemporaries. There's a reason why themes made by Koji Kondo and Nobou Umatsu as well as others became iconic. As for what the NES can actually do without mappers.. check out Micro Mages, a 2019 NES game that uses no mappers. But with mappers, there is a few romhacks that utilize the full 2MB limit. Legend of Link and Rogue Dawn. Both incredible romhacks that are so changed that they are their own games and could rival even SNES games on their own.

Micro Mages is a highly notable example of an aftermarket NES game that does not use any mappers, the developers have put out their own devlog video on it and it's great how creative they get with the limitations.

One important aspect you didn't mention about the NES architecture is that the NES and Famicom has a separate bus connecting the cartridge to the PPU (graphics chip), without a mapper a game was limited to 8 kb CHR ROM which holds 256 background tiles and 256 sprite tiles. This helps understand the differences between CNROM and UNROM. CNROM bankswitches only the CHR ROM, letting the game switch between four different banks of graphics. UNROM on the other hand bankswitches the PRG ROM (the ROM connected to the CPU) and replaces the CHR ROM with RAM. This is more flexible as the game an update tiles individually, but isn't as fast as switching CHR ROM banks and also means graphics now has to be stored in PRG ROM. The MMC1 and MMC3 chips could use either form of CHR memory, and could switch CHR ROM in smaller sections unlike CNROM which could only switch the entire CHR ROM at once.

This was a great video. I love hearing about Atari and other 2nd gen consoles because that info isn’t quite as wide spread as newer gen’s. However this was refreshing and I have always wanted to know more about the new enhancement chips and others both in the 2nd and 3rd gen

The 2600 TIA chip was used in the 7800 for backwards compatibility with 2600 games. If developers wanted to add Pokey sound, they'd have to include the chip in the game cartridge. The extra cost of adding the Pokey chip is the reason most 7800 games just utilized the built-in TIA chip for sound.

As a former video game programmer, I was accustomed to the graphics on 8-bit computers. Something like the Commodore 64 had a limited number of colors on the screen at one time and a limited number of sprites. Although the NES processor was no more advanced, its ability to have more colors and sprites felt like a big leap forward in 1986.

Wow! Very interesting. I thought I knew a lot about the NES, but I wasn’t aware how reliant early games were on mappers!

Interesting to learn how things were done back in the day. Great video!

The dog looks like a Shar Pei. I love the lame jokes, by the way.

I didn't realize there were so many mappers in use, of course it was my little brother that had the NES as I was into computer gaming and later Sega Genesis. Great video.

Another error is about UNROM, it only increases ROM space to 128KB for PRG, CHR is now an 8KB RAM chip which is filled with data from the 128KB for PRG. Now, yes technically there is an increased version of UNROM called UOROM which is 256KB but you said UNROM, not UOROM.

Something you didn't mention about the MMC5 was that some variants of it did feature expanded audio, like the VRC6, but they were simply just an additional 2 square wave and 1 triangle wave channels like the base NES, and one 8-bit PCM channel that could play high quality digital sounds without hammering the CPU like the 7-bit PCM channel did; only one game used that feature thought. And of course, none of that even matters outside Japan where expanded sound wasn't possible on NES anyway without modding the console!

Love your content and this episode delivers as usual! Thanks for making these videos!

Very informative! I didn’t realize the NES relied so heavily on enhancement chips. Growing up, I hadn’t really heard of that until advertisements for StarFox with the super FX chip.

Just for the record Atari wasn’t the first company to use Cartridges. That credit goes to the Fairchild Channel F

Much is possible once enhancement chips enter the picture. Perhaps the most extreme example is NES Doom, using a Raspberry Pi to run Doom and send the graphics & sound data directly to the NES outputs.

Hey Pojr. Another great video. Big fan here. I just wanted to know if you have ever made your own games?

For a really extreme example of this same concept of putting an accelerator chip in the cartridge, TheRasteri got Doom running on an NES by including a Raspberry Pi in the cartridge. Doom itself is running on the Pi and encoding its graphical output in an NES-friendly way. The NES itself is sending controller inputs to the cartridge and reading graphics out of it.

I had no idea so many games had to use expanded memory cartridges, wow. It really puts into perspective how mind-blowing Super Mario Bros was when it came out on the NES. They were already pushing the hardware to its limits.

I'd say the adaptability and the ability to get hardware upgrades as needed throughout its lifespan was a better strategy than banking everything on just the console's abilities alone

When you think about it the fds system was still technically using what the nes could see. 32kb yet the disks held all the data. Like a computer. Truly living up to its name family computer. There was even family basic for the system. Another console that comes to mind was the coleco. That one had expansion ports and add-ons.

yeah both NES/SNES got help later in its life. Pretty remarkable to able to do it

That was really interesting! Great video!

I got my NES in '88, and the PAL version at that, and was obsessed with it. I had no clue the hardware was already 5 years old by then. I did play games on technically superior formats but the NES was still my favorite.

I heard the reason for the 7800 using the 2600 sound hardware was for backward compatibility. If the 7800 had used a new sound system it wouldn't have worked with the 2600.

I mean, most of NES' chips are only used in order to allow for it to fit bigger games, or multidirectional scrolling tbh, I don't think we could call those "enhancement chips", however it do is kinda funny to think how the NES needed them for the vast majority of it's games

Nice job, i wasnt aware how much mappers helped. I always assume they were in the system not on the game.

what game is that music at the end of your video from? I remember it from something but I can't remember the exact game it came from. Update, I finally remembered, that song at the end of the video comes from "world 1 (the first few stages of the game)" in Pac-Man Arrangement on Namco Classics Collection vol. 2. arcade. I remember really enjoying this song playing the game in the arcade back in the day and honestly hadn't heard it for many years but still remember the tune all these years later.

Thanks! I was aware that Mappers existed but I didn't really understand fully what they did. Now I have a better grasp on that.

Very fascinating video, I especially loved how you compared the NES and 7800 head to head. Atari has a tragic history of what ifs. What if the 7800 had a better sound chip and utilized mappers... what if the Lynx had more support and better marketing... what if the Jaguar had been easier to program for...

Man thats crazy to think of an nes game being 1MB! Especially when Sega started advertising games based on their size, 16 MEGA POWER ect. If I remember correctly the first Streets of Rage on the Genesis was only 4 mb or 500KB in size!

Saying that the "NES is not quite the powerhouse" because it needed/used mappers is like saying your top-of-the-line CPU is crap because you still need a GPU to make games run well and/or look good...

The mappers, that expanded addressable cartridge memory has nothing to do with power, it's just a hack to get around the original design limitations. The later MMCs that added extra functionality and allowed multi directional scrolloing or interrupts that generated faux parallax you could say is adding 'power' and helping the console.

I'm not a gamer, but I'm completely fascinated by the tech in the vintage machines.

im aware of mappers and a lot of what of what you said but you did a great job of explaining it (i didnt know about punch out only having one sprite). i dont understand how super mario's 32 levels were fine without a mapper but the fourth stage of donkey kong wasnt. donkey kong jr did have all 4 stages. seems sus.

Hello POJR, I just came across your channel and I'm glad I did. Been watching your content for the past few days and it's really good. This video was pretty interesting. You're really good at reviewing. Very enjoyable to watch! Thank you for putting out these awesome videos and I'll definitely keep watching. Cheers😊

Well, all companies except Sunsoft at the end of the NES' life. FME-7 was in Revenge of the Joker. Ufouria: The Saga was PAL only and got it too. Gimmick, which had a slightly different chip (ironically with a sound chip that couldn't be used). But was stuck in Scandinavia for some reason

Great video! You're right: the NES was not equipped to be part of the 3rd generation of home consoles. It was little more than an Atari 5200, and it got a lot of help from mapper chips from 1985 onward. The Atari 2600 and Intellivision were really the first generation of consoles, and the Atari 5200 and Colecovision were the second gen. Nintendo initially just wanted to make their own 2nd-gen console to compete with those, and the Famicom was slightly better since it came out almost a year later. Their competition in Japan was the SG-1000 by Sega, which was very similar to the Colecovision. These four consoles all had very similar game libraries in 1983. But then the videogame crash happened and put an end to the 2nd gen in North America. When Miyamoto came up with the advanced sidescrolling game Super Mario Bros, Nintendo realised they had to usher in the 3rd generation, which was also the perfect way to impress North Americans enough to get interested in a home console again. The mapper chips were the perfect way to achieve their goals. The Sega Master System was the competition, and while the console itself was more powerful than the NES, people never really noticed because the mapper chips made up for it.

A video game is as good as its line of games. Take the Jaguar, for example. Would u rather play a Jaguar with its 20 best games or a NES with its 20 best? Nice video, man... Cheers!

You kinda missed the mark. The first 2 mappers are simply for increasing the storage on those cartridges, so I don't see how the lack of these two show how the NES was weak. You can maybe make a point for the others, but the NES was supposed to be modular and expandable from its conception. Or else what were they supposed to do, release new hardware every 2 years for incremental upgrades? The mappers allowed games with nicer presentation and better gameplay, without MMC3 you would still have Mario 3, just that it'd be compromised in some aspects. Anyways, the reason the 7800 didn't rely so much on expansion chips was because it barely had any games. What? You think if the 7800 would've kept getting new games into 1995 that it would've done so without expansion chips? Not to mention that the sound is pitiful so almost any game that want to have decent sound would have to include a sound expansion chip. Ok, sure, 7800 might have some advantages over the NES, but it's not all one sided. And the Famicom released in 1983, 7800 was supposed to release in 84, no wonder it should be better in some aspects. And 7800 games still end up looking blockier and more pixelated than NES games, possibly due to the lower resolution. Either way, the 7800 was released too late and Atari failed to have a solid first party library of games as they were stuck in the arcade era. It had good games, sure, but that's not enough. Giving a fresh coat of paint to old games really isn't enough as you could just buy a 2600 if you just wanted some arcade fun. But if the 7800 had succeeded, you can bet more and more games would've started using enhancement chips.

The NES might have been heavily reliant on bank switching, but did you know it actually got some use on the PC as well? Ever heard of EMS? That was a standard for bank-switched memory expansions for PC/XT systems that could take them over the 8088's 1MB limit, though only 64KB at a time, in 4 banks of 16KB. It got wide enough support that later versions of DOS emulated it on 286 and later systems with much more RAM.

The Legend of Zelda also used the MMC1, but still lacked smooth vertical scrolling due to a coding bug.

As a homebrew dev, I can say that UNROM and BNROM are greatly scalable. You can implement an 8-bit bank selector with the same logic, so you can have up to 4 Megabyte (256x16k) and 8 Megabytes (256x32k) respectively. It's just that they couldn't afford something that large back in the day. If you're clever about programming it you can fit low-fi digital music and FMV cutscenes in that much space. Also there are traces of a CPU cycle counter on the CPU die, which could've been used to time running code at the exact moments you want, needed for screen split effects for parallax scrolling or status bars. This feature was unfortunately abandoned and the MMC3 and others had to implement this functionality.

So dragon warrior 4 is one of my favorite games I have it complete complete on NES beat it several times I know it’s a big game would be curious on a more deep dive of top 5 largest nes games or something.

Also, to address your thoughts on CNROM games like Gradius/Ghostbusters and such, if you feel underwhelmed by them, again, it is because the only extra ROM afforded by CNROM is more graphics, in the 32KB CHR space, up from 8KB with no mapper. CNROM is still limited to 32KB like with no mapper. If you want to be impressed by CNROM, check out Friday the 13th and the Famicom version of Dragon Quest 1, both are CNROM games and do a lot with very little. Dragon Quest 1 is not to be confused with its NES version Dragon Warrior 1, it was converted to MMC1 and uses more ROM.

It is still a pity that no mappers can solve the 8x8 sprite scan width flickering.

So it seems to me your angle is to try and say that NES is in some way inferior to the 7800 but for some gimmicks that made it more popular. The famicom came out in 1983 so it should be inferior to the 7800 and the sega master system and more contemporary to the colecovision. I’m glad smart people found ways to exploit the hardware to all of our benefit. For Atari they were focused on the ST computers and were never going to do anything creative with the 7800 after GCC was cut out of the picture. GCC designed the 7800 and could have done magic but Jack Tramiel wasn’t about to pay them to develop for Atari. I love the 7800 just the way it is and really appreciate all the homebrew geniuses who continue till support the system.

also the nes was released 2 years after the famicom. it was already 2 years old at launch, of course it needed enhancement chips. and it was designed to be affordable at launch in 1983. it was lower end hardware in 83, and so that meant it had little capacity

Do a video on the HuCard mappers that's in the PC Engine Street Fighter 2 game.

A very well informative video pojr, there are lot of hidden secrets about the consoles of yesteryear that so many of us would never think of back then.

There is a youtuber that used a cartridge loaded with a Raspberry Pi Zero to essentially play Super Mario for the SNES on the NES. He had an oscilloscope and everything trying to figure out how to get clock cycles to sync. It's been a few years since I saw the video, but of course ANYTHING you search on youtube with NES and Raspberry Pi is gonna yield emulator "how to" videos. If I find it I will update because it an awesome technical demo and thought experiment in one. Hoooo boy I found it!! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/l9hpirWoqM-3omQ.html

My dad got us kids the Atari 400 and then shortly later we got a sega master system (before nes release in US) i barely remember missile command & some ant game

Great video!

Mappers are not enhancement chips. What's an enhancement chip then? The SA-1 Chip from Super Mario RPG is literally a faster copy of the SNES's own processor. The Super FX chip from Star Fox can assist with rotating sprites or rendering flat-shaded polygons. Those are the true enhancement chips. Mappers? You take an off-the-shelf Latch chip that holds 4 bits of storage, then wire it into the cartridge to provide bankswitching. That is not an enhancement chip. The only mapper that I would truly consider an "enhancement chip" would be MMC5. It provides special graphics rendering features far beyond what bankswitching alone can achieve. One feature lets you select a different palette every 8x8 tile rather than the whole 16x16 region. Ironically, Castlevania III didn't use any of the MMC5's special graphics features at all, it only used the bankswitching features of the MMC5. Also, Donkey Kong only used 16KB of program ROM, so it was not limited by the 32KB limit. They could have added in the "pie factory" level if they wanted to. There was a rerelease on Wii Virtual Console that finally implemented the level. And no US-released NES games made it up to 1MB, just 768KB.

The only problem I have is that the famicom/NES was designed with mappers in mind. It's kinda like saying a PC is weaker than we think because it needs a graphics card to really shine

Good vid mate

Would mappers help with my crappy memory if I install them on my head? 😊

I wonder how many NES games feature birds as a major enemy. Ninja Gaiden was notorious for those eagles, and Castlevania 3 has quite the vicious owls.

It's why lock on technology would have been useful to avoid redundancy. NES's design couldn't have it, unless the lock on with the game cartridge combined matched the size of a regular cartridge.

0:57 That's me, lol

Bank switching is fundamental to any 8bit processor when accessing more than 64KB, its not a "trick".

POJR , my friend , you shaved !!!! 😆 🤣 . Excellent video as always . I was just a teen in middle school when I got my NES but I was really blown away after playing my 2600 for so many years before that .

Fascinating information, thank you for sharing. Your scripts could use a bit of revision though, you repeated the same piece of information or statements a handful of times, especially in the conclusion section

Great work sir

Mega Man 6 had up to 4MB of memory. The 7800 didn't just reuse the 2600's sound chip. It had the entire Television Interace Adapter (or TIA) from the 2600 so that it could be backward compatible with the old system. The plan all along was to put POKEY chips in the 7800 carts that needed better sound. Also, you got the pics of the Atari 400 and 800 switched around at 5:32.

I think the POKEY chip was used in Dark Chambers as well.

Great video

I never heard anyone say the NES was a "powerhouse". It was always less powerful than the Master System. I've known about these chips with mappers for many years. This isn't news to me. It just proves that they had a creative way to push past normal hardware limits. How does that equate to "the ugly truth"? Sounds more like clickbait to me.

awesome video, that being said you might want to cut down the intro time I find myself skipping it. Still I enjoy the content. :D also you have an error at 7:13. It says CNROM when your saying UNROM. Anyways thanks for making these cool videos its neat to see this stuff.

In an alternate time line Sega would go on to put a full 32X inside later Megadrive game cartridges.

I think Atari are insane. Their new management had the 5200 manufactured and in storage but didn't ship it for a year because of the crash. Then when the NES took off, only then did they sell it. But it was too late. Atari consoles are interesting because they don't use sprites.

This was a pretty good video in terms of information, but I find the perspective of the NES using mappers being somehow deceptive or bad to be a bit strange. Is that the way modern people who didn't grow up in the 1980s or 1990s look at things? It was fairly common even into the early 1990s for computers and consoles to allow enhancement chips or be substantially upgraded later in life. They were a big investment and people counted on the ability to do things like plug in a newer CPU or additional RAM to extend the life of machines that were pretty pricey at the time. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that I was kind of annoyed when the industry switched over to optical discs... because it meant we were limited to whatever hardware was baked in at launch, and it could never, ever be extended later in life to extend the value of our investment. Which meant it became more disposable and we basically had to upgrade the whole console to get more advanced games, when before you could just put an extra chip or two in the cartridge and have a much more advanced platform without having to buy a whole new console. I would have thought that kind of flexibility was a good thing. I mean, Star Fox used the Super FX chip to draw 3D graphics on the SNES... do you regard that as Nintendo trying to trick people into seeing the SNES as a 3D powerhouse? Not mad or anything, just genuinely curious if I am getting this right. I guess it's just an odd perspective to me, I never looked at it that way. The NES hardware was not intended to do much more than play early 1980s arcade games, because... well, that's what it was designed around. If they hadn't used enhancement chips, they would have had to do what Sega did and keep releasing revisions of almost the same hardware every two years, with the Sega Mark I, Mark II, and Mark III, and that lack of a stable platform would have been kind of a liability back then given the price of consoles.

I had already watched Sharopolis' video on this, but yeah lol.

Is there a limit on how much you can get out of the nes with chips and mappers? You said the biggest we ever got was 2mb but how far can it get One person once out a raspberry pie in the cartridge I personally considered that cheating

You say "double, triple, or even quadruple the amount of rom space" but then show numbers that imply doubling, quadrupling, and octupling respectively. Minor error but something to note.

I believe that particular breed of dog is called a Sharpei.

I’m not a gamer. I’d rather video games look pretty than photorealistic. I liked when shadows used purples, pinks, and blues. I think 52 colors is enough for games as long as they all can be displayed at once at the screen’s full resolution.

I feel like this video really oversells mappers by virtue of confusing the ROM size limit with console "power". Yes mappers were critical for non-basic games due to the ROM size limit. But outside Japan (Japanese mappers had far more capabilities) nearly all mappers did at most 3 basic things and no more: 1. Allow larger ROM sizes (and the number of bank slots they provided was also significant in allowing more complex games) 2. Allow switching between horizontal and vertical mirroring (MMC1+). Mirroring direction allows scrolling in one direction without scrolling artifacts. This did NOT allow 2D scrolling as the video says, nor was it even mandatory for games that could scroll 2 directions in different places (e.g. MM1 scrolled in both directions despite lacking the ability to switch mirroring). It did however allow for switching scrolling directions with artifact-free scrolling (e.g. Metroid). But many games that had the ability did not even use it, e.g. MM3-6 mostly did not use artifact-free scrolling in ANY direction despite having the MMC3. 3. Provide a scan-line interrupt (MMC3). The original NES required busy waits for screen splits, which wasted a lot of processing power that could have been used by the game code (it was also limited to 1 split). The scan-line interrupt also DOES NOT allow 2D scrolling, either. What it does is allow the CPU to be fully used, and allow for more than 1 split. Indeed the reason most MMC3 split-screen games have a split seam artifact is exactly because the NES base hardware doesn't perform 2D scrolling inside the frame very well and the MMC3 grants it no new abilities in that regard. It's true that the MMC5 is a monster of circuitry, though. It provided a number of new features, most of which were never used in any commercial game. And the chip appears to be monitoring I/O in some ways we know of no reason for, suggesting there may be features we don't yet know about.

That dog he has is a Chinese Shar-Pei. My brother has the same breed.

and then they had the Super Nes with LAUNCH titles like Pilot wings needing helper chips. No-wonder Nintendo didn't want to leave carts, can't put chips on a CD. While the Megadrive/Genesis only had a chip in ONE game.

The NES had it quirks but it still was quite the powerful eight bit hardware, for 1984 it could have even pulled a decent home computer if Nintendo had wanted and 256x240 wasn't that uncommon in homecomputer land, see the Spectrum. Regarding the 2600, using an enhanced chip there is double trouble, because the lines going to the module port have no read/write line and no chipselect. And that rare as a unicorn non-Atari BASIC cart even used an evil trick where it let the consoles CPU sleep more or less forever and manipulated the TIA and RIOT from the outside with its own CPU.

I really wish the SNES gave the PPU it's own cartridge bus like they did with the NES.

I can never understand why the NES has worse audio capabilities than the Famicom. Did they think nobody would make use of the audio expansion hardware?

Dog at the beginning looks like a Shar Pei

Atari 7800 probably could have did a lot better if Atari didn’t cheap out with the sound chip. The master system sound chip was at least tolerable for the time, but the 7800 having literally the same sound as the 2600 hurt it significantly. Even if the nes have as much technical capability without the extra chips, it did have them and utilized every advantage it could. So it’s not hard to see why it was so comparably successful.

Nintendo should publish a new NES (exactly the same as the classic one but with modern hardware), they should also publish easy development tools to create games for that new NES and open it to the public, everyone can create games now and publish and sell them.

Oddly I prefer the sound of the music of the NES Castlevania 3 vs the Famicom version despite the latter being “better” technically

2:11 The NES was released in 1983, not 1985. It was released in America in 1985, but the hardware was first released in 83. The early nes games were quite limited. The unexpanded NES was pretty weak.

Pojr this is one of your best vids