The Ugly Truth About the NES

[@VOAN]

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.

[@bltvd]

I got a NES in 1987 and it stopped working in 1990. I had all those games and never remember spending more than 37.50 for a any Nintendo game. I don’t know where people getting this “the games were sixty bucks” idea?

[@cinestubborn]

But 2000 yen for Ninja Gaiden cartridge in Famicom? Plus colorful xD

[@whattheheck1000]

Those may have been Canadian prices. From what I’ve seen in old catalogs, in the USA, games ranged from about $20-50 when brand new, IIRC. The basic games were $20-30 while the carts jam packed with extra hardware could be up to $50. I wasn’t born until the 16 bit era so I could be off on the prices a bit. January 24, 2024 11:41 am

[@jarvindriftwood]

@@bltvd Some stores sold them for no real profit or even a slight loss. They were draws to get families in and buy other stuff. Target did similarly with new CDs of big artists. Also Toys-R-Us and KB Toys used to regularly mark games down even within like 3 months of release.

[@maciejstachowski183]

How much of the cost was in the mapper chips themselves, and how much was in increased development costs for bigger games? The mappers were rather small ASICs that I don't think would have been that expensive to produce at Nintendo's scale, so I'd think most of the cost would be either in larger ROM chips, or - most likely - in R&D and game development.

[@rfmerrill]

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.

[@ostiariusalpha]

The Famicom didn't need or use enhancement chips for nearly 3 and a half years, and it was the most advanced game console available for 2 years. The design really routed a lot of functions through the cartridge, which had the knock-on effect of making it very modular and easier to enhance.

[@thedrunkmonkshow]

When NES Roms first began getting dumped into binary files in the early to mid 90's the file format refers to them as mappers in order to describe how the address space is changed or "mapped" by those enhancement chips being soldered to the cartridges. It's been that way for about 30 years now but by all means if you want to take it up with Marat Fayzullin who kick started NES emulation and designed the standardized NES rom files that even Nintendo has now adopted he's still around and contact info shouldn't be hard to find.

[@rfmerrill]

​@@thedrunkmonkshow I don't know why you're being aggro about it. It makes sense for the "mapper number" in the iNES header to also define what expansion chips are present. I'm just saying that calling MMC3 a mapper is like calling a laptop a keyboard. Yes a laptop _has_ a keyboard, and if someone asks what keyboard you're using you give the laptop model. But that doesn't mean laptops and keyboards are the same thing.

[@thedrunkmonkshow]

@@rfmerrill You were fine until you came across accusatory like people in the NES community are going around intentionally being misleading people when that's not the case at all. If that's not what you meant then I apologize but at the same time you're addressing an issue that's never going to change because it's too well established and part of the lexicon now. Referring to enhancement chips as mappers is nothing new and has been synonymous, short-cut speak for two decades now. But yes you're right that the MMC3 and VRC6 aren't just bank switching alone but contain other features as well like extra audio in the case of the VRC6.

[@rfmerrill]

@@thedrunkmonkshow dude chill out all I said was that the terminology was misleading. You're _way_ overreacting.

[@MCastleberry1980]

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.

[@pojr]

Yeah I do have respect for mappers, otherwise we would have never had great games like Super Mario Bros 3. They made the right call by using mappers to extend the lifespan of the NES a bit.

[@Wallyworld30]

Colecovision was designed to play a mean game of Donkey Kong. Hell, it was the pack in game for the console. Compare it to Atari's and Intellivision is like going back to the stone age. The game that let me know NES was next Generation was when my cousin pulled out Super Mario Bro. I was begging rest of the year for an NES for Christmas.

[@tancar2004]

@@Wallyworld30 Coleco had the exclusive rights to make Donkey Kong on all game consoles. So they made the 2600 version of Donkey Kong and they were damn sure not going to make it a good version. The programmer that did the 2600 version said he could have done far better if he had been allowed to make the game 8k. But the bosses at Coleco wouldn't allow that.

[@ssg-eggunner]

Sort of true and at the same time not so much, according to development history, the goal with the Famicom was to make something that could run donkey kong but at the same time the actual port had problems such as the lack of cutscenes, and the cement factory level being cut

[@Hektols]

Agree, the extra chips was a much better option than add-ons that became different consoles.

[@MrMegaManFan]

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.

[@notsyzagts7967]

Exactly! Old KZbin engagement tricks will never die it seems.

[@blarghblargh]

yeah. also, it's not exactly a hack. a memory mapped bus that hardware can read from and provide expanded capabilities on is just how these things work. calling a mapper a hack is about the same as calling the PPU a hack. That said, it seems like black magic to begin with, and super clever.

[@pojr]

You do have a good point. Companies were smart with how they made their games on the NES.

[@datacipher]

Disagree completely. The beauty in old school gaming was using innovative and clever programming to produce more and extend the limits. Throwing in added hardware negates all of that. You can stick a modern arm processor on a 2600 cartridge and have it do amazing things but it uses a cpu hundreds of times more powerful than what came with the system in the 70’s. Im guessing by these comment that these extreme Nintendo fanboys who are overly defensive and that the system has been criticized by detractors for using external chips. (I wouldn’t know since I had moved to computer games by the time of the nes) but I don’t think that’s a valid criticism - there’s no rules when it comes to producing consumer products. Adding chips is fair - but in terms of giving credit to developers, I’ll give infinitely more credit to a guy who pushed beyond the seeming limits without using chips over a guy who simply had extra hardware.

[@EmeralBookwise]

It's really a shame modern consoles can't really benefit from these kind of life cycle upgrades. Well, they could, just obviously not the same way. The console itself would need to be designed with interchangeable components, but it's more profitable for the manufacturers to just push a whole new generation instead.

[@TheDarkThunder]

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

[@mchenrynick]

Even the 1st Zelda used a mapper. The "bank switching" was necessary to accomplish the complex enemies' moves in the game.

[@Wallyworld30]

I remember being very excited for Zelda 2: Adventures of Link because I loved the first Zelda so much. I was 10 years old when it came out and I was immediately disappointed. The graphics somehow looked MUCH WORSE and not only that but on the overworld map getting interrupted by invisible monsters was dumb and didn't get why they did it this way. The 2D part of the game had clunky ass controls. It was dog crap compared to the first game. Looking back now I see where they got the inspiration of being interrupted on the over world map by monsters from RPG's. Clearly I wasn't the only one that hated it as the next Zelda on SNES went back to the tried and true graphic style of the OG Zelda just with upgraded graphics and sound.

[@deku812]

The chip shortage had nothing to do with mappers, but the MASK ROMs. There's a good documentary online talking about it. Basically the companies making the ROM chips were switching process nodes, which meant the old n ode was phased out while the new node ramped up, leading to a shortage of the chips on the new node. This was around the time Nintendo started publishing larger Famicom disk system games on the NES so they neeeded larger ROM chips for those. Both Zelda 2 and SMB2 (Doki Doki Panic in Japan) were Fami disk system games. not cartridge games.

[@TheSegacampGamerandWerecamp]

Even Super Mario Bros. 3 it was only a Japanese Game for little over a Year!

[@KasumiRINA]

It also explains how Famiclone regions (i.e. everything except of Japan, USA, and Western Europe) rarely got more complex games with save function like SMB3 or Zeldas but instead used the same old games and hacks on multicarts, though I do remember playing later games like Panic Restaurant and entire Kunio-kun sports games collection.

[@cappa310]

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

[@tarstarkusz]

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.

[@KoopaMedia64]

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.

[@notsyzagts7967]

Good points. Plus, he could also remove the click-bait title.

[@samhein321]

I don't think the creator cares for accuracy, just wants views even if he has to clickbait and make incorrect videos, its not about the facts or art to him...

[@EnjoySackLunch]

@@samhein321lol you’re so mad

[@samhein321]

@@EnjoySackLunch of course, we're on the youtube comment section

[@vincenzomottola7778]

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

[@datacipher]

Thanks for the corrections. I don’t know anything about nes as I switched to computer gaming by that time, but pojr makes a LOT of mistakes and/or misleading statements on his videos covering earlier atari systems.

[@vuurniacsquarewave5091]

@@datacipher It's misleading because NES games sometimes have the graphical assets on a separate ROM and sometimes on the same chip as the game code. Each game had to make one of two choices. Unlike most other systems at the time, graphical assets (the tile-based graphics in this case) are not loaded into the console's VRAM because it doesn't have any for this purpose. The console only holds the nametables (aka the "tilemap") for the screen, but the tile data comes from the cartridge and the graphics chip (PPU) reads that data directly without the CPU's intervention at all. To do this each game either has to expose a separate ROM or RAM chip to the PPU. They both have their pros and cons: ROM: Great when your mapper can bankswitch this ROM because you can swap tile banks in and out for no CPU cost at all. If the mapper has interrupts you can even swap the bank mid-screen so different parts of the screen can use different tile sets. For example, why take up space with the letters of the alphabet for anything else but the status bar? If you dedicate multiple banks to the same assets you can implement nice animated tilesets as well by looping a few of the tile banks over and over again (SMB3 uses this technique for quite a few things) RAM: Great if you want to compress your assets and decompress them into the RAM. You can create tile data through code with the CPU on the fly so this allows drawing games and other things to be made. The downside is that you have to make the CPU fill the RAM with tiles before the PPU can use them, and this takes time, you can not easily swap out all assets at once like with ROM. The tiles will also have to come from the same chip where the rest of the game is stored so you might have to play a tug of war with how much space is dedicated to what.

[@c.bretmiller6148]

@@datacipher Thank you! I thought I was the only on who noticed that, and it was really starting to bug me. Every time he does that goofy smile at the beginning of his videos, I think back to something he said in the previous video that is just factually inaccurate, inadvertent misleading, or innately biased, and I get all aggravated and I'm like "this frickin' guy...." ...but yeah... he gets stuff wrong a lot, or interjects his own subjective opinions but construes them as facts.

[@Tornado1994]

@@datacipher NES/Famicom is basically Commodore 64 with enhanced Hardware and Better Graphical Performance.

[@john2001plus]

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.

[@AtariBorn]

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.

[@taemien9219]

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.

[@Skorpio420]

And even then, the NES was lacking the extra sound chip the Famicom had (see Castlevania 3).

[@taemien9219]

@@Skorpio420 You can use the expansion card slot to enable sound from VRC6 games. That does require a modern (older ones won't support it) Famicom adapter (NES games won't have VRC6), or a Powerpak/Everdrive with .fds game files or romhacked .nes files.

[@eightcoins4401]

@@Skorpio420 Castlevania 3 was one of the weaker soundchips, theres an even rarer 2 OP Fm Soundchip which Megami Tensei II used

[@ssg-eggunner]

I still prefer the ay-3-8913 that intellevision used tough

[@kalvinravn8431]

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?

[@kennyryan4173]

Those were the days :) Sorry about your friend.

[@georgef551]

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.

[@slightlyevolved]

Super Mario Bros literally has Shigero stating that it was created to absolutely max out the capabilities of the stock hardware.

[@ToniaGlitched]

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

[@RupeeClock]

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.

[@andrewdowell6474]

I'm just commenting to say I'm happy to see someone else out there remembers the Clock Crew.

[@ssg-eggunner]

Micro Mages is a Masterpiece

[@kennyryan4173]

I luv Micro Mages. It's awesome to see great new games thrive on older systems.

[@user-a5Bw9de]

Its rather surprising that NES is capable of handling so much extra stuff bombarded from cartridge, and it is such an archaic device even back then. The modularity of the hardware is astounding.

[@KasumiRINA]

You could also put entire Famicom hardware on a single chip and make Famiclones in any shape or form, which Taiwanese did.

[@inceptional]

Yeah, if definitely received some help with in-cart coprocessors. And this was actually a very smart strategy by Nintendo there, which other companies at the time maybe should have copied and regularly used extra chips to keep their systems more up to date too. Because it basically kept the NES relevant and absolutely dominant for a long time. The same approach was employed with the SNES also, used from literally day one in Pilotwings. It was just as deliberate, pre-planned at the hardware design stage, and very much successful a strategy there as well. Just imagine SNES without games like Pilotwings, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario RPG, Mega Man X2/X3, F1 ROC II, Far East of Eden, Top Gear 3000, Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Dream Land 3, Star Fox, Doom, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Stunt Race FX, Star Ocean, Yoshi's Island, etc. :-o

[@ItsPaybackTime89]

The snes is also outdated, it's very enhancement chip reliant.

[@themoviereviewwarriors939]

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

[@Skorpio420]

Had Atari not gone with the 2600 sound chip for the 7800, the 7800 may have stood a chance.

[@kennyryan4173]

There's some good looking games for the 7800 from the homebrew community.

[@kennyryan4173]

@@Skorpio420 they needed mascots like Mario, Sonic, Link, Samus, etc.. No way they were competing with Nintendo even with much better sound.

[@PorcoZio79]

Sound chip was shit.

[@TheJadeFist]

The advantage of cartridges is that you can include extra hardware insde of them, something you can't do with disks or hu-cards.

[@F40PH-2CAT]

Lots of consoles still thrive despite being outdated. Atari 2600, Playstation 2 and even the Genesis come to mind.

[@KasumiRINA]

Dreamcast recently had obscure and unreleased arcade game ported to it. I mean Naomi and atomisware games, which are pretty complex for most emulators (i.e. MAME or FinalBurn so have to use Flycast).

[@jcaseyjones2829]

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

[@Roxor128]

To be fair, the PC's initial offerings for video were pretty meagre. CGA could do 320*200 with 4 colours or 640*200 with 2 colours. The full 16 colours were only available in the text modes, and MDA was text-only in 4 shades of grey. Oh, and those 2 and 4-colour modes on CGA had all but one of the colours fixed. It took until EGA in the mid-1980s that PCs had decently-useful graphics for game developers to play with, offering 320*200 with all 16 of CGA's colours, plus backwards compatibility and new high-res modes with any 16 colours from a 6-bit RGB space. VGA and its numerous clones were where things really took off. 320*200 with 256 colours from an 18-bit RGB space was massively popular, still getting use well into the twilight years of DOS after Win95 showed up. Hell, games like Quake II still used a palette. I think it was only in the late 1990s that games started demanding at least a 16-bit video mode.

[@ssg-eggunner]

Interesting analogy but the difference is that with the Famicom you get a single game with enhancement, instead of separately I'd say that PC parts are more comparable to add ons such as EPSM and Famicom Disk System

[@KasumiRINA]

@@ssg-eggunner dedicated 3D graphics cards started as optional addons and basically now even simplest onboard graphics is more powerful than 3D cards of first several DECADES. BUT, not all PCs have onboard video! Old Intel Xeon processors I use (don't buy those now, AMD is better) don't, since those are server brands... So a computer without a graphics card literally cannot output a video signal. With sound sure, PC without Sound Blaster would be having beeper sounds, which are horrible, but come on, you can't say graphics card is optional when you cannot use computer without it.

[@Vorticron]

NES/FC were literally designed with mappers in mind. This was done with the intention of keeping the base hardware reasonably priced while more complicated games could expand the NES' capabilities. Whether or not the base system was a powerhouse is completely irrelevant when it was literally designed to be enhanced where applicable. That was quite literally an intended strategy.

[@yearight5303]

"We meant to do that" lol

[@FeralInferno]

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!

[@DryPaperHammerBro]

🗿

[@nightbirdds]

It's also using CNROM because it's 64KB. Has nothing to do with power, they needed the space.

[@pojr]

Yeah true! I did feel like I sold Gradius a bit short. Between the games I talked about in that segment (Ghostbusters and Arkanoid), Gradius is definitely the strongest.

[@todesziege]

Yeah, no way they could fit that amount of graphics into a basic cart.

[@fattomandeibu]

SMB1 was about the limit of what could be done without an enhancement chip of some sort.

[@thetechdog]

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.

[@terran0797]

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

[@pojr]

I appreciate it!

[@zerobyte802]

The DPC in Pitfall 2 was designed by the programmer David Crane himself. (His degree was in electrical engineering) I saw a post by him on AtariAge forums explaining in good detail how it got music into the game. That was the OP’s question and Crane’s post came after about 6 years of inactivity on the thread. The 2600 had no pins for expansion chips but he made a way to send commands to it by reading from certain addresses which it then interpreted as commands. The music was just PCM data (digital) values that the CPU had to rapidly read and dump into the real sound chip.

[@zerobyte802]

and the real sound chip was definitely not a digital device. There was just a glitch in it that allowed it to be treated like a rudimentary DAC (digital to analog converter) Consequently that’s why the music sounds kind of fuzzy. It’s a low-bit rate digital playback of audio that would otherwise just be a beep bip boop square wave sound generator chip like Pokey.

[@Phredreeke]

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.

[@todesziege]

This is why Super Mario Bros reuses level art so much and pretty much just changes the colours.

[@deku812]

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.

[@Vorticron]

NES/FC was intentionally designed with expansion chips in mind. It was a cost saving strategy. NES got a little gimped but if you look at the pinout on the FC for instance, there are a couple pins that exist specifically for auxiliary audio (from the cart), clocking and a latch for writes.

[@sadsys]

Pojr, your channel is really addicting. I like the type of content, narration skills and illustrations (visuals and sound wise). I watch your content non stop, it's really well put in comparison to many. Subscribed.

[@biostemm]

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...

[@KasumiRINA]

Bad comparison, without a graphics card you literally don't get image. Any! Onboard graphics is exactly what consoles use. And not all PCs do.

[@hardkoregamer1981]

Yet the Atari 2600 out lasted the atari 5200 & Atari 7800 despite them have better technology than the Atari 2600. The Atari 2600's lifespan went from 1977-1992. Advanced hardware and better graphics doesn't equate to quality games it's gameplay design that determines a game's quality. Certain games like Tetris and it's replayability is a true testament to quality game design. Companies like Nintendo continues to use the gunpei yokoi's design philosophy of withered technology with lateral thinking.

[@Daring2Win]

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

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Old tech is far more interesting than new in my opinion. Every console and computer used to be completely different, now they are all the same.

[@illusioncity]

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

[@MavHunter20XX]

Pojr: It's not like you can push out a system update. PC Engine: I mean.....

[@RawrX32009]

XD

[@jaredbrown691]

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.

[@pojr]

Yeah you make a good point. The 7800 did come after the NES, and game companies were smart with how they got the most use out of the hardware.

[@ryan89554]

But Atari never has any good games period look at the Jaguar.

[@Adamtendo_player_1]

@@ryan89554 Atari and their systems outside of the arcade games were from the Stone Age in comparison to the NES in my opinion that the 7800 was probably more powerful than the NES, but the NES had far more charm and way better sound than any Atari system.

[@em00k]

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

[@zaxchannel2834]

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

[@Squirrelsquid]

not a bad video, but "The Ugly Truth About the NES" is exceptionally clickbaity.

[@caucasoidape8838]

Augh my eyes! It's so hideous! Such abominations should be kept in the dark! My childhood NES memories are EFFING ruined!

[@Squirrelsquid]

@@caucasoidape8838 the horrors of mappers and special chips. NOOOO

[@Dwedit]

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.

[@pojr]

Yeah they've definitely not had the lead in hardware performance, yet they almost always made out on top. Better hardware doesn't mean better console!

[@ssg-eggunner]

The pie factory version is 64kb tough, aside that version still didn't have cutscenes

[@illkid86]

By the early 90s the nes was outdated but...I still loved it

[@stringercorrales6627]

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.

[@ssg-eggunner]

Pixel art wise I think stuff that looks sort of like master system but with decent backgrounds and unsaturated colors is ideal

[@metal_kitsune]

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

[@KoopaMedia64]

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.

[@Veylon]

The real ugly truth is that the NES had a special expansion port on the bottom that never got used for anything.

[@ShanetheFreestyler]

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!

[@Squirrelsquid]

UGH. KZbin had deleted my reply for the second time. So once again: the VRC6 added 2 more pulse channels, but they had more varying duty cycles possible than the stock pulse channels. It did not add a triangle, but a Saw wave. Also, it did not add another PCM channel.

[@ShanetheFreestyler]

@@Squirrelsquid I did not say anything about what the VRC6 added, I was talking about the MMC5.

[@Squirrelsquid]

@@ShanetheFreestyler Oh, my bad. I misread that, then. sorry.

[@ShanetheFreestyler]

@@Squirrelsquid Also, I did a quick search, and I think only 1 Famicom game used the MMC5's PCM channel, Shin 4 Nin Uchi Mahjong. Compare that to the dozens of NES/FC games that used the native DPCM channel in 7-bit mode and you wonder why they didn't stick with that. Sure using the MMC5 might've been less CPU intensive, but there's no gameplay going on in Mahjong whenever there's speech playing, so it doesn't really matter... Oh, and no triangle like I thought, just the two squares.

[@Redman8086]

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.

[@vuurniacsquarewave5091]

A modern homebrew NES game that might impress you is Micro Mages. They made this game without a mapper, and it's amazing for what they could fit into the same space as SMB1 had to contend with.

[@Redman8086]

@@vuurniacsquarewave5091 I have seen gameplay of this before and wondered what it was, thanks! I will probably check it out

[@impossiblescissors]

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.

[@syrinx9196]

The 7800 was inferior to the NES in every way. The controllers were terrible. It was slower than the NES (compare Xevious, which was released on both). It had inferior graphics and sound. Most of all... it had a primary developer that hadn't a clue how to create deep expensive worlds like we saw in Super Mario 1. Instead, Atari's vision was very basic. Games like SMB 1 and Metroid were a revelation to US gamers after so many years of basic mindless "arcade" titles.

[@syrinx9196]

Ironically, ET is one of the best 2600 games because it had some expansiveness/depth, instead of being mindless repetition like higher-rated games such as Kaboom. ET was certainly flawed but it had challenge and replay value.

[@mirabilis]

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

[@tempestfennac9687]

It is definitely a Shar Pei.

[@RacerX-]

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.

[@ryan89554]

There are like over 200 that is why early non accurate nes emulators had poor compatibility

[@jimbox114]

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.

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

Doubtful that adding an optional alternative would break compatibility.

[@Adamtendo_player_1]

That’s the strategy that Atari should’ve gone with as the Atari 2600 sound chip was horrible and extremely basic.

[@jackiechun6540]

misleading video, the mappers were mainly to allow for larger games, its like calling a battery save a hardware cheat, the NES could've done most of those games without mappers, but they would've just had less levels and only be able to scroll either vertical or horizontal, only a handful of games used MMCs that added extra hardware capabilities, mostly those Koei strategy games, and NES carts having mappers isn't some gotcha cause Super Mario Bros doesn't use any and it outshines anything on the 7800

[@thetechdog]

That's right. And Super Mario Bros can look better still. There are romhacks that update its graphics, such as Super Mario Bros DX. That one uses no extra mappers, with a ROM as big as the original. The 7800 may have had some advantages on paper but so did the Famicom. In the end its games couldn't hold a handle against the NES, even without mappers.

[@joemck85]

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.

[@Roxor128]

I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified by that particular hack!

[@jaredt2590]

If it wasn’t for bank switching Nintendo would have released a new console in the late 80s. It allows you to make bigger games but increases the cost and the resources necessary to make the game. If the cost hadn’t started dropping for parts Nintendo never would have gone back to making cartridges after the fds had run it’s course.

[@ralfvanbogaert3451]

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.

[@tominator7728]

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.

[@johnellis3383]

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!

[@Adamtendo_player_1]

The first streets of rage was 4 Mb, which was the equivalent of 512 KB. I think the biggest NES game was 6 Mb.

[@ratix98]

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.

[@ssg-eggunner]

FDS was 64kb in each side actually

[@ratix98]

@@ssg-eggunner for the disks yes. The ram cart itself only has room to address 32kb for program data which is why loading is a thing.

[@msbae]

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.

[@todesziege]

Mega Man 6 was four _megabit_ , meaning about 0,5 megabyte.

[@thewingedavenger1007]

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.

[@thecunninlynguist]

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

[@notsyzagts7967]

Yeah, far from an "ugly truth".

[@richtersundeen6105]

The Genesis/Megadrive also had carts with specialty chips, yeah.

[@SaanMigwell]

Most people forget edge connectors are designed so that you can upgrade your machine. Literally that was their purpose to add capability to the base machine. That is the definition of a Rom Cartridge, an upgrade or expansion to the machines native capabilities. I'm surprised some games in Japan didn't come with both a cart and a disk. The disk for instructions and data, and the cart as RAM instead of ROM.

[@bunchocrap]

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

[@pojr]

Really appreciate that, thank you!

[@ClassicTVMan1981X]

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

[@notsyzagts7967]

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.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Only thing I can think of was it made games more expensive. But then so would adding larger ROMs. The 7800 could do anything the NES could with even the best mappers. And I have heard people say for years that the NES was more powerful than the 7800. So people have basically said the NES was something of a powerhouse.

[@58jharris]

@@KrunchyTheClown78 The 7800 was what the 5200 should have been. History might have been very different if that had been the case.

[@claypf4795]

I don't ever remember thinking the NES was a powerhouse back then, it was just a huge leap from Atari. We all saw what was possible at the arcade. The NES version of games like TMNT, Klax or Contra were a harsh contrast, but it's what was available to us. RAM was a lot more expensive, and it took up a lot more space on the board, and consumer tech is built to a price point.

[@johnny19817]

Very interesting video. I wonder if there are other consoles that used mappers so often like NES.

[@vuurniacsquarewave5091]

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.

[@pennyandrews3292]

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.

[@Roxor128]

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.

[@wongyc5585]

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

[@songsan807]

Thanks for this great video. One day back in 86 my older brother brought home this console called the NES that he brought with his Chinese New Year money. I seen Super Mario Bros at the arcade, but to be able to play that at home was insane. The nes games are amazing even for its time and the programmers that work on the games are wizards. Many of the games are still a blast to play to this day like Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, Contra, Zelda 1, etc. This video explains how some of these games were possible.

[@aza1479]

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.

[@BURRITO44]

Great video

[@10072018]

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...

[@arnezbridges93]

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

[@aegisofhonor]

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.

[@KoopaMedia64]

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.

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

Dragon Quest has some very poor art direction outside the famous designs they're adapting. Friday the 13th blew my mind. Really? I knew it was ambitious, even if flawed, but that's another level of ambition entirely...

[@KoopaMedia64]

Dragon Quest 1 is impressive not for the graphics, but for it being an entire JRPG, crammed into a measly 32KB PRG and 32KB CHR rom. It uses passwords for saving progress. That game pushes CNROM to its absolute limits.

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

@@KoopaMedia64 A sudden difficulty spike with a long mandatory grind exposes many of the struggles in a way the usual recolors and a barely serviceable overworld only hint at. Even by early 8-bit standards, this game relies on charm and streamlined design. Can you honestly say you can't imagine a way to squeeze a little more blood out of that stone?

[@jaredt2590]

Games like super Mario bros are the most complex the nes can handle with just programming code. The natural life span of the nes was from 1983 to 1986. With first floppy disks and then memory mappers Nintendo and 3rd parties were able to extend the life of the nes through 1994.

[@DrBillyCobra]

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

[@CarecaRetrogamer]

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!

[@theboxfox6532]

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

[@gamagama69]

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

[@sikitrakix]

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

[@TheGunmanChannel]

Good vid mate

[@billy6427]

Can u use Enhancement chips with that NES Maker Game Engine ?

[@incumbentvinyl9291]

9:37 - Never even seen that problem and I've played it at least hundreds of hours.

[@Ragnarok182]

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.

[@pojr]

Thank you so much!

[@Use_fediverse-7814]

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.

[@ThomaniacsRetrogamingZone]

That was really interesting! Great video!

[@BastetFurry]

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.

[@Hektols]

It's quite interesting that Nintendo never used the extra chips as marketing until Starfox for the Super Nintendo with the Super FX chip but it makes sense, it wasn't a chip that made the game look better, it looked like a next generation game.

[@its_just_matt]

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.

[@Fear2Stop]

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

[@slembcke]

Hmm, so having written a few (homebrew) NES games myself I guess I never really considered the chips in the NES cartridges to be "cheating". On more modern systems, they have an OS that boots and loads software into RAM from the disk. The NES on the other hand didn't do _anything_ until you plugged in a cartridge. The cartridge really was like the OS. The CPU couldn't even start properly without one because the "reset vector" (a number at the end of it's memory range that tells it where to go to start running) isn't available. You really could argue that any cartridge, even the ones without the mapper chips are extending the hardware. They aren't just providing software, the 1's and 0's, but literally completing the circuits that allow the NES hardware to boot. Another interesting factoid is that 6502 CPU only did memory mapped I/O. So by exposing the address/data busses to the cartridge was more like plugging in an expansion card to a PC with a game built into it's firmware.

[@nonewmsgs]

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.

[@ramgladore]

I hear there's an SDK that makes developing for the NES easier. I kinda wanna try my hand at making a homebrew game.

[@TokyoXtreme]

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.