The Games That Upgraded The NES

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Enhancement chip or maybe just mappers as they are often called helped the NES keep up with the competition. Extra circuity included in the cartridge that gave the NES a little more power and a little more edge against the likes of the Sega Master System. This is my deep dive into what these things actually did.

[@Perseid]

There were a few Atari 2600 carts that had extra RAM on them. Tunnel Runner had a whopping 256 bytes!

[@greenkoopa]

😱😱😱

[@PeBoVision]

256 bytes was the TOTAL RAM directly accessible by the 16 bit processor in a TI-99/4A. The 16k used for programs data was shared VDP memory on the 8 bit bus.

[@scottythegreat1]

Pitfall 2 being the big one.

[@No_True_Scotsman]

Wow, a tiny head start on racing the beam!

[@SA77888]

Thats ridiculous who the hell needs an EXTRA 256 bytes.

[@JayEAA]

A good thing to mention would be the extra chip that was only on the Japanese version of Contra. The Konami VRC2 mapper allowed there to be animated backgrounds.

[@AngryCalvin]

Good to know. I much prefer the Japanese version. So glad it was included on the Contra collection. Famicom disks versions of games were also superior.

[@micheliwaniec80]

Stopping at MMC3 and no mention of MMC5 altogether? Not used by that many games, but stocks finer color palette selection in backgrounds, extended tile indices, SNES-like multiplier on the chip, vertical split screen functionality. the list goes on. MMC5 is really the pinnacle of official MMC chips made by Nintendo in that era. Definitely needs another video soon... ;)

[@greenkoopa]

I mean this as a compliment, nerds like you move the world forward 🙋‍♂️🐢🐢 It took me a week to understand how to install retroarch

[@NesrocksGamingVideos]

The thing is not many games used the MMC5 and the ones that did didn't really put the chip to good use, so in reality it didn't upgrade the NES as it could have and as other chips did. I think the video did fine not to mention it and several other mappers. Otherwise the video would be so lengthy. Also, hello Michael! ^^

[@edydossantos]

@@greenkoopa you're a genius as we vould make it. I didn't even try. 😂

[@EpicTyphlosionTV]

And enhanced audio on Famicom carts

[@JMFSpike]

MMC5 was used by more games then you might have thought according to Wikipedia. Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, Just Breed, Metal Slader Glory, Laser Invasion, Uchuu Keibitai SDF, Nobunaga's Ambition II, Nobunaga no Yabou - Sengoku Gunyuu Den, Bandit Kings of Ancient China, Romance of the Three Kingdoms II, Uncharted Waters, Genghis Khan II: Clan of the Gray Wolf, Gemfire, L'Empereur, Ishin no Arashi, Shin 4 Nin Uchi Mahjong - Yakuman Tengoku

[@linkthehero8431]

Fun fact: there's an official Gradius Fighter Yu-Gi-Oh card. I know it's real because Joey uses it sometimes in the original series. That's when you know a game's a classic.

[@archmagemc3561]

Aye, the I believe they are called the "Big eye" or "Big Core" archtype. There are an entire seires of cards based on them. (but they aren't that good due to how modern yugioh has power crept.) And of course their field spell is called Boss Rush, for obvious reasons. xD

[@IdealIdeas100]

Koonami has a lot of yugioh cards based on their other games.

[@Disthron]

I remember back in the day, late 90's early 2000's when many 8 and 16 bit consoles had 90% of games with pixel perfect emulation (there were of course some outliers ) the NES was a big issue because of just how many enhancement chips there were. Still, it certainly did make the system very extendable and it would have been fun to see what other systems could have done if it were more prevalent.

[@JAGtheTrekkieGEMINI1701]

Damn... I kinda underestimated the importance of cartridge enhancements for the NES all the years.... So *Elite* is kinda the "Starfox" of the NES, *Super Mario Bros 3* is kinda the "Super Mario World 2 Yoshis Story" and *Castlevania 3* is kinda the "Castlevania Rondo of Blood" of the NES.... All Games which were Not possible without cartridge Upgrades. PS. Starfox2 actually used the amazing Super FX2 Chip 😉

[@JAGtheTrekkieGEMINI1701]

@@davedavies8968 Rondo of Blood also releases on the SNES as a downgraded Version called *Dracula X".

[@EmeraldEyesEsoteric]

Early polygon games like Starfox and even Final Fantasy 7 were far uglier then many NES games. Starfox really felt like a downgrade to me back in the day.

[@JAGtheTrekkieGEMINI1701]

@@EmeraldEyesEsoteric Starfox still aged better than OG FF7 imo due to the fact that there are only "blocky Alien Space ships" and Not "blocky human characters"

[@modev4163]

Im 35 so I came in more in the snes ages, but i noticed the big disparity in nes games but never understood why

[@sprockkets]

Yeah but the SA-1 was probably used more often, giving iirc 4x (more actually factoring in its other addtions) the CPU for the system vs the built-in one. Stuff like Mario Kart and SMRPG used it. Well, one source said 33 games used it. IIRC the FX chip was used in like, 4 games?

[@Myako]

I enjoy every single video you make, but I have a special fondness for technical deep-dives like this one. Please, do continue on doing these. 👏🏻👏🏻💪🏻💪🏻

[@Sharopolis]

Thanks, I will!

[@bombfog1]

Much appreciated. I really enjoy this series (? don’t know whether series is the appropriate term here). In other words, I love the videos wherein you highlight games that go a bit beyond the capabilities of their brethren.

[@SkyCharger001]

the WideBoy cartridge (a development cartridge that allowed one to test Gameboy games on a tv via NES/Famicom) had an 'extra' cpu.

[@customsongmaker]

Yeah it had a GameBoy in it. I think that uses some kind of Z80.

[@gblargg]

@@customsongmaker GB-Z80, a scaled-down version of the Z80.

[@marsilies]

Regarding no NES game having an extra CPU on the cart, that ALMOST happened, with Color Dreams building a prototype "Super-cartridge" with a Z80 on it for a Hellraiser game. Reportedly, the Z80 was going to manipulate the graphics RAM in real-time to produce a bitmapped display, and the rumor is the game would've been first-person 3D akin to Wolfenstein 3D.

[@Sharopolis]

I would love to see that, that would have been amazing!

[@JayOnTheBay]

Hellraiser as in the horror film?!

[@stevefitz2522]

@@JayOnTheBay yup, the very same

[@Chronz]

That's cool. Where can I learn more on this?

[@LNSLateNightSaturday]

Great video, and I'm looking forward to the follow-up on the Konami-style FM synth sound chips.

[@persona83]

Thanks for the in-depth explanation about these NES features. And I love the pace of your voice and video. It makes everything perfectly understandable.

[@johneygd]

That’s sooo freaking damn special about those enhancement chips, they are no chraphical accelerator chips,BUT they can enhance the graphics by simply swapping tile sets in and out or using an irq counter or do both,along with required extra video ram/chr ram and prg rom, Heck you could even bankswitch pcm audio by swapping samples in & out,so instead of using raw 1bit dpcm and stiff it all into 16kB audio ram,you can use 4bit pcm and swap them in and out of the 16KB audio ram for better 1 channel digital audio, HOWEVER, there are some standard nes games running on a stock nes system wich did amezing things as well such as formation and challanger in wich both uses parallax scrollingng and it uses multi screens,while city connection swaps tile sets in and out to achieve multiple background scrolling among other stock nes games, so i think all these all these clever things could be also done on a stock nes trough the nes cpu insted along with extra ram and rom BUT i do believe that will indeed eat up extra processing power this slowing down the nes, Just imagine mario 3 running on a stock nes, i can imagine that it would,ve ran much much slower if the nes cpu had to do bankswitching instead.

[@theblackwidower]

Not only that, I don't think Mario 3 could run at all on stock NES because of diagonal scrolling. Wasn't possible without these enhancement chips.

[@mrmimeisfunny]

I was hoping you would talk about the MMC2 and MMC4 chips with their weird tile triggered bankswitch. Switching bank when it reached a certain tile as opposed to a certain scanline Punch Out used it. It allowed it to bank out the rope and crowd and bank in Little Mac (which was a background). This allowed the game to put all of Little Mac's animation frames in 256 tiles the crowd and rope in 256 tiles, and the opponent in 256 tiles. This allowed you to have detailed opponents. And animate them by just switching the entire 256 tile bank once per frame.

[@MattoMakesLetsPlays]

I think he did a video on Punch Out which explains how the technique works, but there are so few MMC2/4 games on the market (even localized) its not that amazing to talk about.

[@stevep9177]

Interesting how the nes is basically an incomplete computer, and cartridges are just a pcb that may as well be plugged in with some kind of ribbon cable.

[@jaysharpESQ]

Ahhh that was a great analogy

[@Felamine]

That's how cartridges on the earlier consoles (mostly 4th gen and older) were. These could be thought of as removable SOCs (system-on-chip) that interface directly with the CPU, and include self-contained hardware upgrades as well as the game software.

[@mystsnake]

its just a extension, its not different to the pcie slots in your pc

[@KenjiUmino]

@@mystsnake not so much different in function, but these kind of cartridges would be more like "a pcie card that not only has the game on it but also part of the graphics hardware and some extra RAM" ... imagine if PC games came on pcie cards that you just plug into a PC (thunderbolt, expresscard) and then you can play the game with highest details, raytracing and everything even if you only have a potato PC (Pentium N5030, iGPU only) ... because all the graphics hardware is on the same pcie card that the game is on ... games would be terribly expensive tho, and you would have to buy the games on physical media again instead of downloading everything from steam or the likes

[@tailgunner2]

@@KenjiUmino The Commodore 64 had such a function. It too had a cartridge slot on it's side. Though disks were far more economical at the time.

[@scottscott3463]

Jeeez, seeing all those games, brings back memories of when I got my NES.

[@sevaarutyunov7301]

Great video! Really wanna to watch video on enhancement audio chips. Like the one in gimmick !

[@timmturner]

Awesome video, just subscribed. You are doing great work as I rarely subscribe after seeing only a single video.

[@dan_loup]

The galaxian way to do things of the NES kinda put it in serious advantages against systems that are supposedly more powerful than it like the atari 7800. Tilemaps are just a lot faster than bitmap blitting. I think the first console to actually offer a threat to the NES was the PC Engine, because it was literally an NES but better.

[@greenkoopa]

I don't know why but I watch these types of videos when I'm stoned, and even sober I don't understand the technical stuff but I find the verbiage amusing. To be clear I'm 35 and when I see a new word I look it up, but blitting puts a smile on my face.

[@borby4584]

That’s actually really interesting and clever. Did that give it advantages over the Genesis too?

[@dan_loup]

@@borby4584 The genesis used the same way to do graphics, but better.

[@borby4584]

@@dan_loup so it did what Ninten-didn’t?

[@dan_loup]

@@borby4584 yes, two layers, more colors, an stupid amount of data copying time, massive sprites..

[@hikmori7]

4:30 - 6:39 That's really amazing breakdown. I feel It's distinctively clever of Konami's end to workaround this on their NES games.

[@PeBoVision]

a few years prior, the TI-99/4A shot itself in the foot, by tying their GRom to licenses (along with tyrannical marketing and packaging control). You could create cartridge software for the 4A, but unless you gave up control of your product to TI, and paid exorbitant fees, you were restricted to 8K. Pay up, and you could use GRom expansion in the cart, giving the profit to TI. That's why so many TI 3rd-party software have no cut scenes or multi-channel sound...all Atari and Parker Brothers software is restricted to 8K...giants of the time like Epyx, Bröderbund, and Activision just stayed away, while small companies like Databiotics and Software Specialties did their best to create game-clones in just 8K (often extremely well). To be fair, it was a new industry, and TI didn't understand the idea of making money on the hardware, while providing software rights to the companies that would ultimately sell your machines.

[@romannikonenko7325]

Ooh, Lagrange Point! Such an underrated RPG from the era.

[@ThePerfectKiosk]

Many NES titles didn't have CHR-ROM: they had a RAM chip on the cartridge that served as cartridge memory, and it had to be written by the PPU (not the CPU) using a particular I/O port in the software. Even Mega Man 4 used a setup with CHR-RAM and scrolling is sooooo slow to make up for it.

[@inceptional]

This was an important feather in the cap of the SNES too, which many Genesis fans really seem to dismiss as if it wasn't a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, even though it was clearly one of the [multiple] reasons why the SNES ultimately defeated the Genesis in the console wars. It was certainly a much better solution than Sega's idea of just releasing one extremely expensive and bulky add-on after another for the Genesis. And we all know how that turned out.

[@Gatorade69]

Wow. KZbin removing my comments again... Why ? Sega actually thought about add on chips. Virtua racing had the SVP chip that allowed the system to do early 3d like the SuperFX did with StarFox. Why they chose to go the 32x route I have no idea, I think prices of carts came into factor. Those SuperFX SNES games were pretty expensive at the time. Sega definitely made some bad choices.

[@inceptional]

@@Gatorade69 The thing is, the SNES actually had around 100 games that used enhancement chips, and only a couple were more expensive than normal game prices, so it really was a smart move on Nintendo's part. If Sega had done the same in the Genesis' early life, it probably would have beat the SNES in the console wars, but it didn't. So, yeah, Sega definitely made some bad choices.

[@Gatorade69]

@@inceptional Hundreds of games sounded a bit too much. I did a quick count and it was more like 73 (worldwide) give or take not including a handful of games that were never released. Also looking at the prices in 1993 a majority of SNES games were 60-70$ compared to the Genesis which had games priced 50-60$. Accounting for inflation that's about 120-140$ for a SNES game. So they were on average a bit pricier. Reading about SEGAs SVP chip it increased the price of the carts to 100$. With Virtua racing being the only game produced because of that. So I guess it just wasn't worth it for SEGA to pursue. It's kind of hard selling 100$ games, especially back then. I also notice some SNES enhancement chips weren't really on the same level as the SUPERFX chip more so being made by the developer/production company with some only having 1 or two special functions. I wonder why a company were not able to add an enhancement chip on their Genesis carts ? Did the Genesis just not support it or was it SEGA who didn't want companies doing that?

[@inceptional]

@@Gatorade69 Well, 73 (+4 unreleased) is pretty close to a "around 100", give or take. And, while the SNES games may have been more expensive in general, they cost that price with or without enhancement chips in the vast majority of cases, so the point that they weren't more expensive than normal [SNES] games if they had the chips in them still stands. For SNES owners, the chip-enhanced games (outside of a couple extreme examples like Star Fox) were basically just like buying any other game for their system, which really made things simple/elegant/frictionless. Yeah, none of us will ever truly know the exact reasoning behind why Sega did what it did, suffice to say that outside of Virtua Racing, it didn't use enhancement chips in the carts and instead went for very expensive and bulky add-ons. Personally, I would have preferred them going down the enhancement chips in carts route. It's possible there was some technical and/or legal reason Sega couldn't just copy Nintendo or something. Maybe that's why it took so long for Sega to eventually do the chip on a cartridge thing. I dunno. I think I read somewhere the Genesis wasn't designed with this in mind though, unlike the SNES, so it just wasn't anywhere near as practical for the most part. This is why Nintendo deserves kudos for such as smart idea, which it clearly envisioned/planned before the SNES was even released and indeed had implemented in some games from literally day one (see Pilotwings).

[@fandangobrandango7864]

The genesis CPU was nearly 3x as fast as the SNES, that's why the SNES had the need to invest more in special chips. It was always said that gunstar heroes didn't release on SNES because it couldn't run it.

[@ahumeniy]

Kirby's Adventure also had the parallax effect using scanlines on the final boss scene.

[@neddreadmaynard]

Wasn't Willy Nilly a country and western singer? "I'm on the Commode Again".

[@doc_sav]

I have been wanting a breakdown like this. Great overview.

[@heilong79]

The simple graphics were charming as hell, even though the Master System was more powerful the games on that tried to do too much for an 8 bit system and things looked messy but on the nes it alll looked very clean.

[@Reaperman4711]

How has youtube not recommended this channel to me before? Algorithm's slacking.

[@Clancydaenlightened]

Nes is kinda like a stripped down atari 8bit with a display list in rom and draws tiles not scanlines, the cartridge slot has the system bus fully available, so expansion chips are easily added, also keeps the console cheaper

[@amerigocosta7452]

I agree, I've always thought that the NES design seemed heavily influenced by the 6502 based micro computers that were on the market prior it. Something that is generally ignored or dismissed these days.

[@Clancydaenlightened]

@@amerigocosta7452 well Nintendo wanted atari to sell it originally, derivative work is easier

[@chockablock34839]

I also noticed the similarities with a stripped down Atari 8-bt. It has a fraction of the RAM and lacks the built-in scan line counter. What it does do well is the tiling, the sprites and the colour graphics resolution.

[@Clancydaenlightened]

@@chockablock34839 get an MBC3 on the cartridge iirc and you'll get the scanline counter

[@jasper-byrne]

Castlevania 3 is def worth hearing on a real Famicom, the enhancement audio is incredible

[@Dhalin]

Heck, IIRC, even the NES version sounds nice. I think sometimes, it's not about what you have, it's about how you use what you have. Yeah, some of the Famicom's audio enhancements were all nice and all, but there are still games like Blaster Master that didn't have those that still managed to produce some of the most memorable tunes I heard as a kid.

[@viperdemonz-jenkins]

that was my favorite NES game.

[@akalyx]

i forgot about this channel...glad i found it again

[@Devilot109]

Some games are actually demonstrably worse in graphics or audio in the North American release compared to JP because NoA was much more restrictive about what kind of mappers it allowed.

[@Devilot109]

@@davedavies8968 Castlevania III is the classic example.

[@Inkubaszi]

very intresting material, thank you

[@miketate3445]

18:43 Small nitpick. You show Metal Storm while talking about scan line counters. The parallax in that game uses animated tiles, not split screen from scan line counters.

[@ch-tc4ct]

the changes made in these games were real game changers

[@garyseymour6319]

When you use bank switching it's quicker to have the main elements like a spaceship in all banks, this is shown by the fact they are on the same tiles in ALL banks as will anything else that's needed quite often. Otherwise you have to bank shift to draw it.

[@greenkoopa]

🥴🤯

[@modev4163]

This makes me appreciate why some games costed more, and I always wondered how gradius was so damn good

[@dmtm]

At 1:16 The game Nemesis was released on the Commodore 64 1985 and 1986 it was released on the NES as: Gradius.

[@Idelacio]

Sweet, been looking forward to this.

[@billkendrick1]

The Atari 8-bit line (and hence the XEGS) could point ANTIC at anywhere in memory space, including the cartridge ROM, for video data (bitmap, character/tile set, and text/tile data). :)

[@chockablock34839]

The Atari has great flexibility in what it can do with the built in scan line counter, massively more RAM and that 0.01MHz extra speed :) . If only the highest resolution colour graphics mode (not gr.8 with PMG's) was of a higher resolution and more PMGs were available, then the Atari could have done better than the NES.

[@googleboughtmee]

Great vid! Mr. Gimmick could also be up there with Mario 3 and Kirby?

[@JohnnyWednesday]

Brilliant video :) more enhancement chips please! did any N64 games use additional chips? did C64 cartridges ever make use of all those 6502 compatible NES chips? :O

[@xeridea]

I don't think any N64 games had extra chips, though the system did have an expansion slot to double system RAM from 4 to 8MB, it went in the console itself.

[@JohnnyWednesday]

@@xeridea - Given the abilities of N64 Flash carts? I wouldn't be surprised if enhancement chips were at least technically possible for the N64

[@roberthanthonymartinezrive7383]

IIRC, the only one to do so on N64 was Animal Forest, which used a real-time clock. Everything you saw (expansion pak included) was all hardware without chip add-ons.

[@JohnnyWednesday]

@@roberthanthonymartinezrive7383 - Thanks for pointing it out :)

[@theironfox2756]

Gradius was the first game I purchased with my own money. $19,99 at K-Mart.

[@MickeyMishra]

Vice Project doom is one of the best games I have ever played. I was surprised so many never heard of it. I still had a hard time believing that it was my NES that was doing this!

[@MrMegaManFan]

Ever done a crossover episode with Retro Core? I feel like you two would hit it off well.

[@bastian_5975]

I just had the absurd thought of trying to hook it up so an modern console would talk through an NES, so you could technically have Cyberpunk or something equally absurd running "on the NES"

[@robsku1]

Yeah, technically it should be even possible to create an cartridge that has a cable to connect it to PC that would then use NES to output graphics and sounds and read the controllers, but run the game itself in the PC. Of course you could also stuff a single-board computer, like Raspberry Pi inside the cartridge to do the same thing. Hell, with USB port in the cartridge you could easily update it's content - maybe it could be even made to run whatever games or software in virtual machine with virtual screen and have it read the screens contents and convert it to NES tilemap in the fly. Of course it would still need to scale the resolution down and limit yourself to the colours NES can use - same with sound, unless you want to output the sound from the cartridge instead of TV, in which case you could just use the sound chip in the single board computer. It's a super neat idea that I would love to see and even more to have one, and a totally absurd and useless one at that just as well :D

[@paradoxzee6834]

Pretty much what Nintendo did with Super Gameboy. It is Gameboy hardware in a game card. The SNES is pretty much just a box for controllers and to output the picture on the TV

[@No_True_Scotsman]

Someone did this!! I'll try to find it. I love the idea of playing Crysis on a Super Nintendo

[@ShallRemainUnknown]

NES/FC was designed from its very inception to utilize enhancement chips, despite being based on/inspired by the the Colecovision (which I don't think had any carts w enhancements, and was similar to MSX spec).

[@Ziggurat1]

Your best video I have seen of you so far

[@caseystrange]

Ninja Gaiden II and III had scanline counting as well.

[@Choralone422]

How much the NES was "upgraded" via enhancement chips in the cartridge was very cool to see back in those days. I can still remember in the later NES days comparing some of the early games to later ones and being amazed at how much more complex the games became. It was a shame that Nintendo removed the ability to add extra sound channels via the cartridge port of the NES. It would have been so cool to have the extra audio channel that the Famicom Disk System games had or some of the Konami games like Castlevania III and Lagrange Point did. It wasn't until KZbin became a thing that I ever heard the original Famicom audio tracks for The Legend of Zelda, Metroid or Castlevania III.

[@codenameviper7905]

If you have a flash cart for the NES you only have to solder one resistor in the NES to connect two pins on the hidden expansion connector to the bottomn, If Nintendo wanted they could easily give out some kind of very cheap dongle for the expansion port, only problem is that the plastic tabs had to be broken, i have the extra sound for Famicom Disk Games and also for special chip games like Castlevania 3 jp. Version

[@dustinherk8124]

i like how nintendo always had a way to up the performance from cartridge games in some way or another. nintendo had it in the cartridge, snes had it start as soon as Starfox with its cartridge integration, and the N64 hat the ram upgrade port on the console, which allowed you too double its ram to upgrade games like Perfect dark, to have relatively capable AI in a Golden eye 64 style game engine, instead of preprogrammed level AI that relied more on specific conditions to first, spawn, and how it would react.

[@zorilla0]

The irony of a Micronics-developed title being featured in a video about games with enhanced performance. The fact that Ghosts N' Goblins dynamically loads tiles into expanded graphics RAM would certainly explain the noticeable load times when booting the cartridge and starting the first stage. It makes me wonder if Ikari Warriors 1 and 2 (another pair of Micronics games) used the same technique since they had the same long pauses. Ikari Warriors, being a 256KB game, seemed to have load times that were especially pronounced.

[@darthungeon2872]

I remember FF10 haha. That was probably the only time I had a successful spastic scramble to change strategies after the zombie/Life combo and the Aeon cancelling to defeat him. Was Bujingai before 2000? Or was that not well known enough? I remember there were a few tricky bosses in there also.

[@madcommodore]

On the C64 you can save precious 16k VIC II RAM memory by using the CPU to copy data from a place in the other 48k of RAM into the VIC II RAM bank being addressed. Even more weird is the CPU and VIC II chip can see different values at identical memory addresses. The Amiga, although never a console, can do the same, to save your 512k Chip RAM used by custom chips you can use the CPU to copy stuff between 1-512k and 513-1024k areas willynilly at the same time as the Blitter etc are doing stuff. The only people who need 1mb Chip RAM or more Amigas are people working with 1mb worth of sound samples all at once at the same time.

[@Denathorn]

Back in the day, I used bank switching a lot on my Amstrad 6128, not to the extreme of how they used the extra addressable memory on 8-bit consoles... But once you could harness the extra 64k available, it was great... Sadly though, in a professional sense, it was sadly under used as the target because many a game was for the 464 model which allowed for maximum compatibility. So many game devs mostly never acknowledged the extra memory available to them... Oh, and generally, Z80 machine code was unashamedly ported from the Spectrum to the Amstrad by "professionals" that in the most part, titles looked and played pretty much s*it when there was no reason for it. And do you know what... Nothing has really changed, take the lessor target, build for that, then lazy port it over... Prime example... GTA Definitive Edition... Mobile code, ran through convertors, slapped on targets that are basically super computers and look what you get... Rubbish!!! How very retro! :/

[@ecernosoft3096]

The Atari 7800, 5200, and 2600 all put graphics in ROM. 5200 had enough RAM to put it in RAM though.

[@Sliider36]

Mega Man 5 is one of my picks for best looking NES game. go back and look at all the stages in that game (crystalman, waveman & gravityman for example). tons of animated tiles & detailed environmental stuff. it looks fantastic. then capcom didnt care when MM6 came along- they phoned that one in, as they were focused on MMX at that time. idk why MM5 is often forgotton when talking about nes graphics, but its top quality stuff.

[@ExaltedDuck]

RE: pronunciation of Gradius... It may be worth noting thie title was affected by the R/L confusion that sometimes happens in Japanese-English transliteration. It was originally meant to be Gladius, like the ancient Roman short sword.

[@ClarkPotter]

Phenomenal content. So good I can forgive the British newscasting narration :)

[@itsyeeoledskoolfurry3208]

Gradius got ported to the Sega Game Gear in 1992. It got re-skinned and renamed to Aeriel Assault. Aeriel Assault is VERY similar to this Gradius game.

[@BitwiseMobile]

The bus in the NES is a genius design. It's architecture allows for extending the Famicom via that bus. You can add more RAM, more ROM, or add any amount of circuitry that you want. As long as you talk on that bus you can interface with the CPU. The genius of that design is the mapper chips, or MMCs. It's no accident that games that came along later in the life of the Famicon were able to take advantage of that interface and mapping technology to provide a richer game experience than anyone ever thought possible on the NES.

[@zOOpygOOpert]

"This is an NES Gamechanger!" Yeah cartridges tend to do that.

[@FatNorthernBigot]

I don’t remember many consoles from my childhood in the 80’s (it was home computers or nothing, back then) and wasn’t aware of the NES. When the hugely popular Super NES came out, I was surprised by its grandiose title.

[@Halbared]

Consoles only started to shift in big numbers in the UK in 1990.

[@zk0rned]

@@Halbared The Genesis was a monster in the UK

[@Halbared]

@@zk0rned The Megadrive sold well when it was released in the 90's, yes.

[@zk0rned]

@@Halbared it basically outperformed everything in the UK gaming wise

[@Halbared]

@@zk0rned Until the Playstation, yes.

[@zsciaeount]

Holy wow. Great video. Subscribe and bell. Good stuff!

[@ImmortalAbsol]

Would like to see notable instances on other consoles, not just of the era.

[@BenW83]

Awesome video mate. Really interesting. I knew about the more common MMC chips. But I wouldn't have thought games in 86 had them. Learn something new everyday. Including although a great system the NES is woefully lackluster under the hood. Ghost and goblins looks crap 🤣.

[@user-zo9dc1lu3q]

GORGEOUS video !! 😚👌

[@johneymute]

For a looooong time i tout the stock nes could do all these things on it’s own,but nope because as i had discovered ever since 2093, the nes need swapping data chips along with extra ram & rom to swap tile sets in& out as well swapping pcm samples in and out once needed, now i don’t think that the game elite or the drawing program videomation uses tile sets at all , i think it generates vector graphics trough software via the cpu and then converts it’s to tile sets,sure you might could store 16000+ tile sets to account for every possible drawing combination, but i think that would be very impractical,but am still curious about the innerworkings off those games and i would be not surprised if coloring a dinosour works similar like those mentioned games,now about those animated question mark blocks in mario 3, it might be possible that it contains many frames of animations or it could be that those pixels are constantly moving in a loop from left & right by creating extra tiles on the fly trough extra video ram and output them as extra frames in order to save on space(not sure if that’s actually possible and or if that would couse cpu or mmc3 chip overhead but maybe it can be done that way),also i wish you mentioned battle toads wich does have some amezing tricks to make you undistinguich it as a 16bit game😁

[@robsku1]

I doubt the CPU (or mmc3) would overheat - surely not the CPU. For example, the SuperCPU cartridge for C-64 (which uses 6502 CPU, same as NES) can go up to >20Mhz IIRC, which is over 20 times the clockspeed C-64 runs at - the cartridge uses the same 6502 CPU that's inside the C-64, and I've never heard them overheat even when ran at maximum clockspeed the cartridge allows (it's adjustable from a knob, and some cartridges also allow going _lower_ than default clockspeed). But while it wouldn't risk damaging the CPU, it could still end up being too demanding for the CPU to run fast enough to update the screen 50 (PAL) or 60 (NTSC) times per second. You could always halve the FPS, update only 25 or 30 times per second, and you would have at least twice the time to do all the necessary data processing per frame, but the graphics wouldn't be as smooth and it would affect the gameplay significantly. Even if 25fps was considered fast enough for early FPS games - DooM for example was hardcoded to max fps of 24 or 25 IIRC, and it doesn't even feel choppy unless you're running on old hardware where the refresh rate will drop below that - but I imagine you would definitely notice the difference in a fast-paced side-scroller (or even in the original Mario Brothers - without "Super" - game, which was not side-scroller [you could say it was side-static, lol]).

[@katelights]

Did you see that guy that got Doom running on a NES by having it run on a raspberry pi inside the cartridge?

[@robsku1]

I actually haven't. Is it here on KZbin? The damn algorithm should definitely have recommended it to me, as I actively follow retro tech channels and those about original DooM and all the rest of games built on idtech1 engine (Ultimate DooM, DooM ][, Final DooM, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, Chex Quest) and various source ports, add-on's, new games that depend on one of these (use same engine, but redefine all graphics, sounds, enemies, maps, not just how they look and sound but what they do as well), etc. Could you give a link or video name to search for? I'd love to see it!

[@marcelopires711]

So many Nes games made with the aid of those chips that we will need a "fancy games with plain stock hardware" to know if they exist and who they are.

[@ethanterry7290]

I had to do everything in my power not to turn this off in disgust when Kirby sparked that UFO instead of swallowing it… Incredible video. Well done as always!

[@seditt5146]

I would love to see someone in the modern day push old NES expansion to its max to see what it is capable of. Can we get full on 3D or ray tracing by passing all the data to onboard chips and simply send back processes "Sprites". IDK, But I would love to know.

[@vxorpsxorlox9918]

suckerpinch put a Raspberry Pi inside a NES cartridge and uses it to update the tiles.

[@robsku1]

I think you could - but not sure if any single board computer exists that could run on the power NES provides the cartridge with, so I doubt you could fit enough in a cartridge that could perform actual realtime ray tracing. You could always make a cartridge that has a USB interface to communicate with a PC and let the PC basically use the NES as I/O device (reading controller inputs and outputting graphics and sound), in which case you could pretty much render anything the PC can render - limited to resolution and colours the NES can produce, a fairly simple realtime conversion routine could be used to scale down and apply dithering to any truecolor graphics to be rendered via the NES.

[@seditt5146]

@@robsku1 hhmmmm good point and one I didn't fully consider. Any idea what those specs are? I am pretty familiar with SoCs and embedded computers but don't know about the NES

[@JMFSpike]

Enhancement chips were really a very brilliant thing, because they allowed for essentially (sort of) upgrading consoles without having to actually create new hardware.

[@MiguelPaulettePerez-bj8ml]

I wish that day/night transition in Simon's Quest was as fluid in the real game...

[@JohnsTrainVideos]

It took me a while to realize this guy was saying "tiles" and not "tails"

[@MrDazzlerdarren]

Elite on the NES is the only time I've paid full price for a game ....£50 back then was a lot of paper rounds too!

[@edydossantos]

What about After Burner II? The graphics are quite impressive? Not to forget Battletoads. The level of speed, resolution, fluidity, of the graphics are something out of the curve. How the guys manage to make such games on an 8bit?

[@Nikku4211]

Why is so much of the footage frame-blended when this video is 60fps already?

[@SkyCharger001]

sourced from another video most likely.

[@Badspot]

1:44 GET THE POWERUP AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[@ChaossX7]

Wait star fox 2 was released in '96? I thought it wasn't released until the SNES classic came out.

[@greensun1334]

Some of those enhached NES-Games look better than some early or lazy programmed Megadrive/Genesis-Titles (like Crazy Castle or something...)

[@gorilladisco9108]

With so limited resources, it could achieve so much. Mind blown.

[@maxthompson7107]

It just goes to show how the littlest things can make a big difference. Who knew memory banking was such an old trick. Makes me wish I was able to make NES games that cool.

[@kwkfortythree39]

If I'm not mistaken Master System's Flash has 8KB of RAM in the cartridge.

[@inceptional]

I'm curious. With the SNES' Mode 0, which I've heard was kinda built around it once intended to being backwards compatible with the SNES, how many background tiles per layer was it able to store normally?

[@enriquedossantos3283]

Wow, an "extra" 8kb of SYSTEM RAM, on a 2kb system, thats like they released an expansion of 64gb EXTRA ram for the PS5 or the XBOX series, is insane

[@yourikhan4425]

Elite on the NES. Incredible.

[@LycanWitch]

surprised this video skipped over the Sunsoft games and their next level chip enhancements in games such as Batman Revenge of the Joker and Gimmick!

[@drxym]

I vaguely remember a ZX Spectrum game called Shadow Of The Unicorn that had a RAM cartridge because it was too big for a 48Kb model. It wasn't a good game even with the extra memory.

[@gwishart]

That sounds like the Mikro-Plus, which contained a custom 16k ROM which could overlay the normal Sinclair BASIC ROM. A bit like an Interface II cartridge, but with the mapping hardware built in; and still needed to load data from tape. I don't think any games other than Shadow of the Unicorn ever used it.

[@Disthron]

While I love the enhancement chip shenanigans I think the big N's business practices of not allowing devs to release games, or the same games, on other systems was a big contributor to this. I'm sure Maga Man, Castlvania and Final Fantasy could have been at least as good on the SMS if they'd been allowed to release on it.

[@castlevania82]

So basically in the right hands the nes CPU could be clocked to surpase even the N64!!!👍

[@EmeraldEyesEsoteric]

Yeah, but why do that when they can make you buy a new game system?

[@seankkg]

I always thought my hand was the game changer but I guess I was wrong.

[@yyattt]

Turns out that Tom7 wasn't the inventor of reverse emulation on the NES after all.

[@linkthehero8431]

1:09 ⬆️⬆️⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️🅱️🅰️ (the Konami Code) will give you all the power-ups from the start.

[@Cyborg647]

I think the Indiana jones game on n64 did something like this too if im.not mistaken

[@jayo1212]

Nintendo really should be adding enhancement chips to Switch carts...

[@BrooklynBalla]

I still can’t get over Hatris.What in gods name were they thinking 🤦‍♂️

[@gtgodbear6320]

I want to get one of them cheap digital NES consoles with all the Mario Bros., Ninja Turtles, Castlevania, Zelda games downloaded. I wouldn't really care about the other games much. Same Dimension or little bit bigger controller.

[@ShunyValdez]

> hat painting problem Nice computer science pun

[@alpzepta]

Wow this is like putting RTX 3090 Ti into a Nintendo Switch cartridge