[stella] NES Special Chip

Subject: [stella] NES Special Chip
From: "Matthew W. Miller" <mattm@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 14:53:16 -0400 (EDT)
On Sun, 16 Apr 2000, Pete Holland wrote:

>--- Rob <kudla@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Which games had this 'special chip'?  It'd be interesting to see if
>> they work in the emulators (which to me would indicate the former
>> method.)
>The one game I recall the box bragging about this was called "Captain
>Comic".  I remember it because it had gotten one of the lowest reviews I
>had seen at the time from EGM.

Reviews I've seen of the game suggest that the graphics are good, but
there isn't enough gameplay to hang them on.  A standard cause for VCS
veterans to look down on newer systems, I think.  ;)
	As for the special chip, you may be thinking of the never-released
Hellraiser (based on the movie, if you can dig that).  Some of the rumors
about it are collected on <http://nesworld.vintagegaming.com/colordre.htm>
and <http://nesworld.vintagegaming.com/hellrais.htm>
	In any case, this appears to be something that poor ol' Stella
couldn't duplicate unless it had a "Super C" chip, as the latter page
calls it: "The cartridge had a Z-80 processor in it running at 2 MIPS
(Million Instructions Per Second).  This gave the game 3 times the
computational power of the NES console alone.  The cartridge also had 64k
of RAM (Random Access Memory) on-board. ... In Hellraiser, the game fully
bitmapped out the screen to memory first (the processor on the game could
draw with more colors, and handle more sprites at one time than the NES)."
Sort of a Nintendo XL system.  :)

>There were at least two other games by the same company, called "Happy
>Camper" and "Baby Boomer," the latter I think used the light gun.

Color Dreams produced religious titles under the name Wisdom Tree.  See
<http://www.emuclassics.com/nesworld/color.htm>.  The SNES game you
mention, "Super Noah's Ark 3D", is a literal clone of Wolfenstein 3D.  
SNA3D has the exact same game engine and map layouts as the SNES version
of Wolfie; only the graphics and sounds are changed.
	Legend has it that Id Software let the Wisdom Tree guys go ahead
with it because Id were pissed off about Nintendo's censorship policies
(baddies sweat instead of bleed, German Shepherd dogs are changed to rats,
swastikas and other Nazi references are taken out).  This is not
necessarily true considering versions of Doom were later produced for the
SNES and N64!

-- 
Matthew W. Miller -- mattm@xxxxxxxxxxx>


--
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/

Current Thread