Re: [stella] Miniaturization (NES programming)

Subject: Re: [stella] Miniaturization (NES programming)
From: kurt.woloch@xxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 09:10:19 +0200
On April 19th, A. Davie wrote:

>>   I believe that what this actually did was shrink the
>> region in which there could be N (16?) distinct colors
>> from 32*32 pixels to something smaller.  No, I don't
>> know how that's possible either.

>The NES colour palette consisted of 16 bytes, organised into groups of 4
>palettes.  Of those 4 palettes, the first colour was the background colour,
>and the remaining 3 were the pixel colours.  Only the very first background
>colour was actually used, so in reality you had 13 available colours for
>screen display.

>However, you were limited to choosing only one palette for each 2x2
>character area on the screen.

>On the NES, screen memory (from memory) was 30 lines of 32 characters,
>giving you 960 characters.  There was 2K total of display memory, for two
>screens, mapped (connected) either horizontally or vertically according to
>how the cart was hardwired.  Memory management chips (MMC) later allowed
>program control over this.  But, back to basics... each of the two screens
>therefore had just 1K of video memory.  960 bytes of this was used for the
>character data (each character being one of 256 'names').  So, to
>incorporate colours, the remaining 64 bytes (1024 - 960) of the 1K display
>area were used.

(...)

>Now, as to how to increase colours - one of the things that I found amusing
>about the Nintendo machines was the general trend to include more and more
>power onto the cartridge.  Towards the end of the SNES, the cartridges were
>much, much more powerful than the actual machine - having onboard 3D
>processors, etc.!   It is possible that a similar hardware improvement was
>done on NES carts to achieve the improved colour resolution (an analogy is
>the memory management chips (MMC) which provided much-improved scrolling
and
>bank-switching capability).

Well, I must say, I was never a NES fan... I was shocked to see the success
of the NES in comparison to the Sega Master System. I believe the hardware
of the Sega in most parts was far ahead of that of the NES. Here's some data
to compare:

The Sega had a palette of 32 colors. 16 colors were used for the screen
background, and 16 colors for the sprites. Now, every sprite could be in 16
colors (OK, maybe 15 colors and one background), compared to the NES, where
every sprite only could have three colors and one background. Similarly,
while the Master System had a similar 8x8 "tile" system to the NES, the
Master System tiles all had 16 colors (all colors that were given for the
backgound), compared to the four of the NES. So, basically, nearly
everything possible on the NES could also be done on the Master System, and
much more! The Game Gear, by the way, is closely related to the Master
System, hardware-wise, while the Game Boy Color to me basically seems like a
portable NES, maybe with a bit more memory, but still the same color
limitations. Now while the NES and the Master System were released roughly
at the same time (at least here in Austria - in fact, the NES was released
here in 1987 while the Sega started in 1986), the Game Boy Color came out
just now (how long is it? One Year?), while the Game Gear's been around
since 1991-1992 (is it still on the market, anyway?).
So... I think Sega could have pushed far more out of their machines with the
right marketing, but apparently failed to stand against Nintendo despite
Sega's far superior hardware. (OK, that doesn't count the Genesis vs SNES
now...)

Or does anyone know other backgrounds here, why Sega didn't make it as big?
Are their systems maybe harder to program for, or are there other reasons
unknown to the public?

On the other hand, same could be said for the VCS... I think there were also
gaming consoles at this time which were more promising hardware-wise, but
never reached the VCS's popularity...

Another topic this opens up is... how much could the systems be expanded
with the gaming cartridges? The 2600 carts, basically, contained only ROM.
OK, maybe bankswitching and a special chip, but still, what was delivered
was only CPU data. There were no lines going beyond that. The NES to me
seemed to be a more "open" system... there's always talk about different
"mappers" that were used in the carts (but I'm not an expert on this) and
other things... does anyone know which lines came to the cartridge, and what
could be done with them?

By the way, I own a Sega Game Gear, with a PAL tuner, and I know for sure
that the unit doesn't reduce the TV frame-rate. It's just that fast
movements on the screen seem to "wipe" somehow. By the way, I don't think
this tuner unit generates its video output in the Game Gear's memory. I
think it generates the picture by itself and bypasses, or goes through, the
video chip (or whatever it is) somehow. I'm not sure if it does use the CPU
at all. So... I'm pretty sure that, for instance, a "Video In" line or
something like that, and also an "Audio in" line, is present in the Game
Gear's cartridge port. What about the other systems?

With love from Austria (and many consoles to compare)
Kurt Woloch

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