Things in NES-related media that annoy you

[Pokun]

I agree with Takuikaninja about people saying ROMs about magnetic disk images being annoying.
Optical disc images however are more often called disc images and seldom or never ROMs. I guess people mainly think about mask ROM chips when hearing "ROM".
I myself prefer "ROM image" for memory chips, "disk image" for magnetic disks and "disc image" for optical discs (or just skip "image" as Drag said if it's obvious by context). And maybe "cassette tape image" or "tape image" for cassette tapes but never "cassette image" (because cassette only is used for ROM/RAM cartridges in Swedish).


Another similar pet peeve of mine is when people use "RAM" when talking about EEPROM or flash-ROM. RAM to me is always volatile and can be written to directly while a PROM is ROM and therefore can't be written to directly but can be programmed in a slower process.

Probably not media related, but often SMS (and even A8 and C64) fan-groups like to gripe about the "mappers" on NES.. because "that's cheating". And you obviously need to remove mappers from the capability for a more fair comparison between consoles. /s Oh sweet summer child, you.

Yeah, those systems simply has a smaller cartridge library so mappers never became necessary. Though the NES does have an awful lot of mappers compared to later systems that were similarly popular, like the Game Boy. I guess it was because Nintendo didn't regulate cartridge production as much as on later consoles.

[stan423321]

We have had this discussion on the technical side before. NES had more obvious options for mapping due to PPU bus being separately exposed, for disputable initial reasons, and some pretty obvious functionality holes like scanline IRQ and frugal RAM that were comparatively easy to fix. Meanwhile, GB(C), SMS, GG, SNES, MD, GBA all have an equivalent of hardwired CHR-RAM and no equivalent holes, so all of these systems have occasional mappers, more common when address bus is narrower, but they're comparatively boring until we jump into full coprocessor territory.

There are occasional designs that do something else, and in that case the library size may indeed be the limiting factor. Atari 7800 seems to be an example; it has a single bus that exposes some of its graphics accesses, and supposedly its most known homebrew release does something interesting with it.

The home computers are something I looked less into, especially since there even executing from a cartridge in the first place may be considered a luxury.