Versions of the NES

[psycopathicteen]

Apart from the lockout stuff, have there ever been known things that actually influence the game once it is started?

Here some fictitious examples:

"If you change your weapon while being hit in Mega Man 6, Mega Man will have a wrong color. However, this only happens if you use an NES that was manufactured in 1985. The phenomenon does not occur with an NES from a later date."

"In the game Little Samson you will experience a slowdown at the third boss when you play with the NES from the Challenge Set. On all the other NESes, no slowdown occures there."

"The NES versions produced post-1989 have a little music stutter if too much is going on in Gradius which is not the case with earlier models."

Again, I'm not talking about differences between the actual different NES versions that were even marketed as different versions. I know that a Famicom is not identical to an NES. And a front loader NES is slightly different than a top loader NES. And a European NES is not the same as an American NES.
I'm talking about differences between machines that are generally supposed to be the same: Has there ever been a case where a standard American front loader NES behaves differently than another standard American front loader NES because they were manufactured at different times and thus use slightly different hardware? (Not counting the lockout chip mechanism and the mere tolerance of accepting or declining unlicensed games.)

On PCs, it can make a difference for example what graphic card I use. Has something similar been observed with the NES too? Like that the machines that were produced between April and September 1987 have a certain chip by Sharp while other versions have the chip by Fujitsu. And the models with the Sharp chip have some tearing problems with parallax scrolling, even though the NES was not advertised as a new version and is still supposed to be the standard NES.
Has something like that or something similar ever been observed? Or does every front loader US NES behave exactly the same?

I have a copy of Super Mario World for the SNES that doesn't slowdown with 3 fishes and a Yoshi.

[mikejmoffitt]

Apart from the lockout stuff, have there ever been known things that actually influence the game once it is started?

Here some fictitious examples:

"If you change your weapon while being hit in Mega Man 6, Mega Man will have a wrong color. However, this only happens if you use an NES that was manufactured in 1985. The phenomenon does not occur with an NES from a later date."

"In the game Little Samson you will experience a slowdown at the third boss when you play with the NES from the Challenge Set. On all the other NESes, no slowdown occures there."

"The NES versions produced post-1989 have a little music stutter if too much is going on in Gradius which is not the case with earlier models."

Again, I'm not talking about differences between the actual different NES versions that were even marketed as different versions. I know that a Famicom is not identical to an NES. And a front loader NES is slightly different than a top loader NES. And a European NES is not the same as an American NES.
I'm talking about differences between machines that are generally supposed to be the same: Has there ever been a case where a standard American front loader NES behaves differently than another standard American front loader NES because they were manufactured at different times and thus use slightly different hardware? (Not counting the lockout chip mechanism and the mere tolerance of accepting or declining unlicensed games.)

On PCs, it can make a difference for example what graphic card I use. Has something similar been observed with the NES too? Like that the machines that were produced between April and September 1987 have a certain chip by Sharp while other versions have the chip by Fujitsu. And the models with the Sharp chip have some tearing problems with parallax scrolling, even though the NES was not advertised as a new version and is still supposed to be the standard NES.
Has something like that or something similar ever been observed? Or does every front loader US NES behave exactly the same?

I have a copy of Super Mario World for the SNES that doesn't slowdown with 3 fishes and a Yoshi.

I'm not sure what you are referring to, but I am 99.99% sure that this difference is in your head...

[qbradq]

If you do have a copy of Super Mario World that doesn't slow down in areas where other copies do, you need to loan it to a speed runner

[psycopathicteen]

It's a SMAA+SMW cart that came with the system I bought back in 1996 at a Toys "R" Us in the Chicago area. I've played all 96 levels and there isn't a single level that lags with 3 fishes and a Yoshi.

I don't even know which underwater level it supposed to be anyway.

[tepples]

I know they changed SMW for the SMAS 5-in-1 to make Luigi not a palette swap, and the save code surely coexists with that of SMAS. Perhaps they optimized some of the SMW code while they were at it. It'd be plausible because code in launch titles tends to be total crap because they were developed before the programmers learned basic optimizations, and often before the system's hardware was even settled. Or does the old one run on slow ROM and the new one on fast ROM?

[MottZilla]

SMA + World says SlowROM in the imbedded cartridge information. So if the original slows down and the SMA+W does not, they must have changed something about how the game runs. This could be expected since the cartridge doesn't employ bankswitching hardware to combine World with SMA.

[BMF54123]

Where are you getting this "3 fishes and a Yoshi" slowdown figure from? When was the last time you compared the SMAS+W cart to an original SMW cart?

I'm not aware of any major code changes that were made to the game, other than the addition of alternate Luigi sprites (which aren't even stored in the game's standard graphics compression format) and the gutting of the original save file menu. If there were any, surely SMW Central would have found and documented them by now.

[psycopathicteen]

Where are you getting this "3 fishes and a Yoshi" slowdown figure from? When was the last time you compared the SMAS+W cart to an original SMW cart?

The people at Sega-16 claimed that there is a level in SMW that lags with "3 fishes and a Yoshi." They never said what level it was.

[BMF54123]

So no direct comparison has actually been done, then...

I'm going to assume Sega-16 was playing the game in ZSNES or something, which did introduce extra lag in my old SMW hack that's not present (or greatly reduced) on a real console. I'm quite certain it takes more than three enemies and a Yoshi to bring the original game to its knees.