nesdev.org

Wasn't the 7800 just a blitter?

OneCrudeDude wrote:To go on an alternate history tangent, from the research I made from this thread and others, it seems like the NES would've won over the other consoles even without Nintendo's draconian policies. The console was just more flexible and easier to work with compared to the competition. The SMS would've seen more success since it could handle graphics a little better, but it would've been curtailed by it's relatively inflexible sound processor. Then again, maybe Sega would've released the Yamaha add-on stateside to compete with the NES' audio, which might've pushed Nintendo into 'fixing' the audio expansion and bring a fresh new batch of games over.

The SMS was a lot easier to program (hardware is a lot less buggy and more fault tolerant, plain and simple), the problem is that it came out two years after the Famicom, and by that point Nintendo had already completely taken over the Japanese market and got a serious headstart in the US market as a side effect. (mind you, Sega still managed to get a foothold in the markets Nintendo wasn't paying attention)

tepples wrote:Was the NES cheaper even after you figure in the cost of games?

Weren't games expensive in general regardless of the platform? Pretty much all software was priced extremely high no matter what it was.

PC games are generally cheaper than console games, which is true then and true now. People could copy their cassettes and distribute them free of charge, and even if you wanted to buy a C64 game, they were rather cheap also. And just like today, the C64 was much more expensive to buy, wasn't it something like $600 at launch? That would get you an NES ($200) as well as eight other games (8*50 = 400), or a Deluxe NES ($250) with seven games, as well as a toy robot and a light gun.

How exactly was the SMS fault tolerant? I'm honestly curious, I reckon a high complexity machine would require as few faults as possible to even operate. And part of the reason why the SMS tanked was because it was handled by Tonka. I'm certain that Sega would've done a "Sega does what Nintendon't" if they did it themselves, but there was really nothing to hold it up. Two years is a long time, and that was enough to get companies on board to make games. Nintendo's exclusivity contract prevented companies from making games for other consoles for two years, and even without it, there's a good chance no one was willing to risk developing for the SMS.

OneCrudeDude wrote:The SMS would've seen more success since it could handle graphics a little better

What do you mean? Some graphical aspects were better on the NES (like sprite flipping, sprite priority, the possibility of bankswitching CHR), but the SMS was better in other aspects (higher color depth, background flipping, background priority, built-in scanline counter), so you can't really say it was inferior to the NES. If anything, the higher color depth could make games look much closer to those of 16-bit consoles, something impossible to do on the NES no matter how good artists were.

but it would've been curtailed by it's relatively inflexible sound processor.

Does the average player care about that, though? I'm completely clueless when it comes to music/sound, and to me the SMS sounds just fine. To this day I remember several cool melodies of games I used to play, and it never occurred to me that they were technically inferior to the sounds produced by an NES. I think melodies always made a bigger impression on me than how the actual instruments sounded. As long as the melodies were catchy and memorable, I didn't care if they were made with blips and blops or 44KHz 16-bit samples.

About prices.

Here in Sweden you could buy "budget" C64 games on cassette tape for about 50 SEK (about 7 USD in todays exchange rate) during the late eighties/early ninethies, "full price" games cost about 100-250SEK when I looked in a 1990:s computer magazine.

NES/SMS games was usually 2-3 times more expensive than the "full price" C64-games. And you could get 6-8 budget games for the price of one NES/SMS game. However, many times the NES/SMS games were 6-8 better than the budget games aswell

Also, in 86-90 when I think most people bought their 8-bit system here, the price difference between a C64 and a NES or SMS was not that big, perhaps the C64 was a little bit more expensive but definitely not twice the price. My guess would be you could get a NES with 1 or 2 games for the price of a C64. However, if you wanted a diskdrive aswell a C64 was definitely more pricey.

Anyway, I don't think hardware capabilities are all that important in the big scheme of things, it's the games that are. And when it comes to games, I definitely think the NES is the winner of the 8-bit wars. It's game library is huge and there are lots and lots of quality games in there.

I grew up with a C64 and later a SMS and I love both systems. I think the C64 had better sound and the SMS had better graphics than the NES! Still I play way more NES nowadays.

OneCrudeDude wrote:How exactly was the SMS fault tolerant? I'm honestly curious, I reckon a high complexity machine would require as few faults as possible to even operate.

The PPU in the NES is a horrible buggy mess where if you don't write things at the exact moment or don't do things exactly as intended (e.g. OAM getting trashed) it will break down really hard. With the VDP in the SMS the worst that could happen was writes not going into video memory during active scan (and even then you could cram a byte each scanline), and there are settings that couldn't be changed mid-screen but would take effect in the next frame anyway (vscroll). Also not needing to resort to raster effects to make a window HUD helps (the VDP allows disabling scrolling in certain areas of the screen).

OneCrudeDude wrote:Nintendo's exclusivity contract prevented companies from making games for other consoles for two years, and even without it, there's a good chance no one was willing to risk developing for the SMS.

I was thinking about this and it's even worse for Sega actually: during the SG-1000 era Sega made every game (any third party games were ports handled by Sega), and if I recall correctly this stayed true during the early SMS days too. In other words, Sega would also be screwed by not allowing third parties into their console in the first place.

Then again I think Nintendo was the first manufacturer to allow third parties to program for their console directly... the Atari 2600 had third party games but Atari never gave permission for that (they even sued for it).

Sik wrote:The PPU in the NES is a horrible buggy mess where if you don't write things at the exact moment or don't do things exactly as intended (e.g. OAM getting trashed) it will break down really hard.

Ah, yes, the "because it's better documented it must be worse" fallacy.
We call that sampling error, by the way.

The only show-stopper in the entire set of our Errata is the DPCM-induced duplicate reads glitch, because everything else fails fast.

Sik wrote: I was thinking about this and it's even worse for Sega actually: during the SG-1000 era Sega made every game (any third party games were ports handled by Sega), and if I recall correctly this stayed true during the early SMS days too. In other words, Sega would also be screwed by not allowing third parties into their console in the first place.

This actually continued until the early Genesis; some of the Genesis' pride and joy games (Strider, GnG, and Truxton) were ports handled by Sega themselves. I'm certain there are other third party games that had to be ported by Sega themselves. I'm certain anything with "Reprogrammed game © Sega" was handled in-house.

OneCrudeDude wrote: How exactly was the SMS fault tolerant? I'm honestly curious, I reckon a high complexity machine would require as few faults as possible to even operate. And part of the reason why the SMS tanked was because it was handled by Tonka. I'm certain that Sega would've done a "Sega does what Nintendon't" if they did it themselves, but there was really nothing to hold it up.

You might be interested in the book Console Wars, though it's mostly about the later days of the Genesis. I got the impression that Sega of Japan was strongly opposed to criticizing Nintendo directly, Sega of America sorta forced them into it by taking an "ask for forgiveness, instead of permission" approach.

Regarding Yamaha's sound chips, from reading Atari's internal emails I learned that their purchasing contract with Yamaha didn't allow them to use their parts in consumer equipment, just arcade games. I don't know how long that policy lasted, and if it was specific to the YM2151, or their FM stuff in general, but it did make me wonder if Sega and others had run into similar restrictions.

From the same source too, after reading about the Atari AMY sound chip, I found it very disappointing that it was never used at all. It was a digital additive synth with 8 channels, 64 oscillators, and 72 envelope generators. It would have been a very capable sound chip, for sample compression (kinda like MP3 decoding) and synth sounds.

Well, in the case of Sega, Yamaha made their custom ICs so I guess they probably had less restrictions to cope up with as a side-effect.

But yeah, the licensing restrictions were kind of annoying. Supposedly Yamaha had given an exclusive license for their chips on the Adlib sound card and other sound cards couldn't use it in the US. Creative Labs worked around it by covering the Yamaha chips so they couldn't be easily detected (and crushed Adlib in the process). (trying to get a source URL for this one but Google is not helping)

tokumaru wrote: Does the average player care about that, though? I'm completely clueless when it comes to music/sound, and to me the SMS sounds just fine. To this day I remember several cool melodies of games I used to play, and it never occurred to me that they were technically inferior to the sounds produced by an NES. I think melodies always made a bigger impression on me than how the actual instruments sounded. As long as the melodies were catchy and memorable, I didn't care if they were made with blips and blops or 44KHz 16-bit samples.

Probably back then, no, but I reckon the NES (and other consoles, such as the C64 and Game Boy) was partially responsible for 'video game music' being an art and not an afterthought. That might also be the case because the NES (and Nintendo) strangled all other options, not unlike how Sony has made Nintendo utterly irrelevant in the home console market since the mid-90s. That said, what if the SMS was more successful, would Mega Man's music be nearly as iconic with the SMS' hardware? What about Contra's intro jingle? The dreaded moon theme from Duck Tales? The SMS, to my knowledge, isn't as gifted when it comes to DPCM playback, so there would be no Sunsoft basslines or those crazy drums in Konami games.

Sonic 2 (Game Gear) Underground Zone is pretty d*mn iconic. Sonic 1 (Game Gear) Bridge Zone was so iconic that Janet Jackson allegedly used it as the basis for "Together Again".

I seem to remember a lot of later SMS games using pitched looped noise for bass lines to circumvent the SN76489 family's 110 Hz minimum square wave frequency.

I think it was an important factor that the NES had graphics capabilities that were competitive for the time, but it was not really important that they be the best. The important thing was that the hardware was versatile and usable enough to make good games, and that the NES had a lot of good games.

Capable developers can make a good game with whatever set of limitations you throw at them. I think Nintendo was able to attract good developers to work on the NES, partly by policy/business arrangment, but also partly by establishing a high enough level of quality in their first-party publishing.


I think the NES was able to stand out strongly from the previous generation, so in this sense the hardware was important. It had to justify buying a new system, especially after how dismal the market had become after the meteoric rise and fall of the 2600. In this respect I think the deliberate support for one-directional scrolling made the largest impact. At the time of launch, hardware good enough to distinguish from the past was a big deal, but contemporary competition soon reduced this to a requirement rather than a standout feature.

The APU of the NES I would say is an accidental success. The design is really clunky, with several features that turned out to be near-useless, and I don't think initial games did much to make it stand out from the competitor's sound hardware. After a few years, though, NES games really put it to great use. I do think that it was quite distinguished at that point against the 3-square PSG or AY.


I got an SMS at the end of 1988, I believe, at which point is was considerably cheaper than the NES, despite being a newer system and probably more costly to make, it was failing enough against the NES that its price went way down.

rainwarrior wrote: The APU of the NES I would say is an accidental success. The design is really clunky, with several features that turned out to be near-useless, and I don't think initial games did much to make it stand out from the competitor's sound hardware. After a few years, though, NES games really put it to great use. I do think that it was quite distinguished at that point against the 3-square PSG or AY.

I have to agree with that. You were not "supposed" to update the registers every frame, but only every note, that is why there is the useless decay units (this is easy and more versatile to do by software) and the useless lenght counters (again, easy to do by software).
The most ridiculous of all is the triangle channel having 2 length counters.

At least the sweep unit is useful because it can update faster than 60Hz.

Also it seems the early games simply does not play music and sound effects at the same time (at least not on the same channel), this idea only came later.

How the APU was better and better used over time is absolutely fascinating. Apparently Mega Man 1 is one of the first games that feature vibrato, and then everyone started to use them, because it sounds much better with them.

I must also say the sound of the SMS is clearly inferior to me. The fact they are stuck at 50% duty cycle and can't go too low in frequency really kills the change to get music you actually enjoy listening.

The Triangle channel on the NES might be the channel with less features, but hironically it's my favourite one. I just love this channel Probably because it's sound is so distinctive on the NES. Square waves and white noise is a common denominator of all PSGs in the world, triangle is also common but the NES' triangle really has it's specific sound.

tepples wrote:I seem to remember a lot of later SMS games using pitched looped noise for bass lines to circumvent the SN76489 family's 110 Hz minimum square wave frequency.

For my own curiosity, I looked this up: it apparently disabled the XOR behavior of the LFSR, only clocking in the MSB, turning it into a fixed 15- or 16- step sequence (depending on the exact PSG IC used)... so effectively an "extra" ×15 or ×16 for the period.

Yeah, the lack of bass on the SMS PSG is a big problem for it. The periodic noise thing did help a little, but it's got a tinny TIA-esque sound to it, and also can't be used at the same time as regular noise, obviously. As was said, it didn't get used much until later, and still then not very often.

The AY had a similarly weird to use bass available through the envelope unit, though there's some really kooky sounds you can get through various available combinations of tone/noise/envelope. At least the squares could go low enough to make a nice normal bass though, so you didn't have to abuse/use the envelope at all.

The NES triangle is also hard to use since it didn't have a deliberate volume control, but it really does make a good orchestration in combination with the other channels. It has the ability to blend with the others in a natural way when used well, which I can't really say for the PSG's periodic noise bass, or the AY envelope.

I kinda wondered if some of the motivation for including the triangle was so that dull-timbre sounds like the ones in pac-man would be easy to imitate. The 2x wavelength thing does make it seem designed with bass in mind, though.