Masayuki Uemura, designer of the NES (and SNES), has died, age 78

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OneCrudeDude
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Masayuki Uemura, designer of the NES (and SNES), has died, age 78

Post by OneCrudeDude »

ImageI figured this should be an appropriate place share this, considering the forum.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/new ... ed-age-78/

I wonder if he was aware of the enduring legacy his consoles provided.
strat
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Re: Masayuki Uemura, designer of the NES (and SNES), has died, age 78

Post by strat »

He probably was.

Thank you, Mr. Uemura. So many wonderful games were possible because of your work.
Pokun
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Re: Masayuki Uemura, designer of the NES (and SNES), has died, age 78

Post by Pokun »

Yeah he should be, about 50% of Japan's households had a Famicom, it was a similar situation in Sweden and I guess North America wasn't too far behind.
Rest in peace Uemura.
NewRisingSun
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Re: Masayuki Uemura, designer of the NES (and SNES), has died, age 78

Post by NewRisingSun »

What exactly did he design: the looks of the console, the technical specifications, the CPU+APU or PPU LSIs, a combination of these?
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Ben Boldt
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Re: Masayuki Uemura, designer of the NES (and SNES), has died, age 78

Post by Ben Boldt »

I think it is sad that someone so important to the history of Nintendo has passed away. But at the same time, it requires a whole team of engineers to design something so complex, as NewRisingSun pointed out. There were ASICs being designed, PCBs laid out, mechanicals of the console, cartridges, controllers, marketing, software, testing, management, h.r.…

While recognizing that someone important has left us, let’s not let that undermine the large group effort that was inevitably necessary to create the Famicom. We should understand exactly what he did so we can appropriately credit him where it is due.
Pokun
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Re: Masayuki Uemura, designer of the NES (and SNES), has died, age 78

Post by Pokun »

As I understands it, Uemura was the boss of R&D2 (Gunpei Yokoi was boss of R&D1), and Yamauchi pitched the mission for developing the Famicom to Uemura's R&D2 as they didn't have any work to do and R&D1 was probably busy with Game & Watch (which is why they had stolen most of the R&D2 crew).

This article details how Uemura's team developed the Radar Scope hardware based on ideas used in Namco's Galaxian (like the sprite hardware) and which is, as we all know, the same hardware used in Donkey Kong, which was (along with the Coleco Vision) used as a base for the Famicom.
Also there is a video interview somewhere with Uemura where he among other things points out the importance of the EJECT lever mechanism. It wasn't strictly needed, as you can just yank the cartridge, but he wanted it because it was supposed to have the feel of a toy.

According to Wikipedia it was supposed to be called "Gamecom" at first but Uemura's wife came up with the idea of "Famicom". "Personal Computer" and "Home Computer" were common terms, but "Family Computer" was not yet taken so it was perfect for a TV-game system that could be enjoyed from the kotatsu. But this interview with Uemura suggests that he coined the name "Family Computer" himself. His wife suggested to use the abbreviation "Famicom" which is what everyone would call it in the end anyway, but according to the same interview Yamauchi rejected the abbreviation. I'm not really sure if that is true though, because we now know that Sharp owned that name for their Family Convection Oven. That also explains why Sharp's Famicom variants uses the abbreviation while Nintendo themselves went with the full name for a long time.

In other words I think it's quite safe to assume that Uemura and his team was responsible for the internal hardware, the outward design and even naming the system.
Yamauchi also contributed to its outward red & white design. Uemura said in the above interview that the deep red used was Yamauchi's favorite color and he wore a muffler in that color (so it was not, according to Uemura, because red was cheap as previously believed).

The linked interview in the top post says that Uemura designed the Zapper, but other sources claims that the light-gun was made by Yokoi's R&D1 department and the Zapper ray-gun redesign was made by NOA's Lance Barr, so I'm not sure where they got that idea from.
Uemura's team seems to be responsible for the NES redesign though (again I assume both internally and outward appearance), and also the Famicom Disk system and the SFC/SNES.
strat
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Re: Masayuki Uemura, designer of the NES (and SNES), has died, age 78

Post by strat »

What exactly did he design: the looks of the console, the technical specifications, the CPU+APU or PPU LSIs, a combination of these?
Going by this YT interview and the GlitterBerri article, it looks like he spec'd the system and Ricoh did the 2A03 and PPU chip designs (there's a 45 min. interview with Mr. Uemura on YT but I'll get to it later).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbL9OFlxwV8
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Ben Boldt
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Re: Masayuki Uemura, designer of the NES (and SNES), has died, age 78

Post by Ben Boldt »

Would an original spec like that be available somewhere? It would be cool to see it. Maybe someone in the know would be willing to share it; in his memory.
Pokun
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Re: Masayuki Uemura, designer of the NES (and SNES), has died, age 78

Post by Pokun »

Yeah well Nintendo couldn't manufacture ASICs on their own so they hired Ricoh. I understood it that they designed the chips together but of course Ricoh was the ones with the required equipment to make it. Ricoh supposedly came up with the idea to use the 6502 as CPU core because they had a license for it (according to an Iwata Asks), and Nintendo eventually agreed because they realized it would make it harder for other companies to produce games for it (and avoid another Atari game market crash due to shovelware).

There are official hardware documents for usage of the CPU, PPU and some mappers (which all matches final specs), but I haven't heard of any documents describing under the hood. There are decaps though.
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