What would you change about the NES?

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Marscaleb
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What would you change about the NES?

Post by Marscaleb »

Food for thought.
Let's say we moved to a new world and had to start over, keeping our knowledge but having to build infrastructure from the ground up.
And now we're at the point technologically where we can build the NES again, or rather, a new console about the same level as the NES.

What changes would you want to make to the (new) NES?

Bearing in mind that you can have your modern flawless understanding of where technology and trends will go, but not such that you could devise advanced tech that couldn't be reasonably manufactured in the 80's.
What kind of changes would you flat-out demand? What kind of improvements do you feel would be worth increasing the console's cost or delaying its release? Or perhaps the inverse, what you feel you could trim out just to bring it to the market sooner or cheaper?
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tokumaru
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by tokumaru »

To answer this I am mostly gonna ignore the apocalyptic scenario where we have to rebuild an entire world from scratch, seeing as video games would probably be pretty low on people's priority lists in that situation.

I'd say that the NES was pretty damn well engineered for the period during which it was designed... I don't think it had any significant flaws when it was first released. It was only when more powerful machines started showing up and games started becoming more complex that some aspects of the NES started to feel insufficient, but that happens to all consoles.

For me to feel more comfortable working with the NES, I would basically want more color (more palettes, finer background attributes) and more sprites per scanline. A little increase in CPU clock wouldn't hurt. Most other "problems" with the system can already be solved with mappers, with the addition of extra RAM, scanline counters, access to more PRG and CHR memory.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by NewRisingSun »

4 KiB VRAM by default. The hoops one has to jump through, with all that mirroring nonsense, just because memory prices in 1983 were so high that they deemed it necessary to save on 2 lousy KiB, even as they would go down after that.

Use an RGB-based palette format like the Sega Master System instead of that silly NTSC model that creates so much variation in the colors.

Allow for raw PCM playback via DMA, not just DPCM.

Make the X/Y position registers behave the same during rendering and during NMI, and most importantly, in a way that makes sense, not in the cranky fashion that the NES' actual 2005/2006 behave and that even original-era NES programmers did not fully understand.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Pokun »

If we are to follow the same specs to keep cost the same or lower I think I would keep the 2 kB VRAM but make a single nametable that is a bit larger than the visible screen like on the Game Boy. That way seamless scrolling could be done in all directions very easily and with better use of the VRAM. I suppose 2 kB is not even needed in this case, so it could be trimmed down to lower the cost, two birds with one stone. I would keep the ability for ROM cartridges to come with extra VRAM so that it can be used to swap in a second nametable for raster effects like the 1-screen scroll that the MMC1 can do, and the Game Boy also can do without mappers.

Sprites should not be blanked at Y=255, it should be possible to partly clip them on the top of the screen, but I would keep some way to fully blank a sprite though (like with a special Y-coordinate or whatever). The PC-Engine has a good method where the full sprite space is larger than the visible screen, so that sprites of all sizes can be partly clipped at all edges and even hidden in all corners. But that would require both sprite coordinates to be more than 8-bit and thus require more OAM, increasing both cost and usability.

Yes I would also use RGB-based colours if possible, and get rid of all those cloned or buggy colours (such as $0D).

I would fix those bugs with the sprite overflow flag and all the DPCM stuff. I guess that wouldn't make it come sooner or lower the cost though.

It should also have CVBS and RGB video output from the start. Also Famicom controller cables wouldn't be hardwired and have longer cables. Actually I would make the Famicom and NES identical so there would be no region problems. If I could redo television standards as well I would also scrap the whole NTSC and PAL nonsense, and there would only be one Famicom/NES to rule them all.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by lidnariq »

NewRisingSun wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 2:46 pm 4 KiB VRAM by default. The hoops one has to jump through, with all that mirroring nonsense, just because memory prices in 1983 were so high that they deemed it necessary to save on 2 lousy KiB, even as they would go down after that.
Historical prices were about $20 per 2KiB RAM in 1983. At the time, 4KiB SRAMs were more than twice that... the only realistic options are "only use DRAM" like the TMS9918, in which case a hybrid ROM/RAM model is impractical, or use not-more RAM.

In a historical contemporary way, the only way one could say "just put more RAM" is to say that they weren't allowed to design for cost, or that they weren't allowed to launch for another 18 months.

---

Even though it would largely defeat what gave the NES such staying power, I think I'd take a bunch of cards from the TMS9918/SMS. 16KiB of DRAM, 16 bits per nametable entry, but retain all the ways that 2C02 sprites are better.

Add something like the game boy's LY instead of sprite0 hit. Both backgrounds and foregrounds able to select from all eight palettes. Wider PPU data bus means there's plenty of time to sneak in PPU reads/writes during rendering.
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Dwedit
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Dwedit »

Change the memory map. So much wasted address space in there. If it's not the built-in 2K of ram, reserve 256 bytes for hardware registers, and expose the rest of the address space to the cartridge port. Basically a directly mapped 64K cartridge, minus 2.1k.
Simplify the APU, just volume, duty cycle, and period, nothing else. Also make the noise and DMC channels have a fully selectable period.
Make cartridge audio work.
Built-in countdown timer IRQ, none of that APU Frame IRQ nonsense.
Simplify PPU scrolling, all scrolling is relative to screen origin rather than where the raster happens to be at the time.
More than 4 rows of brightness, maybe 8 or 16 rows of brightness instead.
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Marscaleb
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Marscaleb »

Switch to a tape-based media. Make those damn kids learn some patience.

Ha ha, but seriously, for myself, there's only two major thoughts. I realize that the NES was already made more future-proof than basically any other console ever, what with how mappers and other chips directly integrated with the rendering hardware. I kind of wonder what could happen if more of the system was opened up to that kind of modding through a cartridge. Of course, it would make games more expensive to produce, because they'd need more custom hardware. And that said, I don't understand the hardware enough to know exactly what I'd want, but still, imagine a couple extra pins so that a cartridge's board could just directly access some more systems and enhance or even bypass the systems inside the machine. Want better sound? Have the audio pass through the cartridge before going out the system, and you can put on a custom chip to just replace the audio entirely, as long as you are willing to pay for it. Want more memory? More nametable? Just turn the whole system inside out and have everything connect to the game board. You can enhance anything you want!

...but I'm probably stepping past the realm of what is reasonable and showing some Dunning-Kruger effect here.

The second thing that comes to mind (and I understand with far more clarity) is that I'd love to expand the color palette. At the very least, fill out the full gamut of 64 colors to be a full 64 colors. Give four real shades of gray and some brown tones. But better yet, imagine being allowed to pick a custom palette that loads into system at startup. Even if it were locked to a single cartridge, that is, one game could only use 64 colors, but it could still pick which colors it wants for those 64 colors. With that one change, imagine how incredible and diverse the NES library could have been, visually.
Though really I can't fathom how that could be possible to lock the palette that way; I'm sure someone would devise a mapper-esque chip that would allow changing the palette during a blank period.
But just look at the Game Boy Color games; though granted they have more palettes available in the games, but it still shows what can be done with (sort-of) the same tile restrictions but with a full 15-bit color array.

Also I've never understood how it worked out that it was reasonable to have just 64 colors. Why would that be more reasonable than using a full byte to select a full 256 color palette? I thought the processor still has to process a full byte even if the data isn't using the full byte. What happens to the extra bits when the code only references 64 colors?
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Marscaleb
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Marscaleb »

Pokun wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 4:50 pm If we are to follow the same specs to keep cost the same or lower I think I would keep the 2 kB VRAM but make a single nametable that is a bit larger than the visible screen like on the Game Boy. That way seamless scrolling could be done in all directions very easily and with better use of the VRAM.
I was thinking about that earlier, and I began to wonder, if you had a larger nametable, wouldn't developers at the time just want to increased the displayed resolution to have a more defined image on the screen? The problems with the nametable not being quite large enough to fill the whole screen without bleeding is really only a problem we see today. On hardware of the time it wasn't an issue. I imagine most developers would rather have a wider resolution, like the Genesis.
Pokun wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 4:50 pm It should also have CVBS and RGB video output from the start. Also Famicom controller cables wouldn't be hardwired and have longer cables. Actually I would make the Famicom and NES identical so there would be no region problems. If I could redo television standards as well I would also scrap the whole NTSC and PAL nonsense, and there would only be one Famicom/NES to rule them all.
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NewRisingSun wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 2:46 pm 4 KiB VRAM by default. The hoops one has to jump through, with all that mirroring nonsense, just because memory prices in 1983 were so high that they deemed it necessary to save on 2 lousy KiB, even as they would go down after that.
Well for the scenario I described, there's no telling what an exact component could cost. When you go to build the system, memory could be cheaper, or it could be more expensive.

Also I realize that a "rules as written" for the scenario I described would probably mean that people would want internet connectivity on the new-NES. If people were aware of trends, they would want to start establishing that sooner.
Hmm, I wonder what component costs would be like in a world where people want to build a public internet sooner...
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Ben Boldt
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Ben Boldt »

I am sure some of these are repeats, sorry about that (I didn’t read all posts carefully).

Original Famicom:
AV outputs
Stereo audio
Positive center DC input
CPU A15 to the cartridge instead of PPU /A13
Logically combine built in controllers with expansion port
More DMC sample rates, correspond to music notes
Prevent DMA controller glitches
Triangle channel volume/envelopes
Built-in Namco-163 audio (that’s not too crazy is it?)
8x8 attribute native support, more color palettes
Sprite Zero-hit interrupt
Onebus (is that worse though?)
Combine cpu and PPU in 1 chip
Allow normal writing to OAM, palettes during raster


NES specific:
Normal board edge connector in NES instead of ZIF
Expansion audio to the cartridge
Same expansion port as Famicom


PAL NES:
Full speed cpu
Not cropped video
Pull-up resistors on controller ports
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Nikku4211
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Nikku4211 »

Give it integrated VRAM, 64k of WRAM, a keyboard, a tape drive that connects digitally, separate cables for luma and chroma, an advanced audio chip with 3 channels and ADSR, a disk operating system that comes with BASIC out-of-the-box(no need for an external cartridge), a floppy disk drive that utilises standard floppy disks, a user port, and support for bitmap layers.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Dwedit »

Nikku4211 wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 7:23 pm Give it integrated VRAM, 64k of WRAM, a keyboard, a tape drive that connects digitally, separate cables for luma and chroma, an advanced audio chip with 3 channels and ADSR, a disk operating system that comes with BASIC out-of-the-box(no need for an external cartridge), a floppy disk drive that utilises standard floppy disks, a user port, and support for bitmap layers.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by zzo38 »

Like some others, I would also want to have built-in BASIC (or possibly Forth), which is loaded if no cartridge is inserted. (Actually, even if making an entirely new one today, I would still want to include that.)

Another thing would be exposing the PPU EXT signals in the cartridge.

I would have the NES controller ports (including bit3 and bit4) and Famicom expansion port, both in the same system.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by NovaSquirrel »

I've always wished for the ability to DMA to $2007 instead of only $2004, like the VT02. I think it would've been really helpful even if it was always 256 bytes like OAM is - maybe the DMA register could have responded on both $4014 and $4015 and the bottom bit could've filled in two bits in the PPU register address.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by TmEE »

Having audio loopback in all regions would have been nice and enough VRAM to have no mirroring needs and attribs for every tile not just tile groups.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Oziphantom »

added a timer, a raster line counter with IRQ support, do what Commodore did with RAM and put at least 8K in knowing that it will get a lot cheaper during the life of the machine. Remove the microphone and you could easily afford this. Improve the sprite system so it can handle more than 64 pixels of sprites on a line, its just too small for anything practical.

And give it a 65C02 over a 6502 although they would have had to pay for it from day 1 and not try and rip of Commodore for years.
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