What would you change about the NES?

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Nikku4211
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Nikku4211 »

Dwedit wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 7:33 pm Would get annoying typing LOAD "*",8,1 all the time...
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Ben Boldt
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Ben Boldt »

I think we have to consider tradeoffs with this. You can easily add all sorts of cool features that make it cost too much. Ultimately, Nintendo need to make as much profit as possible and still meet a reasonable timeframe. The great ones are "for free", like bugfixes, this instead of that, etc.

What types of things could have made the NES/Famicom more competitive (if any)? Would a better NES have sacrificed future sales of SNES? Heck, the NES didn't have a whole lot of competition. Maybe they should have made it worse and cheaper to get a bigger base and drive up the SNES? But a worse NES would hold back Nintendo technologically and maybe they would be less capable to make the SNES... Things to think about. The stars aligned pretty well; I don't think I would risk touching how it played out.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Pokun »

Yeah well it's hard to make the most successful console better (besides even just fixing some PPU bug might affect the stars and fate and stuff). I guess we would have to look into markets were it did not win, such as South America and certain parts of Europe, and see what Nintendo did wrong there. I have a feeling that hardware specs don't play a big role here though, rather marketing and timing does.

Like Tokumaru I think the topic question is a bit too unrealistic to answer normally. Why would the world progress exactly the same again after an apocalypse and all we would do was to make minor changes to the Famicom to make it better?
I interpret the question more something like this: "If you were to time travel back to the early '80s and get an important role in the Famicom design team, what design decisions would you want to push?".

Marscaleb wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 6:31 pm
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.
No, an increased resolution would require a faster PPU or something (increased cost), it's unrelated to nametable size. By bigger nametable I mean that the nametable is slightly bigger than the "TV" both vertically and horizontally. It's just rearranging the position of things, it does not increase anything so there's probably no increased cost. You just need a few extra rows and columns outside of screen that can be updated before they become visible when scrolling into them, and by keep updating them you can scroll forever in any direction without a seam. Having a whole extra nametable like the real NES has, is wasteful and since it can only be placed horizontally or vertically it causes a visible seam when scrolling in the axis where there is no nametable. I think the PPU was designed with scrolling either horizontally or vertically in mind, not both at the same time as SMB3 does.

Also regarding expandability of the cartridge slot, it already has pretty good expansion. The Famicom already has audio expansion in the cart slot (and so does the Game Boy and the SNES, though these were not used as much as the Famicom's) and the NES adds it plus more stuff in the bottom expansion port. I would merge both systems into one so you would have expansion audio in the cartridge slot and a larger NES-like expansion port for other peripherals. There would be no need for the Famicom DA-15 expansion port and controllers would have their own ports like on NES and AV Famicom. The best of two worlds.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

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Pokun wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 4:46 pmI guess we would have to look into markets were it did not win, such as South America

NES clones were very popular in South America. In my experience (knowing dozens of families that owned a console at the time), NES clones were in higher numbers than Master Systems. It is misinformation that the NES failed here just because it wasn't brought in officially. We only started getting famiclones in around 89-90 though, which generated some weird side effects. Some games that are popular in the US were never heard of here. I don't understand the appeal of Blaster Master or Guardian Legend, but they seem to be really important somehow. We did get most of the classics like Contra and Megaman, but Tengen and Micronics games were also widespread.

So, if I could change anything it would be for Nintendo to bring the NES to South America in 1985 officially. :beer:
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by tokumaru »

Pokun wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 4:46 pmI guess we would have to look into markets were it did not win, such as South America
What they did wrong was not having any official presence whatsoever. Even today Nintendo cares very little about Brazil, not even subtitling games in Portuguese, something that costs very little to do nowadays and nearly every other game developer does.

Like nesrocks said, the story of Nintendo losing the 8-bit war to Sega in Brazil is a little exaggerated... Nintendo obviously could never win a war they didn't even bother showing up to fight! But NES games found their way into the homes of Brazilian gamers anyway (sometimes imported, but more often pirated), and NES titles were just as well known as Sega's offerings. In my own experience visiting other kids, Famiclones were just as common as Master Systems, possibly even more common, considering that there were so many different models to choose from and the fact that pirate releases probably cost less than the officially licensed stuff TecToy was selling. So while Nintendo did officially lose in the business sense, that doesn't mean that gamers did not get the Nintendo experience anyway.
I interpret the question more something like this: "If you were to time travel back to the early '80s and get an important role in the Famicom design team, what design decisions would you want to push?".
That does make more sense than the originally proposed scenario!
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

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Ben Boldt wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 11:16 am I think we have to consider tradeoffs with this. You can easily add all sorts of cool features that make it cost too much. Ultimately, Nintendo need to make as much profit as possible and still meet a reasonable timeframe. The great ones are "for free", like bugfixes, this instead of that, etc.
Okay, then make the NES a ZX-81 then. That thing was made to be cheap.
nesrocks wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 6:52 pm We did get most of the classics like Contra and Megaman
And Super Pitfall?
tokumaru wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 8:46 pm Even today Nintendo cares very little about Brazil, not even subtitling games in Portuguese, something that costs very little to do nowadays and nearly every other game developer does.
M8 not sure the people in Brazil can understand Google Translate-nese that well.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Marscaleb »

Ben Boldt wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 11:16 am What types of things could have made the NES/Famicom more competitive (if any)? Would a better NES have sacrificed future sales of SNES? Heck, the NES didn't have a whole lot of competition. Maybe they should have made it worse and cheaper to get a bigger base and drive up the SNES? But a worse NES would hold back Nintendo technologically and maybe they would be less capable to make the SNES... Things to think about. The stars aligned pretty well; I don't think I would risk touching how it played out.
This is why I phrased the scenario as "rebuilding" rather than time-travel. If you went back in time to the 80's there's too much that you could just screw up.

And honestly, I never really was thinking of this as an apocalyptic scenario. Honestly I was thinking of it as a "new world," so maybe we move to a new planet or different dimension, but are unable to bring a full collection of machinery and tools, or that trade with the old world is sparse/difficult enough that the only time someone brings a modern computer it has to go to something far more critical like hospitals or something.
Thus, we could have a full knowledge of computers, but not the full resources to build them, thus requiring the development of manufacturing from the ground up.

IIRC, the thought I first had that got me thinking about this was a world where everyone was living a second life with full memories of their first one, and so if you happened in this new world that was now developing 80's era computers and you could tell people "Hey guys, I know about something REALLY great here..."

But those specifics are really all secondary.

On the subject of developing with later systems in mind though, honestly I would be more interested in advancing the SNES sufficiently that we could extend its life out an extra year or two, just so that we could hold out on the N64 a little later to make it a little more powerful, because - well, the visuals in that era were TERRIBLE. But man oh man, they could have been SO much better with just marginally higher polygon counts. Like, just compare Quake (which came out the day before the N64) to Quake 2. Imagine the 64 bumping itself up by that degree.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

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Marscaleb wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 11:28 pmOn the subject of developing with later systems in mind though, honestly I would be more interested in advancing the SNES sufficiently that we could extend its life out an extra year or two, just so that we could hold out on the N64 a little later to make it a little more powerful, because - well, the visuals in that era were TERRIBLE. But man oh man, they could have been SO much better with just marginally higher polygon counts. Like, just compare Quake (which came out the day before the N64) to Quake 2. Imagine the 64 bumping itself up by that degree.
On the subject of improving the N64, it might have been enough just to fix the memory controller. In fact, it seems they nearly did.

If I'm not mistaken, it should have been possible for the different chips to all access different banks of RAM without significant latency, which would have allowed developers to freely allocate the enormous bandwidth of the RDRAM according to the needs of the game. For instance, in theory, the Z-buffer should have been basically free when blending 36-bit pixels in two-cycle mode (31.25 Mpix/s, allows multitexturing and fog), with plenty of bandwidth left on the table even with the RDP at full throttle. In fact, even in one-cycle mode (62.5 Mpix/s), the memory bandwidth was theoretically sufficient for continuous read/write of an 18-bit framebuffer and Z-buffer, although any other chip accesses (CPU, RSP, VI) would slow it down.

But it didn't work properly, and so we get 64-cycle CPU cache misses, dithered 18-bit framebuffers everywhere, and the fact that the easiest way to roughly double the fill rate is to turn the Z-buffer off.

...

Then there's that tiny oversight I can't shut up about - the fact that the blender wasn't clamped, making the additive blend mode virtually useless. They figured (the manual says this) that since an alpha blend can't overflow if the inputs are clamped, there was no point to the extra circuitry. I guess they realized too late that alpha can't do everything, and threw in an additive blend mode as a half-baked afterthought... perhaps if they'd done that extra hardware spin, they'd have fixed this too...

I don't think the 4 KB TMEM was nearly the problem everyone makes it out to be. Sure, it doesn't let you fit a whole wall texture from Doom into the cache, but with the memory latency problem solved it's not prohibitively difficult to work around that if you really want to. Besides, it's easily the most expensive flaw to fix, other than the lack of a CD drive (which is arguably not a flaw as such, and is probably also the main reason the N64 was $100 cheaper than the PSX at launch).
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

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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 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.
What screen resolution are you thinking of?
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Pokun »

The NES screen resolution is fixed to 256x240 dot of course.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by DRW »

My improvement suggestion: Have the name tables be 256 pixels high instead of 240, so that you don’t have unused color attributes and there is no invalid vertical scrolling position range.
Also it would make calculations easier, like when you try to map absolute y pixel positions to the corresponding tile position. Dividing by 256 or 16 just works better than 240 and 15.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

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Not enough hookers and blackjack.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Dwedit »

I don't know, would Bender work with a 2A03, or does he need Decimal Mode?
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by Pokun »

Probably, he only has 6 fingers.


DRW wrote: Sun Mar 06, 2022 3:07 am My improvement suggestion: Have the name tables be 256 pixels high instead of 240, so that you don’t have unused color attributes and there is no invalid vertical scrolling position range.
Also it would make calculations easier, like when you try to map absolute y pixel positions to the corresponding tile position. Dividing by 256 or 16 just works better than 240 and 15.
Kind of similar to my suggestion, though I'd want it wider as well. But to make sure that the nametable size is that of an integer number of attribute elements is also a good point. If the nametable is 36x32 characters it would be exactly 9x8 attribute elements large. 4 character columns and 2 character rows would be outside of screen, which is enough for the commonly used 16x16 dot metatile size. VRAM would only need to be 1152 byte nametable + 72 byte attribute-table for a total of 1224 byte VRAM. I'm not sure how much cost saving this is though since it might need a custom ASIC for this kind of non-standard RAM size, unless part of the VRAM chip can be shared with other things, like the palette.
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Re: What would you change about the NES?

Post by dink »

I think they [Nindendo, Ricoh] did great back in '83, and, all things considering - I'd leave everything just as it is.

best regards,
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