You're right: many of TecToy's Brazil-exclusive Master System games were tweaked versions of Game Gear releases. That includes games like Ecco 2, Mortal Kombat 3 and Sonic Blast, but not the aforementioned Street…
I don't know if they even had an emulator at the time - I don't think a 1980s PC could run a NES emulator at a reasonable speed. Another possibility is that they used a hardware device. Perhaps something that watches…
> On execution, 16-bit Thumb instructions are transparently decompressed to full 32-bit ARM instructions in real time, without performance loss. That quote is from the ARM7TDMI manual - the CPU used in the Game Boy…
Throughout the entire NES game library, almost no games use these illegal opcodes. Apparently as part of the licensing process, Nintendo would verify that games only used the official instructions. I wonder how they…
> Link's Awakening feels like it shouldn't be possible in a single megabyte of mask ROM Half a megabyte, even! (For the original monochrome game - the later color version is a full megabyte.)
220uF is correct. Along with the 75Ω terminating resistor inside the TV, that forms a high-pass filter with a cutoff frequency of ~10Hz.
> no instruction timing chart? Instruction timings are in the pink table on the left-hand side. For example, `ADC HL, BC; ED4A; H15` means that the instruction affects the flags as in row H and takes 15 cycles to…
According to [0], about 1.2 kg (2.6 lbs). Surprisingly this is mostly in the neck and funnel of the tube - the screen itself uses different metals because lead would affect its optical performance. [0]…
Yes, the aperture grille (hundreds of wires and a metal frame holding them in tension) is itself heavier than a traditional shadow mask. However, aperture grilles also use differently-shaped glass from shadow masks. The…
AFAIK the French NES is just a PAL console with an added composite-to-RGB converter. Although it outputs RGB signals, the quality is no better than composite.
> A megabyte of ram on a machine with only a 16 bit address space gets a bit silly. Do you really want to manage 16 memory pages? The Game Boy Color has a 16-bit address space and almost all its games are 1MB or larger…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperGun
The Game Boy is much more similar to the Sega Master System & Game Gear than to the NES. Some games (e.g. Lemmings 2, Pinball Dreams, Spirou) were developed for both handhelds (or even for all 3 platforms) using a…
> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices. True, but there was a huge difference between a good-quality RGB monitor and a consumer TV connected via composite…
> The NES didn't have a framebuffer either The NES does have two nametables that perform a similar role, though. Instead of storing a 256x240 array of pixels, they store a 32x20 array of tile indices, each describing an…
I assume the suggestion isn't that Nintendo should give the games away. Just that if you buy a game on the Switch you shouldn't have to buy it again when you upgrade to their next console.
That's right. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
"The DMA registers [...] run the full CPU 3.6Mhz speed. [...] I put a 32 byte function that would draw a scanline of polygon data in there." The SNES supports SlowROM and FastROM but, interestingly, its internal memory…
Portable consoles haven't gone anywhere - Nintendo is releasing a new one in just 10 days! Other manufacturers may have stopped building them, but that's because (with the exception of Sony's PSP) Nintendo's handhelds…
That's another interesting thing about the Lynx - it has so much RAM compared to other 8-bit game systems (the Game Boy, Master System, Game Gear and PC Engine all have 8KB, the NES has just 2KB). Those other systems…
> According to Epyx, Sega still got it wrong and produced a crappy design in comparison. To be fair, the Lynx was a far more capable system. Making the Game Gear more-or-less a portable Master System was probably the…
> Not only could it display in color, but it also supported scaling and rotation effects. IIRC the Lynx was designed at a time (1986-87) when this was feasible for portable systems but not for consoles, because of its…
There is a Game Genie code decoder/encoder here: http://www.smspower.org/maxim/forumstuff/gamegenie.html (This was designed for the Sega Game Gear version, but the Game Boy algorithm is the same.)
You're right: many of TecToy's Brazil-exclusive Master System games were tweaked versions of Game Gear releases. That includes games like Ecco 2, Mortal Kombat 3 and Sonic Blast, but not the aforementioned Street…
I don't know if they even had an emulator at the time - I don't think a 1980s PC could run a NES emulator at a reasonable speed. Another possibility is that they used a hardware device. Perhaps something that watches…
> On execution, 16-bit Thumb instructions are transparently decompressed to full 32-bit ARM instructions in real time, without performance loss. That quote is from the ARM7TDMI manual - the CPU used in the Game Boy…
Throughout the entire NES game library, almost no games use these illegal opcodes. Apparently as part of the licensing process, Nintendo would verify that games only used the official instructions. I wonder how they…
> Link's Awakening feels like it shouldn't be possible in a single megabyte of mask ROM Half a megabyte, even! (For the original monochrome game - the later color version is a full megabyte.)
220uF is correct. Along with the 75Ω terminating resistor inside the TV, that forms a high-pass filter with a cutoff frequency of ~10Hz.
> no instruction timing chart? Instruction timings are in the pink table on the left-hand side. For example, `ADC HL, BC; ED4A; H15` means that the instruction affects the flags as in row H and takes 15 cycles to…
According to [0], about 1.2 kg (2.6 lbs). Surprisingly this is mostly in the neck and funnel of the tube - the screen itself uses different metals because lead would affect its optical performance. [0]…
Yes, the aperture grille (hundreds of wires and a metal frame holding them in tension) is itself heavier than a traditional shadow mask. However, aperture grilles also use differently-shaped glass from shadow masks. The…
AFAIK the French NES is just a PAL console with an added composite-to-RGB converter. Although it outputs RGB signals, the quality is no better than composite.
> A megabyte of ram on a machine with only a 16 bit address space gets a bit silly. Do you really want to manage 16 memory pages? The Game Boy Color has a 16-bit address space and almost all its games are 1MB or larger…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperGun
The Game Boy is much more similar to the Sega Master System & Game Gear than to the NES. Some games (e.g. Lemmings 2, Pinball Dreams, Spirou) were developed for both handhelds (or even for all 3 platforms) using a…
> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices. True, but there was a huge difference between a good-quality RGB monitor and a consumer TV connected via composite…
> The NES didn't have a framebuffer either The NES does have two nametables that perform a similar role, though. Instead of storing a 256x240 array of pixels, they store a 32x20 array of tile indices, each describing an…
I assume the suggestion isn't that Nintendo should give the games away. Just that if you buy a game on the Switch you shouldn't have to buy it again when you upgrade to their next console.
That's right. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
"The DMA registers [...] run the full CPU 3.6Mhz speed. [...] I put a 32 byte function that would draw a scanline of polygon data in there." The SNES supports SlowROM and FastROM but, interestingly, its internal memory…
Portable consoles haven't gone anywhere - Nintendo is releasing a new one in just 10 days! Other manufacturers may have stopped building them, but that's because (with the exception of Sony's PSP) Nintendo's handhelds…
That's another interesting thing about the Lynx - it has so much RAM compared to other 8-bit game systems (the Game Boy, Master System, Game Gear and PC Engine all have 8KB, the NES has just 2KB). Those other systems…
> According to Epyx, Sega still got it wrong and produced a crappy design in comparison. To be fair, the Lynx was a far more capable system. Making the Game Gear more-or-less a portable Master System was probably the…
> Not only could it display in color, but it also supported scaling and rotation effects. IIRC the Lynx was designed at a time (1986-87) when this was feasible for portable systems but not for consoles, because of its…
There is a Game Genie code decoder/encoder here: http://www.smspower.org/maxim/forumstuff/gamegenie.html (This was designed for the Sega Game Gear version, but the Game Boy algorithm is the same.)