#### Back to index | # Info for nes

#### Nintendo Entertainment System / Famicom (1985 USA)

The Nintendo Entertainment System (called Famicom in Japan) was an instant hit with such popular
titles as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Excitebike. It was released to the states
in August, 1985. The 8-bit graphics were far superior to any-home based console that had come
before it. Strong sales were were driven by the gamers wanting the feeling of real-life arcade
games in their homes.
The NES boasts an impressive library of games with over 8000 games (Cowering goodnes), offering
a smorgasbord of titles for fans of every genre. The Nintendo continued it's reign with other
big hits such as The Mega Man series, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, Castlevania, Double Dragon and of
course, Super Mario Bros 3. The NES continued it's strong sales with over 36 million units sold
worldwide by its official cancellation in January 1996 but not before releasing a redesigned NES.

Usage:
Note that the one player hand controller Select is
mapped as Coin 1 (default key 5), and
Start is mapped as Player 1 Start (default key 1).
This makes it convenient to use the driver with a
"MAME" configured controller.
Famicom Disk System switching is mapped to Player 1
Button 3 (default key [space]).

Features:
Main Processor: 8bit NMOS 6502 CPU with a secondary PPU (Picture Processing Unit).
Clock Speed: 1.7897725MHz for NTSC and 1.773447MHz for the PAL version.
Data Path width: 8-bits
Color Palette: 256; 16 max on screen
Sprites: 64 (8x8 or 8x16)
Sound: FM with 5 sound channels (4 analog, 1 digital)
Video Ram: 16 Kbits
SPR-RAM: 256 Bytes
Rom addressing: 8k
Cart Size: 64k - 4 Megabit
Controls: 8 directional D-Pad, A, B, select, and start buttons.

Links:
Nintendo - www.nintendo.com
NES World - nesworld.parodius.com
The Warp Zone - www.classicgaming.com/thewarpzone

MESS Emulation State:
The NES driver should run most of the images currently out there with very little problem. It doesn't yet support the obscure one-game mappers used by many "pirate carts".
The NES driver has quite accurate sound and sample playback. For example, you can hear speech samples in Bayou Billy, Gauntlet, Dirty Harry, and Skate or Die that are not present in a few other NES emulators.
The main focus up until this point has been in getting the NES driver as accurate as possible. Unfortunately, the scanline rendering method is quite slow, so future efforts will be focusing on bringing up the speed.
Wanted: I'd appreciate any info on some of the more obscure mappers. If you have any of this, please drop me a line at bradman@pobox.com

Generated on Tue Jul 15 11:11:04 2003