NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Discuss hardware-related topics, such as development cartridges, CopyNES, PowerPak, EPROMs, or whatever.

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hackfresh
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by hackfresh »

rainwarrior wrote:http://kotaku.com/the-mini-nes-wont-ope ... 1783693116

So, basically this lowers my interest to zero.
Mine as well.
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thefox
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by thefox »

Myask wrote:I was surprised at StarTropics…which is MMC6, and US-only.
Not US-only.
koitsu wrote:
Myask wrote:I was surprised at StarTropics…which is MMC6, and US-only.
Does StarTropics use MMC6-specific features (talking about the 1KB of PRG-RAM internal to the chip)? If not, then MMC3 is sufficient. They're basically the same mapper except for that.
Of course it does, StarTropics 1 and 2 are the only games that use MMC6 after all. Probably Nintendo was trying to cut costs by not having to put a separate RAM chip on cart.
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Myask
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by Myask »

Both games on MMC6 (Startropics I/II) certainly use the PRG-RAM (to save). But they don't truly rely on any of the differences. So it'll be interesting to see if they implemented the protect registers as in MMC6.
Not US-only.
Oops. Misremembered the trivium about it (that it was never released in Japan).
Just because people have been asking: safe to say it can’t play old cartridges, right? (Based on the image it looks like an NES cartridge would have around the same width as the entire console.) Does it open up at all?
I was surprised that the PR guy didn't use the same answer for a third time there.
Probably Nintendo was trying to cut costs by not having to put a separate RAM chip on cart.
Problem with that idea is that Final Fantasy, Kirby's Adventure, Metroid, Startropics, The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link all save. oh wait you mean back in the day, not on this thing.

So who wants to guess whether iNES (or, as a longshot, NES 2.0) headers are going to be somewhere inside? (I would laugh for days if one had a DiskDude!…say, did that happen with any of the VC releases?)
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by Drew Sebastino »

hackfresh wrote:
rainwarrior wrote:http://kotaku.com/the-mini-nes-wont-ope ... 1783693116

So, basically this lowers my interest to zero.
Mine as well.
So basically, it's no better than this POS:

Image

Only Nintendo could get away with selling what is really just a Plug and Play console for $60. Damn it, Nintendo's biggest enemy is themselves. It's the higher up corporate people making all the dumb decisions that hurt the talented game developers underneath them. One of my favorite games from the last 5+ years (Splatoon) was made on their least successful console (Wii U), which was so because the businessmen that run the company thought that they'd try and chase after a market that existed with the Wii, but doesn't anymore. Based on the recent NX news, I think they're still stuck on the past. All they need is a console like the Gamecube or anything before it, plain and simple, but as powerful as the competition so 3rd party developers will be willing to make games for it. All this is coming from a person who actually really enjoyed the Gamepad controller, it's just that you shouldn't be forced to have it, like Microsoft was trying to do with the Kinect. Yeah, I know I don't know better than they do, but it saddens me to see a company I've liked so much kind of fall apart. Can we bring Hiroshi Yamauchi back to life? :cry:

Okay, I got really sidetracked. I'm just saying, I really doubt that this is some sort of super-accurate emulation, it's probably just an emulator on a chip like the Neo Geo X was, and we all know how that turned out.
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by Great Hierophant »

koitsu wrote:Actual product is up on at least one Nintendo official website: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Misc-/Ninten ... 24287.html

It's certainly a SoC of some kind doing emulation. Be sure to note that all the games they list off are either NROM, MMC1, or MMC3. (I'm also chuckling that they've included Pac-Man -- that's the one game that Namco-Bandai is *super* aggressive about when it comes to IP of any sort, including in homebrew)
In addition to Punch-Out and Startropics, Castlevania and Ghosts 'N Goblins are UNROM, Gradius is CNROM.

3rd Party games :
Namco-Bandai : Pac-Man, Galaga
Konami : Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Gradius, Super C
Square-Enix : Final Fantasy, Bubble Bobble (S-E owns Taito)
Koei-Tecmo : Ninja Gaiden, Tecmo Bowl
Capcom : Ghosts 'N Goblins, Mega Man 2
Technos : Double Dragon II (through Arc System Works)

Interesting that 13 out of the 30 are from 3rd parties, and all are good games.
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by rainwarrior »

koitsu wrote:
Myask wrote:I was surprised at StarTropics…which is MMC6, and US-only.
Does StarTropics use MMC6-specific features (talking about the 1KB of PRG-RAM internal to the chip)? If not, then MMC3 is sufficient. They're basically the same mapper except for that.
Even if it wasn't, it's not like making a mapper that only has to be accurate enough to run 1 game is a particularly difficult thing to do. :P

I sincerely doubt that they gave much concern to the mappers involved, if any, when choosing games. My bet is that it's 95% about licensing and VC market data, and 5% about the favourite games of a particular executive member of the company.
Last edited by rainwarrior on Thu Jul 14, 2016 7:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by tepples »

Especially when Low G Man, the only game that really depends on correct MMC3 disable behavior, isn't part of the collection. (Its music engine has a bug causing it to rely on open bus at $6000-$7FFF.)
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by rainwarrior »

Espozo wrote:Only Nintendo could get away with selling what is really just a Plug and Play console for $60.
Yeah, it's just a bloody disposable NES.
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by Dwedit »

Startropics 1 & 2 because Nintendo has to pay themselves for the privilege.
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Myask
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by Myask »

Dwedit wrote:Startropics 1 & 2 because Nintendo has to pay themselves for the privilege.
Zoda's Revenge is absent.
rainwarrior wrote:My bet is that it's 95% about licensing and VC market data, and 5% about the favourite games of a particular executive member of the company.
Ice Climber because Smash Brothers. Hmm...16/30 games are Smash-charactered. I think Excitebike's got an assist trophy, too.
Sirs/Madams Not Appearing In That Series wrote:Balloon Fight, Bubble Bobble, Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Double Dragon II: The Revenge, Excitebike, Final Fantasy, Galaga, Ghosts'N Goblins, Gradius, Ninja Gaiden, StarTropics, Super C, Tecmo Bowl
(And I can't imagine anyone complaining if Bub, Bob, Simon, Jimmy/Bimmy, FTR, THF, Bl.B, WhM, BlM, RedM, Arthur, Ryu, Mike, Contradude (...Lance and Bill?) showed up in Smash. Mega and Pacmen already did, after all.)
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by dougeff »

koitsu wrote: It's pretty obvious what the intention is here. I told people about this a long time ago (talking 5-10 years ago), so I'll just harp on it once again: Nintendo continually "gets involved with emulation or homebrew" in a weird way, trying to do something about their expiring patents + holding on to intellectual property with the goal of providing themselves legal recourse in cases of ROM piracy or devices that can "infringe upon whatever they feel like at the moment". "See, your honour, that Metroid.nes file hosted on that website being distributed is hurting our profit and cash flow margins, because as you can see we still actively have such games in the market... yes the game came out in 1986, but..."
Many of NES games are also for sale / playable / on the Wii games online store. So, they ARE still being sold by Nintendo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_V ... sole_games

I don't think Nintendo will make any money off this thing. Everyone either has a real NES, or uses emulators. Surprisingly, Nintendo is making a ton off Pokemon Go. Who would have guessed?
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by Dwedit »

It's for non-techie hipsters.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by Drew Sebastino »

93143 wrote:compounded by the thing being upstaged by the PS4 and XBOne almost instantly.
That's what I was talking about, but the other two are also big factors.
93143 wrote:The Gamepad driving the price up and keeping it there didn't help (although it's not totally unique in that regard - look what the Kinect 2 did to the XBOne).
And look what happened when they got rid of it for the Xbox one. Honestly though, I'd still get the gamepad, even if it wasn't mandatory because I think it's a comfortable controller, although I still wish they'd make an "updated" Gamecube controller with clickable joysticks, a ZL button, and a select and home button.
93143 wrote: You know something's wrong with the industry when people condescendingly declare that Nintendo has to "get with the times" and bribe developers to make games for them like Sony and Microsoft do...
I've really never understood what's so great about either Sony or Microsoft's consoles, especially Sony's because it's twice as overrated when it's the same thing. All a PS2 to me is a GC or Xbox with 2 controller ports, worse graphics, and no Super Smash Bros or Halo. (but it's got Final Fantasy, ooh boy.) I know that pissed off droves of people, but I'm sick of lists that say the PS2 is the 3rd+ best console of all time (and these are the same kinds of lists that put the Atari 2600 in first place. It's got a lot of historical significance, but come on now) and then have the GameCube and Xbox, which I've talked about before, barely in the top 15. It's like whenever people talk about how the PS4 is "twice as powerful" as the Xbox One. Give me a break; I sure as hell can't see it. A good computer makes it all irrelevant anyway.
93143 wrote:What recent NX news?
Just Reggie being awfully hesitant to brag on the hardware. "It's all about the games." Well, if 3rd party developers don't deem your hardware powerful enough, or, more likely, don't want to work around motion controls or a second screen or whatever, than you're not going to have all those games.

I know I sound like any snobby gaming journalist, but let me explain. I'm not the one crying over the hardware being "not powerful enough" or "too different" or whatever, because frankly, I find both to be irrelevant. (Modern games are optimized like shit. People were shocked that Doom 4 ran on the Xbox One and PS4 so well, when looking at the hardware, I see no reason it shouldn't. It's just that most of the time, it doesn't. Most 1st party Wii U games look just as good as what the Xbox or PS4 are offering, although they often don't target realism as much.) I will say though that both of these lead to the bigger problem that most people care the about, which is a lack of 3rd party games. Like the previous "problems", I don't care. 90% of games that I've gotten from the last 5 years have been developed from Nintendo, because I find most games from the big 3rd party companies (which is all Sony and Microsoft even have) to be pretty dull and just overall not fun, like a really long chore.

The problem is though, that the aforementioned problems deter a very large number of people from buying Nintendo consoles, which is actually a problem to me, because I'm not a big fan of seeing them struggle considering I'm a bad Nintendo fanboy.
93143 wrote:everyone was moaning about Nintendo being "dead" and "irrelevant"
People have been doing that forever. I don't think they can be if Pokémon Go is the first suggestion on Google from just typing in "P". I think they're only getting about 20% of the profit from that game (Pokémon is jointly owned, and the game was developed by a company outside the Pokémon Company), but still.

Yeah, there's another giant rant. I probably made myself look even more ridiculous now. :lol:
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koitsu
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by koitsu »

Espozo wrote:
93143 wrote:What recent NX news?
Just Reggie being awfully hesitant to brag on the hardware. "It's all about the games."
Reggie Fils-Aime is just a figurehead for the US division. When it comes to the hardware, design decisions, etc. the guy almost certainly has no say in it, other than "herpdederp I think our US developers would like giant snakes coming out of a cartridge slot with Black Sabbath music that plays from an onboard speaker!". Nintendo Co., Ltd. -- i.e. Nintendo of Japan -- is who makes these decisions. There's a fake/parody Shigeru MIYAMOTO account on Twitter that even covered this (the device he's staring at is an Xbox One S), albeit a bit tongue-in-cheek.
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Re: NES Classic Edition - Nintendo's own repro console

Post by 93143 »

Espozo wrote:Yeah, there's another giant rant. I probably made myself look even more ridiculous now. :lol:
For the sake of posterity, here's the post I deleted while you were responding to it:
93143 wrote:
Espozo wrote:the businessmen that run the company thought that they'd try and chase after a market that existed with the Wii, but doesn't anymore.
At the time, a game developer was running the company. Besides, it's not clear to me that the Wii U's poor sales weren't due in large part to incoherent advertising and a weak launch lineup, which was compounded by the thing being upstaged by the PS4 and XBOne almost instantly. The Gamepad driving the price up and keeping it there didn't help (although it's not totally unique in that regard - look what the Kinect 2 did to the XBOne).

Also, the third parties were awfully quick to jump ship... You know something's wrong with the industry when people condescendingly declare that Nintendo has to "get with the times" and bribe developers to make games for them like Sony and Microsoft do...
Based on the recent NX news, I think they're still stuck on the past.
What recent NX news? Unless I've missed something big, we know almost nothing about NX at this point. All we know is that there's a new concept involved, and that Nintendo doesn't want to make a big deal of the raw specs before the system is revealed. We don't know what the new concept is. As far as I can tell, the most well-founded rumour about the NX is the one about it being cartridge-based, which is (a) positive - at least IMO - and (b) very far from being solid enough to qualify as "news"...

Before E3, everyone was moaning about Nintendo being "dead" and "irrelevant" because they were only showing one game. Why not wait and see what NX actually is before you decide it sucks?

Speaking of getting sidetracked... I've deleted multiple attempts at a much larger rant, in one case following a tangent out into politics and philosophy. I'm still not sure I shouldn't just delete this whole post...
Just Reggie being awfully hesitant to brag on the hardware.
I suspect it's less powerful than Scorpio, and in the wake of that announcement Sony seems to have suddenly hushed up too. That doesn't mean it's weak. One reason I like the cartridge rumour is that it seems like it would allow the deletion of a fair bit of expensive hardware from the console, which could allow a higher power-to-price ratio than is typical. I guess we'll see...

Besides, he's right. It is all about the games. If the developers like it (and so far they seem to), that should be enough.
The problem is though, that the aforementioned problems deter a very large number of people from buying Nintendo consoles, which is actually a problem to me, because I'm not a big fan of seeing them struggle considering I'm a bad Nintendo fanboy.
I'm with you there.
Pokémon Go is the first suggestion on Google from just typing in "P".
I've noticed that. Kinda exhilarating really, even though I have no interest in playing it myself (never played Pokemon, never owned a cell phone). I hope they don't drop the ball...

...

As for the subject of the thread, it seems like it might be an okay idea to me. My mind is not blown, but if it can produce good-quality low-latency judder-free video on an HDTV, it might be a good option for people who don't have a real NES and a CRT. In my experience NES emulation lags badly on a PC.

...oh wow. It had better be low-latency. Punch-Out!! is on there...

...I've been thinking about latency lately. It strikes me that things are getting worse as technology advances. The Atari 2600 could take control input, process it during VBlank, and display the result on the first full frame after the input was registered. The Famicom took control input, used the next frame to process the input, transferred the results to the PPU during VBlank, and displayed the result on the second frame after the input. The N64 (when running at 60 fps) took control input, used the next frame to process it, drew the results to a framebuffer during the frame after that and displayed the contents of the framebuffer on the third frame after the input. The Wii U takes control input, uses the next frame to process it, uses the frame after that to render to the framebuffer, sends the result to the TV's framebuffer, and even if the TV does nothing whatsoever to slow things down it ends up displaying the result on the fourth frame after the input...

Have I misunderstood something? Can a framebuffer-based system do general processing and rendering in parallel during a single frame? Can an HDTV display an image live as it comes in rather than waiting until it's all there?
Last edited by 93143 on Sat Jul 16, 2016 3:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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