NES rereleases and hardware clones

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asm6hackr
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NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by asm6hackr »

Is there a list of NES rereleases (such as Classic NES Series and also Classic Series), official NES emulators, and hardware clones?
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segaloco
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Re: NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by segaloco »

"Official NES Emulators" I'm aware of would be:

Virtual Console
Classic NES GBA
Zelda Collection
Metroid Prime? (I forget if the unlockable NES Metroid here runs on the GC or is beamed to the GBA connected via the link cable)
NES Classic Firmware

DK64's copy of Donkey Kong is a modified arcade version, not NES version right?

Just searching around with the term "Famiclone" will probably yield some good results. The Sharp Famicom Twin is the Famiclone I'm most familiar with, but there are designs all over the place. I think there are even some "iron curtain" versions that may or may not explicitly advertise that they're really just a Famicom inside due to weird Cold War stuff. Old Soviet technology clones are their own rabbit hole that I've resisted thus far...although temptation grows every year...
asm6hackr
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Re: NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by asm6hackr »

@segaloco Whoops. I meant official hardware clones. The only one I'm aware of is the NES Classic Edition.
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wyatt8740
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Re: NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by wyatt8740 »

There are too many hardware clones to list, unfortunately.

As for official, the NES classic is not a clone, it's an ARM computer dressed up to look like a NES. The only 6502 CPU core in it is in software, not hardware.

It'd be nice if there were, but as far as I can tell most only use one of a handful of chips or chipsets made by a couple of manufacturers (or maybe it's just UMC? I think there's at least one other company that is making or used to make clone chips).

We could maybe also count the FPGA-based ones as clones, I suppose.
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segaloco
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Re: NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by segaloco »

asm6hackr wrote: Wed Jan 17, 2024 12:35 pm @segaloco Whoops. I meant official hardware clones. The only one I'm aware of is the NES Classic Edition.
For the record, the Sharp Twin Famicom is licensed by Nintendo. In fact, doing some reading, it looks like all of Sharp's Famicom-based products got the Nintendo OK. Here's a pretty detailed Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famiclone
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wyatt8740
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Re: NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by wyatt8740 »

I'm pretty sure the twin famicom was made in the same mitsumi factory/factories as normal famicoms were. Only the branding was altered.
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Gilbert
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Re: NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by Gilbert »

Sharp is a good friend of Nintendo (a lot of the LCD screens of Nintendo handheld systems since at least the Game&Watch era were manufactured by Sharp).
Sharp is also a good friend of Hudson Soft (Hudson Soft wrote a lot of the system software for Sharp's X series of computers, including the X-68000).
It was Sharp who introduced Nintendo to Hudson Soft for the development of Family BASIC and as a result Hudson became the first 3rd party publisher of games on the system.

It is not a coincidence that Sharp had produced licensed clone systems of both Nintendo consoles and the PC-Engine.
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segaloco
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Re: NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by segaloco »

This had me reading more on the Sharp-Nintendo connection too, one of the key facts of the matter is Masayuki Uemura was likely a pivotal player in that relationship, he originally worked for Sharp with their solar cell stuff and other light technologies, and his original involvement with Nintendo was on light-sensing technologies for things like arcade shooters.

I also found out in that research last night that he published an autobiography in 2013, which I've since ordered a copy of. Word on the street is it hasn't been fully translated yet, and I'm already working on a translation of a similar work by Hideki Sato the regarding his work at Sega, so will add that to the translation pile along with the Ricoh Famicom documents.

What it makes me wonder is if Sharp did any of the FDS boot ROM programming or if they brought SRD in for that, as the boot ROM code exhibits several SRDisms and shares a few library routines with for example Doki Doki Panic.
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Gilbert
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Re: NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by Gilbert »

The FDS BIOS was developed by Nintendo R&D2.
It would be possible that they... err... borrowed codes from other sources, especially those parts that involve disk I/O though.

Fun fact. While "Famicom" is an officially accepted abbreviation of the product name "Family Computer", Nintendo did not own the full rights to the name "Famicom" (they did have rights to use it as the name of game consoles), but Sharp had the rights to use it for every other home appliance.

That's why Nintendo (almost?) always use the full name "Family Computer" in official stuff such as boxes, etc., and that FDS actually means "Family Computer Disk System", not "Famicom Disk System". But Sharp could call their clones "Twin Famicom", "Famicom TV", "Super Famicom TV", etc. (and even some other stuff which are not related to the game console) officially, and ironically they replaced "Nintendo" by "FAMICOM" on the start-up screen of the Twin Famicom.
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segaloco
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Re: NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by segaloco »

Gilbert wrote: Thu Jan 18, 2024 8:27 pm The FDS BIOS was developed by Nintendo R&D2.
Oh shoot a developer credit, neat. Just looked up Takao Sawano, looks like he's worked on several system ROMs for Nintendo over the years.

One of the things in the FDS boot ROM that isn't necessarily a service it needs to provide is what I've seen called "JSRSUB" in official sources. It's the thing in for instance the Super Mario Bros. engine where you provide a list of entry points after the call to the subroutine and the index you called it with picks which one runs, like the game mode switcher. There's a copy of that down in the FDS boot ROM. I've identified the same in SMB1, 2, 3, and Doki Doki Panic. Until spotting it in the FDS boot ROM I assumed it was an SRD creation, but maybe it is a common pattern used throughout the R&Ds.

Anywho, not cracking that one open too far though, part of what I'm trying to suss out long term between my Super Mario Bros., Doki Doki Panic, etc. stuff is some sort of picture of the "common library" that SRD and Iwasaki/Intelligent Systems programmers were working with back in the day. While Nintendo likely didn't have any starter code for anyone outside (even Hudson???) such an intersection between their different departments would very likely represent a corpus of library routines worth the analysis. Libsrd has a nice ring to it.
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Re: NES rereleases and hardware clones

Post by Pokun »

Sharp and Uemura got involved before the light-gun games. Basically Gunpei Yokoi wanted to reinvent the light-gun (which previously were done since the '30s using a light-bulb in the gun and a photo-sensing vacuum tube in the target so it was literally a gun that shot light) used in those amusement parks attractions with electromechanical things happening when you hit a target (these were still around in amusement parks when I was a kid in Sweden, I remember them fondly). Sharp had started producing photo-sensor cells (photo diodes/transistors) which was much smaller and cheaper than vacuum tubes so Yokoi and Uemura worked together to produce toy guns for home use that would shoot down a wild gunman toy or other variants (like a lion that falls dead). A Duck Hunt variant was also made which projected ducks on the wall to shoot.

Nintendo later used this technology with their electromechanical Laser Clay series (beginning with a Clay Pigeons game and went on with a wild gunman game among other light-gun games) which was used with projected clay pigeons on a wall or with an interactive video in the case of wild gunman. This was one of many electromechanical arcade game series Nintendo made when they were still mostly a toy manufacturer.
Then Ralph Baer invented the video game light-gun for his Magnavox, this is where the photo-sensor is placed in the gun instead of on the target and which detects the light from the TV (so it's more of a sensor than a gun), Nintendo produced the toy guns for him. In other words, Yokoi never invented the light-gun which has been said before.
The Kousenjuu/Zapper is just an improved design of Baer's light-gun (which couldn't tell the difference between a light-bulb and a white portion of the TV).

Sharp made the My Computer Televi C1 Famicom variant which also had PlayBox BASIC, which later turned into Family BASIC. The name of the BASIC dialect is NS-HuBASIC which stands for Nintendo-Sharp-Hudson-BASIC (and is a port of Hudson's HuBASIC that they made for Sharp's computers). I bet Hudson had to know the Famicom pretty well in order to make this though, and once the beans were spilled it was probably not hard for them to make Nuts and Milk and other 3rd-party games for it.
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