What do you guys know about the NES?
- Thread starter Grall
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Grall said:
RoB is a chain of S&M sex shops here in england...... not that i know for experience....
Psychogenics
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I don't remember that exact amount of those cartrigdes but I think that it was less than 2mbs and the ones that included the "sound chip" was not a chip at all just extra memory for sound files and game saves like in Zelda.
The mappers were designed so that they NES could access more than 32KB on a cartridge. The reason for this limitation was that the NES had a 16 bit address space (64KB or 2^16 accessible) which its 65C02 (one the worst CPUs ever) could access, and the bottom 32KB of address space was mapped to physical RAM. So what these cart-mounted mappers could do is define is define a "page" or "pages" totaling <32KB on the cart that the NES could access while the actual cart itself could be much larger. Think segment mode on the 8086.
There were also many neat tweaks you could do if mappers if you were creative. For example, you could redefine the memory pages on the fly to fake scrolling by pointing to over to the next set of background tile data. Lord programming for that thing was a nightmare, even as a hobbyist. So my memory might be a little off.
And Dragon Warrior 4 was a 512KB cart. The 1MB version you have on your PC is known as the "bad dump."
And heres some data on mappers and NES tech - http://www.thepong.com/Sites/Left/Nintendo/NTech.htm
There were also many neat tweaks you could do if mappers if you were creative. For example, you could redefine the memory pages on the fly to fake scrolling by pointing to over to the next set of background tile data. Lord programming for that thing was a nightmare, even as a hobbyist. So my memory might be a little off.
And Dragon Warrior 4 was a 512KB cart. The 1MB version you have on your PC is known as the "bad dump."
And heres some data on mappers and NES tech - http://www.thepong.com/Sites/Left/Nintendo/NTech.htm
Slightly OT:
I dont know what you're talking about, the 65C02 was one of the best cpu for it's day. I've had a blast programming assembly language for it. If you could optimize your routines for that cpu [X/Y/A/Stack registers] you could optimize for any cpu afterwards. The undocumented opcodes were a pleasure to use; if they were available, you could replace several commonly used instruction-pairs with a single instruction. I still have many fond memories of my own self-relocating-self-modifying program.
I dont know what you're talking about, the 65C02 was one of the best cpu for it's day. I've had a blast programming assembly language for it. If you could optimize your routines for that cpu [X/Y/A/Stack registers] you could optimize for any cpu afterwards. The undocumented opcodes were a pleasure to use; if they were available, you could replace several commonly used instruction-pairs with a single instruction. I still have many fond memories of my own self-relocating-self-modifying program.
Oh yes BRiT, the famous "extra instructions," (like ASO and XAA) forgot all about those. Unfortunately none of the devtools for 65cXX I have seen ever implemented those in any shape or form. And I think the key phrase here is "for its time." The 6502 was released in 1975, and the NES debuted in 1983, and in the interim much better microprocessors came out. I much preferred the Z80 in the SMS; that's just me I guess.
But yes, if you learned good assembly programming practice on 6502, (as I did) any other asm lang is almost trivial.
Unfortunately none of the devtools for 65cXX I have seen ever implemented those in any shape or form. And I think the key phrase here is "for its time." The 6502 was released in 1975, and the NES debuted in 1983, and in the interim much better microprocessors came out. I much preferred the Z80 in the SMS; that's just me I guess.But yes, if you learned good assembly programming practice on 6502, (as I did) any other asm lang is almost trivial.
