I'm amazed at these 2 games and my question is - did they use any additional hardware in the cartridge? Or even additional processors?
Nothing special inside those cartridges. Just a mapper chip.
Recca uses MMC3, just like Batman and Super Mario Bros 3.
Crisis force uses Konami VRC4 as its mapper, a mapper roughly equivalent to MMC3 (but slightly better).
You just seeing really good programming and game design here. Neither of those two games even uses extra RAM in the cartridge.
Considering that NES has only 2 KB of RAM, does it mean that it uses ROM on cartridge in place of of RAM? Because there are systems with 640 KB RAM that still don't do what NES is capable of.
ROM is used to store code and data, RAM is used for variables and arrays. It's not like on the MS-DOS PC, where the code and data need to fit in RAM.
Some games put 8k extra RAM on the cartridge. Sometimes, it's backed by a battery for saved games. It can also be without a battery, where it's used to allow compressed levels to be decompressed there. SMB3 and MC Kids are examples of using extra RAM for big compressed levels. Zelda 1 also wastes the extra RAM on storing code and data copied from ROM, because it was originally a disk system game, so the developers wanted to do less work during the conversion process. For an absolute waste of perfectly good NES cartridge hardware, see Home Alone.
Beeper wrote:
does [the NES use] ROM on cartridge in place of of RAM?
Yes. Cartridges for the NES and other cartridge-based consoles from the Atari 2600 through the Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Advance contain ROM that's as fast as RAM. The Nintendo DS, DSi, 3DS, and PSVita, on the other hand, treat their ROM cartridges as a
really fast disk, not unlike CompactFlash, and have to copy everything to RAM in order to run it. This is why the SuperCard for GBA and PowerPak for NES have the "loading" phase: they're copying data from the CF to a big ass RAM on the cartridge that the console thinks is ROM.
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Because there are systems with 640 KB RAM that still don't do what NES is capable of.
You say "640 KB RAM", so I guess you're referring to old PCs running MS-DOS in real mode, which are famous for having a 20-bit address space with RAM in the lower 640 KiB. The amount of main memory is comparable between the PC and NES, given that
only a handful of original games for NES and Famicom are over 512 KiB of ROM: Kirby's Adventure, Metal Slader Glory, and a couple that don't come to my mind immediately. The biggest difference I can see is that the PC's multicolor display modes are a dumb frame buffer; the NES PPU just does a lot more.
Dwedit wrote:
ROM is used to store code and data, RAM is used for variables and arrays. It's not like on the MS-DOS PC, where the code and data need to fit in RAM.
Some games put 8k extra RAM on the cartridge. Sometimes, it's backed by a battery for saved games. It can also be without a battery, where it's used to allow compressed levels to be decompressed there. SMB3 and MC Kids are examples of using extra RAM for big compressed levels. Zelda 1 also wastes the extra RAM on storing code and data copied from ROM, because it was originally a disk system game, so the developers wanted to do less work during the conversion process. For an absolute waste of perfectly good NES cartridge hardware, see Home Alone.
What's with Home Alone?
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What's with Home Alone?
Despite being poor game, it uses W-RAM.For a simple game like that using W-RAM is...a Big(With capital B) waste.I can bet that some of nesdev programmers(maybe even me..) could make this game with UNROM, and no W-RAM(UNROM have no W-RAM anyway..).
Are there any shooters of this speed, technological advancement and difficulty available for pre-486 PC, Amiga or 8-bit home computers (C64, Atari 8-bit etc.)?
Denine wrote:
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What's with Home Alone?
Despite being poor game, it uses W-RAM.For a simple game like that using W-RAM is...a Big(With capital B) waste.
I seem to remember marketing claiming that the big advantage of Home Alone over, say, Lode Runner is that the Wet Bandits would learn the player's patterns.
As for whether pre-486 PCs had shooters like this: I don't think they could handle raster effects.
PC was not capable for smooth games with fast scrolling and many objects moving around for very long time, just because it had no hardware acceleration for graphics. All you had is a large raster buffer with slow video memory access and not so fast CPU to render all the graphics in software - no sprite/tile hardware like on consoles, no blitter like on Amiga. Only 386-486 with VGA got enough power to do it well, more or less.
Thanks, because a dumbass here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5qHlKx2w68 wrote this:
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@atari67 I never said it was, but both are computers. It just happens the NES is a computer with hardware on par of something from the mid 70s launching in the mid 80s. Nintendo had to pull a profit on it and make sure it would cheap enough for consumers. Now a days Nintendo is still the only company able to pull a profit on the console (Wii) while the PS3 and Xbox360 systems are both subsidized from money made through licensing and accessories.
lordShard pred 9 mesiacmi
Basically, an Amiga fanboy who trashes NES by "zomg 2 KB RAM". So? N64 has just 4 MB RAM, and runs games that require 64 MB on a PC.
I suppose when you compare the NES to a computer like the C64, for the 'average' NES game you can safely say the NES has more memory than the C64. The memory just happens to be read-only. It's not just a matter of there being 'no loading times', but there is simply stuff one can do with 512kB of memory that can't be done in 64kB, whether it's ROM or RAM.
Check out this port of Prince of Persia to C64 (released a couple months ago)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBs5-WOtIpc
It uses a ROM cartridge. I'm not certain, but I imagine this (with all those animations) would just not be possible without a large memory.
Following the same reasoning, you'd say the SNES has more memory than the Playstation, as the latter SNES carts were often 4MB but the Playstation only have 2MB of system RAM.
The reality is more complex.
To compare what is comparable, let's compare the FDS to regular cartridges. The FDS has 34kb of RAM while a cartridge hooked up to a NES has only (natively) 2kb if no SRAM is present on the cart. The FDS is not supperior as it can only "see" small parts of the discs loaded in memory at once - while a cartridge can acess any data anytime.
However in a typical game you only access one music at a time, one level at a time, one character set at a time etc... So the real difference is in loading times.
The C64 definitely has less graphics possibilities than the NES through - and only have 3 sound channels - even if they feature much more than the NES' channels.
Another thing to take into consideration is that VRAM on the C64 is just part of its RAM - so all the part you use for storing graphics and sprites is taken and can't be used for anything else. This is also why the C64's CPU is so slow - because the RAM access are interleaved between the video chip and the 6510 - so both have to run two times slower than the RAM's speed which is pretty terrible.
Bregalad wrote:
However in a typical game you only access one music at a time, one level at a time, one character set at a time etc
Mappers and large ROMs aren't limited to typical games. Go play something atypical like Cosmic Epsilon and see how many character sets are used in a single frame. Or even Super Mario Bros. 3 or Kirby's Adventure, which rapidly switches among subsets of a large character set depending on the hero's frame of animation.
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The C64 definitely has less graphics possibilities than the NES through - and only have 3 sound channels - even if they feature much more than the NES' channels.
Like the ability to do chorus with one channel by slowly varying a square wave's duty (which is equivalent to the difference of two detuned sawtooth waves). The NES needs two because its duty cycle is limited to 3 distinct fractions.
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Another thing to take into consideration is that VRAM on the C64 is just part of its RAM - so all the part you use for storing graphics and sprites is taken and can't be used for anything else.
This would be true for anything on the FDS that rapidly rewrites CHR RAM in order to allow more frames of animation for each character.
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RAM access are interleaved between the video chip and the 6510 - so both have to run two times slower than the RAM's speed which is pretty terrible.
Agreed. Put VRAM on a separate bus, use a Z80, and cheap out on the audio, and you get the MSX (if programs are in RAM). Move the programs to ROM, and you get the ColecoVision. Add scrolling to the ColecoVision and take out the attribute clash and you have the SMS, which is graphically roughly comparable to an NES with CHR RAM.
tepples wrote:
...and you get the MSX (if programs are in RAM).
All MSX models have cartridge slots though, so it can just as easily run programs from ROM.
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...and you have the SMS, which is graphically roughly comparable to an NES with CHR RAM.
Although the greater bit depth of the SMS makes a huge difference in my opinion. Some SMS games look amazing (they don't necessarily play well though), with graphics that the NES could never come close to reproducing.
Bregalad wrote:
However in a typical game you only access one music at a time, one level at a time, one character set at a time etc... So the real difference is in loading times.
Yes, but when the character set, level data, etc needs to be larger than your RAM, then you're screwed - stopping to load isn't always an option. So I still believe it's true, there are things you can do with a large ROM that are just not possible with smaller RAM. For one example, I remember reading about a port of Mortal Kombat for Sega CD includes gameplay-ruining pauses so it can load data off the CD. I just looked up info on it and apparently that was a problem on the Playstation and other versions also, whenever Shang Tsung morphed into other characters or even for some moves. Yet the SNES port handles it all just fine, because the cart included enough memory. So yeah, I'd say the SNES can sometimes have more memory than Playstation.
The Down+B morphs of Sheik and Pokemon Trainer in Super Smash Bros. Brawl and opponent spawning during event matches take so long for the same reason. With more than two players, the action can't pause, so they load a character's textures and sound bank in the background. They could have gone with lower detail models and fit it all into the Wii's memory (64 MB RAM, 24 MB VRAM), as they did for the N64 version of Smash Bros. (16 MB ROM, 4 MB RAM), but players demanded more detail.
A lot of Super NES games freeze while loading sound. Compare the level transitions between Super NES and Genesis in multiplatform titles like Zoop or Pinocchio. Trying to work around this by streaming stuff to the SPC all the time results in gameplay slowdowns, as seen in The Lord of the Rings.
Memory is also the reason why in the PCE Arcade Card CD version of World Heroes II, DIO cannot transform to every arbitrary character. If data are to be loaded from the CD during a match the result would be horrible. Not only that there'll be a (long) pause, the BGM will also be cut due to it being CD audio and drives bitd simply cannot play CD audio and access data from the disc at the same time (with rare exceptions such as the obsolete CD-Gs).
Even the Neo Geo CD couldn't get away from this fate. Later AES/MVS games are so large that the RAM in the CD unit isn't enough to hold the stuff for a single level. A number of newer games have animations cut, such as the Metal Slug games (I think the PlayStation versions have annoying in-level loadings instead) and in the case of Art of Fighting 3, instead of sacrificing the animation frames, they shrunk all the sprites in the game.
For cart games, I also remember the Mega Drive version of Strider Hiryu has some small pauses in-between levels. I think the game is possibly loading more level data to RAM and/or uploading more graphics data to VRAM (the PCE Arcade Card CD version isn't half as good in this case either).
Gilbert wrote:
Not only that there'll be a (long) pause, the BGM will also be cut due to it being CD audio and drives bitd simply cannot play CD audio and access data from the disc at the same time (with rare exceptions such as the obsolete CD-Gs).
Then why didn't the games that streamed music from the CD use XA or other ADPCM audio, which could be ring-buffered? The Mega Man games for PS1 use this, as do Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and every PS1 version of DDR since 3rd Mix. Did the hardware not support ADPCM? Or were gamers of the time that insistent on playing the soundtrack in an ordinary CD player?
Simple. As the 1st console in the world equipped with a CD-ROM XA simply wasn't available, also while it did have an ADPCM channel it's just a single mono channel and normally not meant to reproduce audio in high enough sample rate used for streamed music. Furthermore, the channel was already used in voices and data seeks on the 1X drive probably won't work well for "real-time streaming" events. Remember, the PCE was a console released in the late late 80's.
Even for the PS1, a number of games (especially arcade conversions of fighting games) had animation cut to ensure smooth gameplay.
Thanks for all the answers folks, just 1 another question, do the PC-Engine/Turbografx-16 Hu-Cards work in the same way? A ROM card instead of RAM? Are they basically miniaturized cartridges?
By the way, Merry Christmas!
HuCard, the cartridge used in a TG16, is a miniaturized cartridge, not unlike a Game Boy cartridge. HU card (note the capitalization and spacing) was a smart card used to translate DirecTV key streams for a particular subscriber, long since obsoleted by the P4 and later D2 cards.
Bregalad wrote:
This is also why the C64's CPU is so slow - because the RAM access are interleaved between the video chip and the 6510 - so both have to run two times slower than the RAM's speed which is pretty terrible.
Yet it is
still faster than the original IBM PC/PC XT's 8088
http://trixter.oldskool.org/2011/06/04/ ... advantage/ .
Trixter actually took a lot of crap over that post, from people who knew both the 8088 and the 6502 much more fluently than he. The answer then, as now, is "depends on the workload" :)
And if the workload includes "one program being made available for machines with different instruction sets through recompilation", the platforms with 16-bit registers (e.g. 8088) have an advantage.
Beeper wrote:
Thanks, because a dumbass here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5qHlKx2w68 wrote this:
Quote:
@atari67 I never said it was, but both are computers. It just happens the NES is a computer with hardware on par of something from the mid 70s launching in the mid 80s. Nintendo had to pull a profit on it and make sure it would cheap enough for consumers. Now a days Nintendo is still the only company able to pull a profit on the console (Wii) while the PS3 and Xbox360 systems are both subsidized from money made through licensing and accessories.
lordShard pred 9 mesiacmi
Basically, an Amiga fanboy who trashes NES by "zomg 2 KB RAM". So? N64 has just 4 MB RAM, and runs games that require 64 MB on a PC.
That guy is a total doushbag. NES was more powerful than the Colecovision.