toptenmaterial Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 That said, I play my 7800 a LOT more than my NES. Platformers and crappy RPGs are lame. Joust and Robotron still rule Allow me to say that it is my lifelong ambition to play joust on a video projector Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toptenmaterial Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 That said, I play my 7800 a LOT more than my NES. Platformers and crappy RPGs are lame. Joust and Robotron still rule Allow me to say that it is my lifelong ambition to play joust on a video projector The top sentence was originally posted by Lord Thag, I post from the iPhone and messed up the quote format. And I disagree with him; I love platformers and crappy RPGs! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
high voltage Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 (edited) [The games to the 7800 are so cheap that no emulator is required. You could even buy any game just to test it =) And for me, please buy me a boxed Tank Command Edited January 11, 2011 by high voltage Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kool kitty89 Posted January 13, 2011 Share Posted January 13, 2011 (edited) That said, I play my 7800 a LOT more than my NES. Platformers and crappy RPGs are lame. Joust and Robotron still rule Allow me to say that it is my lifelong ambition to play joust on a video projector My preferred version of jouse and robotron are on the Williams (or midway) greatest hits compilation, in my case the SNES version (the Genesis version could technically allow atari joysticks to be used for robotron though, or the Sega arcade sticks for that matter ). But that didn't come out until 1996 (for pretty much every current console of the time -SNES, Genesis, Saturn, PSX, N64 -later for the latter as Midway hits and adding a bunch of midway games to the set of williams games on the previous compilation), and prior to that I think the 7800 may have had the best home ports of Joust and Robotron available, period. (OTOH there were no good home versions of Sinistar until 1996 AFIK, let alone arcade perfect versions ) NES joust is pretty poor to be sure though, Lynx Joust might be better than 7800 in some respects, ST Joust looks more like the arcade and sounds off for some things and seems to be rather sloppy overall (and is one of the few ST games without double buffering -and thus had nasty tearing). Balloon fight might be the closest thing to Joust that was done well on the NES. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JMY2dMnK_E Edited January 13, 2011 by kool kitty89 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toptenmaterial Posted January 14, 2011 Share Posted January 14, 2011 I think in general that 7800 arcade ports are excellent, and harder than their NES contemporaries. Not sure if joust originated in the arcade or not... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Usotsuki Posted January 14, 2011 Share Posted January 14, 2011 It did, pretty sure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kool kitty89 Posted January 14, 2011 Share Posted January 14, 2011 Yes, it most definitely did it was one of Williams' big hits back in the early 80s and has been ported (and/or emulated) on dozens of consoles from the 2600 to the PS3. (1996 saw the multiplatform release of Williams Greatest Arcade Hits on the SNES, Genesis, PS1, and Saturn with Defender, Defender II, Joust, Robotron 2084, and Sinistar -several other compilations since then as well as standalone downloads) Prior to that though, the 7800 was probably the best home version. (not sure about the lynx, but the ST version seems a bit sloppy, though it looks more like the arcade) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Metal Ghost Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Quick question for the group here: in doing some research, I've run across some technical specs of both the 7800 and NES. It stated that Max Cart size for the 7800 is 128K, while for the NES it's 512K. Is that true? Or is there more to the story than those simple figures? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 It stated that Max Cart size for the 7800 is 128K, while for the NES it's 512K. Is that true? The largest commercial game for the 7800 was 144K. There have been homebrew carts with 512K in the past (music and slide show demos). The extra ROM space depends on a technique called bank switching where the game can select different chunks of the ROM image to appear at a certain address. This extra hardware resides in the cart. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamesk Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Joust has also been ported to World of Warcraft. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Metal Ghost Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 It stated that Max Cart size for the 7800 is 128K, while for the NES it's 512K. Is that true? The largest commercial game for the 7800 was 144K. There have been homebrew carts with 512K in the past (music and slide show demos). The extra ROM space depends on a technique called bank switching where the game can select different chunks of the ROM image to appear at a certain address. This extra hardware resides in the cart. Ahh, I see. I had read about bankswitching before, but didn't realize that it required hardware to accomplish. So to educate the non-technophile is accomplishing a 512K 7800 cart something that can reasonably be done? Or does the hardware and/or technical know-how requirements pretty much preclude this from happening as far as most homebrews are concerned? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Ahh, I see. I had read about bankswitching before, but didn't realize that it required hardware to accomplish. So to educate the non-technophile is accomplishing a 512K 7800 cart something that can reasonably be done? Or does the hardware and/or technical know-how requirements pretty much preclude this from happening as far as most homebrews are concerned? Ideally you want one of C300565 cart PCBs as a starting point. Its still quite a bit of work to get it working. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Metal Ghost Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Quick question for the group here: in doing some research, I've run across some technical specs of both the 7800 and NES. It stated that Max Cart size for the 7800 is 128K, while for the NES it's 512K. Is that true? Or is there more to the story than those simple figures? So thanks to Groovy I have some information on the 7800 side of things regarding cart size. As far as the NES is concerned, were there a lot of 512K cartridges released back in the day? Also, does anyone know what a Zelda or SMB cart size might be? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DracIsBack Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 It stated that Max Cart size for the 7800 is 128K, while for the NES it's 512K. Is that true? Or is there more to the story than those simple figures? Absolutely not true! - First, in the lifetime of the 7800, Alien Brigade and Crossbow were 144K. - Second, there have been 512K demos for the 7800 released more recently. Examples: - A prototype 512K 7800 board has been found - Games that never got kicked off like TIME LORDS were intended to be 512K - On both the NES and 7800, the games still deal with data in much smaller chunks because that's all the 6502 can access at a time - I think there's a couple NES games that are bigger than 512K. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 As far as the NES is concerned, were there a lot of 512K cartridges released back in the day? Also, does anyone know what a Zelda or SMB cart size might be? I can't help with that information because I don't know enough about the NES yet. However, if nobody answers here, you might have better luck asking NES technical questions on NesDev. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ApolloBoy Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 As far as the NES is concerned, were there a lot of 512K cartridges released back in the day? Also, does anyone know what a Zelda or SMB cart size might be? 512K carts didn't come around until about 1990, so many of the 512K games are from the last few years of the NES. Zelda is 128K while SMB is just 40K. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Usotsuki Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 AFAICT, Zelda 1 = 128 KB SMB 1 = 40 KB SMB 2J = 72 KB SMB 2 = 256 KB SMB 3 = 384 KB Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toptenmaterial Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 AFAICT, Zelda 1 = 128 KB SMB 1 = 40 KB SMB 2J = 72 KB SMB 2 = 256 KB SMB 3 = 384 KB is that the size of the programs on the cart? that's astounding! just from a layman's perspective, I would think that games like Zelda which featured massive worlds would be measured in the megabytes... isn't civ 3 for the PC something like 300 megabytes! I'm not at all disputing this data that usotsuki posted, I'm just saying it blows my mind how small these programs are!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DracIsBack Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 is that the size of the programs on the cart? that's astounding! just from a layman's perspective, I would think that games like Zelda which featured massive worlds would be measured in the megabytes... isn't civ 3 for the PC something like 300 megabytes! I'm not at all disputing this data that usotsuki posted, I'm just saying it blows my mind how small these programs are!!! Clever use and re-use of background tiles. :-) Even on the 7800, there are examples of this. Crack'ed, for example, is 128K and is really just some static screens ... maybe 6 or 7. Scrapyard Dog has 17 side-scrolling levels that can take hours to traverse and its the same size. Midnight Mutants is also 128K and has tons of areas across the landscrape. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Clever use and re-use of background tiles. :-) .. and the use of Run Length Encoding (RLE) to compress the data in a simple but effective way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Metal Ghost Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Wow, that's really interesting stuff. Thanks all for humoring the tech layman here. I just wanted to get a feel for, from simply a single technical aspect (size in this instance), whether some of these NES games could have been done on the 7800. But more than just 'yes they could' and really down to some numbers here, again, at least from a single perspective. It's interesting though, what allowed the NES to implement 512K cartridges 'natively' (admitedly I'm probably misusing the term here) as opposed to the 7800 that had to utilize bankswitching in order to acomplish the same thing? They both had basically the same 6502 CPU. Does that have to do with the differences between Maria and the NES graphics chip? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 It's interesting though, what allowed the NES to implement 512K cartridges 'natively' (admitedly I'm probably misusing the term here) as opposed to the 7800 that had to utilize bankswitching in order to acomplish the same thing? They both had basically the same 6502 CPU. Does that have to do with the differences between Maria and the NES graphics chip? The NES had to bank switch too. The NES mappers offered bank switching and other enhanced functionality. Enhanced functionality mappers are something the 7800 never had. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kool kitty89 Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 (edited) It stated that Max Cart size for the 7800 is 128K, while for the NES it's 512K. Is that true? The largest commercial game for the 7800 was 144K. There have been homebrew carts with 512K in the past (music and slide show demos). The extra ROM space depends on a technique called bank switching where the game can select different chunks of the ROM image to appear at a certain address. This extra hardware resides in the cart. Ahh, I see. I had read about bankswitching before, but didn't realize that it required hardware to accomplish. So to educate the non-technophile is accomplishing a 512K 7800 cart something that can reasonably be done? Or does the hardware and/or technical know-how requirements pretty much preclude this from happening as far as most homebrews are concerned? The hardware is really rather cheap and trivial for mass produced games... a huge portion of the 2600, NES, SMS, many 7800 games, and many others used it often. Really high production volume games would tend to embed the logic inside the ROM chips while others would have it external. (the NES also had more complex "mapper" chips that were somewhat similar but mapped memory in such a way to break limitations of the PPU -or somethings non PPU related stuff- many also added audio hardware, but the NES couldn't use it as the audio expansion pin of the Famicom was removed from the cart slot) Any 7800 game above 48k is using bank switching, any 2600 game over 4k is bank switching, I think the Master System's limit is 32k (might be 48) before banking, and the NES is a bit odd as it has 2 buses with 32k mapped to the CPU/program bus and 16k mapped to the PPU/character data bus (a bit ironic since you'd normally use much more graphics data than program data) and I believe the vast majority of NES/Famicom games use bank switching for character data and many later games for program data as well. That's also why you more often see odd ROM sizes on the NES. (and why you see 2 ROMs if you open up a cart) Later systems had so much address space that bank switching was unnecessary, or very rarely used... or in some cases that expanded address space was created via internal bank switching (the PCE/TG-16 had embedded logic in the CPU to extend the 64k to 2 MB -not all of which is available to the cart slot, though some still added external banking like SFII and the arcade RAM card; the SNES's 65816 derivative used a banking mechanism to expand to 16 MB address space -though it was also mapped a bit oddly iirc), in many of those cases the actual address space on the cart slot was more limited like the Genesis with only 4 MB specifically mapped to game ROM (there was 10 of the total 16 MB addressed to cart space, but the added 6 MB went to various reserved expansion addressing) and very few games pushed beyond 4 MB anyway. The Jaguar had 6 MB for carts but no games pushed past that at all, and the N64 had no cases of bank switching either. (though the carts were multiplexed to reduce pin count -an unrelated mechanism though) is that the size of the programs on the cart? that's astounding! just from a layman's perspective, I would think that games like Zelda which featured massive worlds would be measured in the megabytes... isn't civ 3 for the PC something like 300 megabytes! I'm not at all disputing this data that usotsuki posted, I'm just saying it blows my mind how small these programs are!!! Clever use and re-use of background tiles. :-) Even on the 7800, there are examples of this. Crack'ed, for example, is 128K and is really just some static screens ... maybe 6 or 7. Scrapyard Dog has 17 side-scrolling levels that can take hours to traverse and its the same size. Midnight Mutants is also 128K and has tons of areas across the landscrape. Yep, and when you get to 3D games, strip out all the textures and digitized audio and see how much memory you're left using. For that matter, most of the polygonal games of the Genesis are among the smallest on the system (Hard Drivin' is 256k). Edited January 18, 2011 by kool kitty89 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 The hardware is really rather cheap and trivial for mass produced games... a huge portion of the 2600, NES, SMS, many 7800 games, and many others used it often. Really high production volume games would tend to embed the logic inside the ROM chips while others would have it external. As a point of interest, Atari bank switched 7800 carts like the '565 and '339 use standard 74LS parts for the bank switch electronics and not a custom external ASIC (or embedded ROM functionality). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kool kitty89 Posted January 19, 2011 Share Posted January 19, 2011 The hardware is really rather cheap and trivial for mass produced games... a huge portion of the 2600, NES, SMS, many 7800 games, and many others used it often. Really high production volume games would tend to embed the logic inside the ROM chips while others would have it external. As a point of interest, Atari bank switched 7800 carts like the '565 and '339 use standard 74LS parts for the bank switch electronics and not a custom external ASIC (or embedded ROM functionality). What about VCS carts? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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