Battle of the Bits: Nintendo Power, Mappers, and Circuit Boards - Talkin' Code Ep. 3

This article and a few others in Nintendo Power made me a CPU design engineer today

Yes please, do a MMC5 deep dive!

I'm surprised that there was such a technical article in Nintendo Power! I find memory map conversion romhacks to be fascinating. I've seen people do some truly incredible things with them.

Even now, there's AAA games that take up 100GB, that cost $70, that I play a few hours and get bored with them. Then there's Terraria and FTL, which collectively take up less than a gig, and both cost me $2.50, that I've played forever. The SNES and NES may not have been technically as powerful, but they really made use of all the hardware and made some amazing games

That quote about the measure of a great game about being fun to play is very true. I played a lot of overcomplicated modern games but going back to the simplicity and fun of Super Mario 2 is always the best.

I'd say the NES memory mappers are a big part of the reason Nintendo is still around today - they allowed the NES to stay relevant for a lot longer than it would have otherwise. Aside from enabling larger game storage - the mappers could do things like flip pages for animations - like in Mario 3 and enable multidirectional split screen scrolling.

Really love the "talking code" vids. Can't wait for more!

God I miss receiving my monthly Nintendo Power and sitting down after school to read every single page in one long reading!! That was such an amazing feeling each time!!

It's kind of interesting to me because people have always said that the Master System was superior to the NES. I'd look at the games and used to think "Hmmm not sure. Maybe as far as color goes but not much else, if anything". The thing is though that the Master System has most of these MMC functions built right in to the base hardware. Wonder Boy and Enduro Racer scrolled diagonally and they were fairly early games. Golvellius did the MMC5 vertical scrolling partitioning thing. You didn't need to hold reset to save your game. The biggest limitation of the console might have been the leftmost 8 (16?) pixels had to be masked off to hide corruption during horizontal scrolling. Oh and the letterboxed aspect ratio of every single game due to the lack of sufficient vertical resolution.

8:00 I'd like to point up a common misunderstanding about nametable mirroring aka the horizontal solder blob. That solder blob was just meant to set how the tilemaps are seen by the PPU. It doesn't limit the directions of scrollings. Scrolling in both axes is a built in feature of the PPU. As a matter of fact, Hudson's Adventure Island used the same mirroring setup as Castlevania 1 and it does diagonal scrollings right up and right down way before SMB3 came up. Setting the solder blob on the H like Castlevania, when scrolling up and down and diagonally, you could have some artifacts in the first or last 8 lines of the image, but those were out the the visible portion of the display on NTSC systems. On PAL systems you will see those artifacts but you could eliminate them by simply disabling the image on the last 8 lines of display by using some interrupt from cartridge or the sprite 0/bg collision detection, for example... Mario 3 sets the tilemap to be 32 tiles wide and 60 tiles height (because it needs the HUD) and so it has to disable the leftmost 8 pixels to minimize artifacts when scrolling horizontally but you still get color artifacts (seen at the right when moving horizontally) since the color attributes in the tilemap is 16x16 pixels, the only way to hide them is disabling 16 pixels: Tom and Jerry and Tuffy uses the same tilemap layout as SMB3 (because it uses a HUD in similar fashion) and also scrolls diagonally but it does disable the leftmost 8 pixels using a PPU toggle and hides the rightmost 8 pixels using a column of sprites, so no scrolling artifacts.

This is so cool!! I had heard previously that the scrolling direction in older games was determined by a soldering connection on the circuit board, but somehow it didn't click that that would prevent ever scrolling along more than one axis. It was cool to see how it's the additional hardware that games that do that have in them that makes that possible. And I was also really interested in how the MMC5 fixed the need to hold the Reset button when powering off a game with save data, and impressed with its ability to do multiplication. Thanks for this video! Please do another one on the MMC5!

I read this article when I got my copy of Nintendo Power in the mail. I was 10 at the time, and almost all of it flew over my head, but I found it fascinating nonetheless. I hadn't seen that level of technical detail in Nintendo Power ever before and thought it was cool that they bothered to publish such a thing.

I always felt like Punch-Out! was kind of primitive in its presentation, but knowing how the MMC2 works now, it really seems like it was pushing the system's limits at the time. Neat stuff!

One of my favourite things about old cartridge circuit boards is finding the company logos on chips or cut out of the solder mask. Konami did it a bunch especially with famicom boards, and there's a "hidden Mickey" made from test points on one of the Disney titles (if I remember it was actually decorative and not just a by-product)

In 1991, I had an Atari 7800 and was jealous of my friends with an NES. Sega Genesis might has well been a private jet.

There were a number of games before Mario 3, and the MMC 3, with multidimensional doing though, especially RC Pro-Am and Wizards & Warriors from Rare. It's known that Rare was the only company in western territories that Nintendo allowed to use their own mapper chips.

Seeing this makes me want to go dig out my classic Nintendo Power magazines. I remember this section when I was a kid and had interest, but was still too young at the time to understand it all.

I remember this article from back in the day, I found it fascinating

Thanks for doing these vids! Grew up with the NES, and always find the "under the hood" stuff almost as interesting as the games were themselves. Actually found a "How to Make an NES Game" tutorial online that I just started plodding through, though Assembly is a bit outside my current area of experience.

Not sure how one can read that and wonder what happened to the MMC4. We would only learn years later that, it was a slightly better MMC2, and it was only used on the Famicom (for the three Intelligent Systems strategy games, Famicom Wars and the two Fire Emblem games). In the FE games, the character ROM bank switching I believe was most used for an even easier to see example: tiles FD and FE, which are the two tiles hard-coded in the mapper to activate the bank swap when rendered, are the left and right text window borders. So, essentially when the left and right edges of text windows are drawn, the game will automatically swap to the font ROM bank at the start of the window and back to the main screen graphics ROM at the end).