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NES (Games) Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

NES Goes Under The Knife 25

Posted by simoniker from the senseless-death-but-many-others-like-him dept.
Thanks to Nintendojo for their continuing Family Computer (NES) 20th anniversary special, which is still adding new game reviews and content, but now has 'under the knife' dissection pages for both the original Japanese Famicom and the classic American NES, showing the consoles disassembled and analyzed. The rest of the site has mini-reviews of some classic NES titles, and info on oddities like I Am A Teacher: Super Mario Sweater: "Japanese appliance and sewing machine maker Royal Industries Co., Ltd. saw an opportunity to cash in with the Nintendo Famicom Disk System. Selling pixel art sweater design software for a mere 2900 yen (about $24), the company could make a fortune taking orders for custom sweaters! It sounds crazy, but it must've seemed like a good idea at the time."
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NES Goes Under The Knife More

NES Goes Under The Knife

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  • expansion slot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by slothman32 ( 629113 ) <pjohnjackson&gmail,com> on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:08AM (#6548637) Homepage Journal
    I was hoping they'd tell us what the slot did. I haven't seen anything that could use it.

    • Re:expansion slot (Score:3, Informative)

      by WiKKeSH ( 543962 )
      The Minnesota state lottery had a cartridge and modem. More info can be found here:
      http://www.megspace.com/entertainment/neski ngdom/s pecial/lottery/
      • Hmmm...I'm starting to like our state's cutbacks with crazy investments like this.
        Now, if I could get mail order brides over this modem....although...with 16 KB of RAM, I wouldn't get to see much of her before she arrived.

    • Re:expansion slot (Score:3, Interesting)

      by edwdig ( 47888 )
      In Japan, there was a floppy disk drive for the Famicom. You could go to a store, and they'd have a machine you put a disk into and you could pick what game you wanted on it. I don't know exactly how it worked, but I'd assume there was a charge of a few dollars or so each time you changed the game on it.

      The port probably exists in case Nintendo decided to do the same thing in other countries.
    • I was hoping they'd tell us what the slot did. I haven't seen anything that could use it.

      That slot was intended for use with a floppy disk drive. The drive shipped in Japan, but was never released in the US.

      The only vestige of it in the US release are certain software titles (like Excitebike) that have "Save/Load" options on the menu that do nothing. (It's my understanding that the Japanese Famicom releases of these titles are identical and those menu options access the floppy drive.)

  • now I wouldn't mind one of those sweaters.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BFedRec ( 257522 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:37AM (#6548724) Homepage
    I would LIKE to have a mario pixel-art sweater... that's some stylish fashion man! Think of how popular those Atari logo shirts are... these will be hot ticket items in a couple years you can be sure.

    CharlesP

  • Y0SHi (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dimator ( 71399 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @01:50AM (#6548751) Homepage Journal
    Anyone remember the original NES Doc by Jeremy Chadwick (Y0SHi)? This dude layed the groundwork for most of the NES emulation scene with his detailed account of NES internals... link [216.239.39.104]

    I think he dropped out of the emu scene on bad terms... not sure.

    • Re:Y0SHi (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      He is now known as "koitsu" and he "maintains" parodius.com [parodius.com].

  • Anyone tried to portable-ise a NES yet? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Flying-Cow-Man ( 686404 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @02:49AM (#6548956)
    Every time I pull apart an old system (which I do fairly regularly), I'm amazed at how, by today's standards, simple these things are. I know www.classicgaming.com/vcsp/ is run buy a guy with a penchant for doing incredible things with portable Atari 2600's (he did a PS1 as well), but what about more mainstream systems? Surely it would be fairly cheap to wrap a GBA case around a SNES, and you've got an instant 1000's of games to choose from. Hell, I was pretty tempted to have a go at an N64 not too long ago.

    Assuming we had schematics, circuit layouts, etc and didn't have to pull apart old systems for parts, it would be trivial to fit all the silicon you would need in one chip. Then its a matter of minimalising the analogue components, which is basically all your I/O (screen / AV out, controls). If I had the full schematics and access to a fab I could do it myself....

    Some big company with lots of money should license this idea from me. I want my Mario All-Stars on a handheld!
    • Some big company with lots of money should license this idea from me. I want my Mario All-Stars on a handheld!

      Albeit illegal, because ROMs are always illegal no matter what, regardless of what some stupid site said about having the original copy and 24 hours (but that doesn't mean I don't have any because they stopped selling the games...), it is possible to put SNES games on your Game Boy Advance with the aid of a special flash cartridge that uses ROMs from your computer. It can also hold, of course, GBA

      • Re:Anyone tried to portable-ise a NES yet? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28, 2003 @05:00AM (#6549252)
        I hope ROMs aren't illegal or a lot of old BIOS makers are in trouble. Seriously, though, the question isn't whether ROMs are legal or illegal any more than it's a question of whether or not mp3s are illegal or not. ROMs and mp3s are just a medium. Whether you have redistribution rights (the right to copy and then distribute again) is an issue for which copyright infringement might be occuring.

        As for SNES games, you wouldn't be able to run SNES games on a GBA advance at full speed inside any nature of emulator. Now, a converter might be made, though I doubt that'd be likely given how different the snes and gba are (ie, you could write some stub code to fill the voids, but I doubt it in software could ever run in an adequately fast time to allow for real time action), but your mention of the lack of buttons is a pretty good deal breaker as far as the possibility of playing snes games directly.

        And finally, you're probably thinking of the GP32 (gamepark 32), which already supports running various emulators includes snes9x. As far as I've heard, though, no gba emulator has been ported to the gp32 yet, but that's more a point of it not happening yet, I think.
      • ..which is a big showstopper for end users. I want to be able to plug the same carts into the top of my portable N64/SNES as I do in my big grey box below the TV - just like that guy did with the Atari 2600s on the site I mentioned above. Sure, that'll stretch the size of the machine, but any sort ROM-copying needs to be easy and seemless, so that any shmuck could use it on the go. I'd hate the hassle of having to shift ROM images around every time I wanted to play a different set of games.

        Imagine a por
        • There was an adaptor out a while ago that let you play any Sega Master System game on the ill-fated Game Gear. I could never figure out why that didn't take off, it increased your potential library ten-fold. The only drawback was having to carry bigger carts around, but they were no bigger than an audio tape.

          I have one, and if you did too you would know why it didn't take off.

          The whole point of the Game Gear is that it's "portable" (as in easy to carry around).
          The problem with the Game Gear though is tha
    • Someone already made the NES portable, its called the GameAxe. It plays Famicom games, but a converter will allow it to play NES. Although I can't really see how portable the system would be when you are playing aircraft carrier sized cartridges.

    • Re:Anyone tried to portable-ise a NES yet? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Quietust ( 205670 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @11:28AM (#6551066) Homepage
      You mean aside from the Game Axe [nesplayer.com] (mass produced), or Portendo [tripoint.org] (someone's personal project), or anything else I probably missed?
    • http://www.classicgaming.com/nestable/

  • MURDERER! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Rethcir ( 680121 )
    Oh my god, they killed that NES! You Bastards!

  • Arrogance. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Eevee ( 535658 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @10:50PM (#6556015)

    Selling pixel art sweater design software for a mere 2900 yen (about $24), the company could make a fortune taking orders for custom sweaters! It sounds crazy, but it must've seemed like a good idea at the time.

    Why do people insist on making predictions about things beyond their experience? (I mean, aside from being a slashdot reader.) Knitters can be quite high-tech. You have knitting machines that use punchcards [studioknit...chines.com] and machines that use electronics [studioknit...chines.com]. Even hand-knitters trade what are essentially pixel patterns for sweaters.

    And we'll throw in the sewing machine [sewingmachinestore.com] crowd as well with a slightly more modern gaming machine--in matching color! (If you'll forgive the dupe [slashdot.org].)

    ---------

    (If you've never heard of knitting machines/knitting frames before, count yourself lucky. My wife's got three of them hidden away in the basement.)

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