Nintendo Entertainment System Turns 25 164
harrymcc writes "On October 18th 1985, Nintendo launched its NES console in the US, reviving a near-dead video game industry and establishing Nintendo as a leader in home consoles. We've celebrated with a roundup of some of the stranger spinoffs that the NES has inspired over the last quarter century, from odd controllers to a lock parents could use to disable the console to do-it-yourself projects like an NES built into a Super Mario cartridge."
Re:Crazy... (Score:5, Informative)
God, I'm old. This was 5 months after I graduated high school.
Re:Crazy... (Score:3, Informative)
Mine still works... (Score:1, Informative)
And my original NES still works. My PS1 or first XBox, not so much.
Re:Crazy... (Score:5, Informative)
NES is actually older than the Summary suggests.
The NES is simply the US version of the Famicom, which was released to Japan in 1983. Same hardware and specs; different plastic package. So it's really 27 years old now..... almost as old as a Commodore 64 or Atari 5200/Supersystem or Colecovision (1982).
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Informative)
Only if you look at the release of each in a different country.
July 1983: NES (actually, "Famicom") released in Japan
September 1985: Super Mario Bros. released in Japan
October 1985: NES released in US
March 1986: Super Mario Bros. released in US
Re:Mario vs. Duck Hunt (Score:3, Informative)
Nahhh the post your replying too was incorrect, the only thing Duck Hunt checked for was the brightness of the square thats all it did.
The screen did not go black then black with a white square, all it did was go black with a white square in the position of the sprite you where shooting at, if your gun was pointed at one of the white squares when you pulled the trigger you scored a "hit" if it was in the black area it was a "miss"
"The light detection flag gets set when sensing light emission from the display, ie. when the cathode ray beam outputs a bright color (preferably white) at the location where the gun is pointed to.
Most video controllers are latching the current cathode ray beam coordinates at the time when the light detection flag gets set - that's not supported by the NES/Famicom video controller - it could be eventually implemented by software, ie. by counting the number of clock cycles between vblank and light detection.
Otherwise, the following trick can be used: Output a black picture, with a white field at the desired target location, wait for 1-2 frames, then check the light detection flag to see if the zapper was pointed to the target area or not. The downside is that the normal picture cannot be displayed during that time, so one should check the zapper position only when necessary, ie. typically only at the moment when the trigger gets pulled."
Pulled from a site that has way more information about the NES then most mortals need to know.
http://nocash.emubase.de/everynes.htm [emubase.de]
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, "Mario" the character was in an arcade game first. (Retroactively named Mario in Donkey Kong, where he was called Jump Man [exact case possibly incorrect].)
However, *Super* Mario Bros. was not an arcade game first(*). "Mario Bros." was.. Where they were in the sewers, jumping into turtles and such from below, then walking over them so they'd go off the screen.
(*) I think it was later. IIRC, there were NES-in-arcade-cabinet systems.