Wireless Controller Duel - 8bitdo N30 2.4g vs. Retro-bit Origin8

Wireless NES controllers are nothing new but good ones are more recent. Wireless controllers contemporary with the NES were generally infrared based, which meant that they had to be within a direct line of sight to a receiver and within only a rather limited range and angle from the receiver. They also had high latency as the infrared pulses took milliseconds to transmit a full controller packet. More modern solutions use a 2.4g or Bluetooth receiver. Today we are going to compare a newcomer to the NES controller scene, the Retro-bit Origin8, to the reigning 2.4g NES controller champion, the 8bitdo N30 2.4g.

The Unofficial Enhanced NESs - Continuing On where Nintendo Left Off

As we all know, Nintendo introduced the Famicom in 1983, ported it to the west as the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985 and after the last licensed games were released in 1993-94 Nintendo retired the system. But that does not mean that the hardware underlying the system was dead, the hardware was widely cloned and cartridges were still being made for it. Some companies decided develop the hardware further by adding new capabilities, such as new graphics modes and more sound channels, to work with games that would look less primitive than those that could only take advantage of 1983-era chip designs. Let's take a look at some of these approaches in this blog article.

The Official Nintendo Player's Guide - Review of the First US-Based NES Game Guide

When the NES was just starting out in 1985 and 1986, there really was not a whole lot of information available about the games for the system other than TV and magazine ads and the manuals, advertisements and posters included with the games.  At the beginning of 1987, Nintendo began publishing a subscription newsletter called the Nintendo Fun Club.  Priced at $2.50 an issue and continually improving for its seven issues before Nintendo expanded the magazine to become Nintendo Power, it was one way by which Nintendo could connect with its ever-growing audience of fans and game players.  The magazine began by offering tips and previews for the latest games, but the early issues were fairly limited in their ability to provide a comprehensive look into more than one game per issue.  So Nintendo advertised a special book in its later issues of the Fun Club, The Official Nintendo Player's Guide, copyright 1987.  In this blog post I will take a look at it and its significance to Nintendo's history.

Nintendo Board and Chip Manufacture and Third Parties

I have often read that Nintendo, as of the Nintendo Entertainment System and everything thereafter, made all cartridges for its systems and required third parties to buy chips, board and other raw materials from them in order to have their software run on Nintendo's systems.  While this was often true, the rule was not an absolute one and at times exceptions were made.

Nintendo does not make anything, it does not construct silicon wafers, it does not extrude plastic into molds, it does not own factories or fabrication plants which do these things.  Nintendo designs and patents chips and products, but turning those designs into reality is a function of contractors.  Obviously Nintendo has to work closely with those contractors to ensure its designs can translate into workable devices, but it is not correct to say that Nintendo really "made cartridges".  In this article we will look at instances where Nintendo permitted third party cartridges to be made.

Nintendo, Sega and the World Outside Japan and North America - Accommodating Non-English Speakers

Early on, most video games did not need to be translated because the amount of text used in these games was very limited.  Some games, like RPGs, were an exception but by and large most games from the pre-crash era used English when they needed to convey information in the written form.  Even games made by Japanese companies, unless the game was for a Japanese game like Go, Mahjong or Shogi, English was the norm for the simple text messages.  

When console games were large enough to hold a significant amount of text and able totell a story, then for the games that were developed in Japan most or all of the game would tend to use Japanese text.  When these games were released in North America the Japanese text would be translated into English, generally with some simplification for 8-bit and 16-bit console titles.  But when tongues other than English had to be accommodated, things got interesting.

RetroUSB AVS : The Affordable NES FPGA Console

RetroUSB AVS, courtesy of RetroUSB.com

The NES is undoubtedly the most cloned video game system ever, and in the 2010s FPGA technology had decreased in price to the point where it was affordable to implement retro video game systems on an FPGA.  The RetroUSB AVS was the first NES FPGA console made available to the public, and while I have discussed it before on this blog, I have not done a full review of the AVS because I never had one in my possession before.  That changed recently thanks to a friend of mine who let me borrow his for testing and review.  As this console is almost five years old at this point and is the only NES FPGA console you can currently pre-order, I think it is time to see where it has progressed and how well it has held up over the years compared to more recent competition.

Life After Death - The Unlicensed Market for NES and Famicom Games after their Lifespan

When Nintendo and its authorized third parties stopped releasing new games for the NES and Famicom in 1993 and 1994, respectively, the established pattern would have dictated a period where no new games would be available until the eventual birth of the homebrew scene.  However, this really did not happen for the Nintendo 8-bit platform, games have been development continuously from the birth of the Famicom in 1983 to the present day.  In previous articles I have taken a look into Unlicensed Western and Taiwanese developers active during the active lifespan of the NES and Famicom.  In this article I will give a brief overview the afterlife of this iconic hardware.

FPGA NES and Famicom Solutions' Mapper Support Matrices

There have been several hardware devices released over the past four decades which play NES and Famicom games.  Any regular reader of this blog will know that the NES and Famicom have many, many different ways in which it supports memory management.  Hardware devices which support a wide variety of games use FPGAs to configure their logic to handle the various memory mappers used by NES and Famicom games.  Below I will give matrices of each device and identify the mappers it supports.  Both iNES 1.0 and NES 2.0 mappers will be identified.  None of these devices support UNIF format mappers and UNIF should be fully deprecated by NES 2.0 now.

Early Efforts at Online Interaction on Nintendo Consoles

We tend to think that Nintendo consoles first entered the online arena with the GameCube, its Modem and Broadband Adapters and Phantasy Star Online.  In the west, this is the case, but every Nintendo home and portable console (except that hunk of eye-straining junk called the Virtual Boy) has had some way to access the non-local world.  Sometimes these methods were first party supported, sometimes third-party exclusives and there was even an unlicensed publisher or two in the mix.  This blog entry will give an overview of the subject.  I will describe briefly each device or method, As this blog entry's purpose is not meant to give a comprehensive review of each of these devices.  I will include links for more information to sites and videos with more information.  

2.4G on Controllers for your Vintage Consoles 2020 Edition

Trinity

In 2019, 8BitDo released a unique product, the M30 2.4G.  This product was notable in that it was shaped like a Sega Genesis 6-button controller, used a wireless non-Bluetooth 2.4GHz protocol and came with a 9-pin dongle that worked on original consoles and cost only $25 to buy.  While not the first wireless controller for the Sega Genesis, it was the first from a noted controller manufacturer.  Now 8BitDo has released new controllers with the same price tag and functionality, the N30 2.4G and the SN30 2.4G.  I bought a pair the day before the launched and have had some time to play with them.  I'd like to share my thoughts on them in this blog entry.  (All photos used in this review hereafter courtesy of Amazon and 8BitDo.)

Fixing NES Headers and Converting them to NES 2.0 : Putting Theory into Practice!

In my last blog entry, I announced the creation of an evolving database of NES ROM headers, focused on cartridge accuracy.  However, while I can make a spreadsheet for easy accessibility, spreadsheets are not the best way to organize data for use by other programs.  I cannot expect someone wanting a full set of proper NES 2.0 ROMs to manually edit the headers of over 2,900 separate files!

There has to be an easier way, right?
The task of manual fixing isn't slight.
Well, if you read further now,
I'll be happy to tell you how.

The NES and Famicom Accurate Cartridge Information Database

NES and Famicom emulation has been around for over twenty-five years.  In that time, the internal hardware has become very well documented.  NES and Famicom cartridges, on the other hand, have had a parallel journey of discovery during this time, but emulators and flash carts and FPGA devices have not always been up to date with current developments.  The core games which people enjoy with NES emulation, namely those licensed and approved by Nintendo and unlicensed games released during the NES' lifespan, sometimes suffer in emulation due not to bad dumps but a wrong information in their file header.  The header indicates what kind of hardware the game uses, but if the information in the header is wrong, out of date or missing, the game will not play or play correctly.  In this blog article I will explain how headers work, why they are necessary, the need for accurate information in them and how they have evolved over time.  Then I will describe and link to my database which contains the most accurate and up to date information for the NES and Famicom ROMs most people care about.

The Taiwanese Connection - The Source for Many Unlicensed NES/Famicom Games

Joy Van - Twin Eagle

AVE - Double Strike

Taiwan was called one of the four Asian Tigers (with Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong), small countries which had developed economically very rapidly after from the 1960s to the present to compete with much larger countries.  Taiwan embraced technology, creating chip fabrication plants and becoming indispensable to the PC revolution.  Video game consoles were hardly overlooked by the island, and Nintendo was the largest publisher of console video games in Asia.  There was no protection system in place for the Nintendo Famicom, so Taiwan programming firms began developing unlicensed games for that console around 1986.

At the same time, Nintendo was becoming the largest publisher of video games in North America thanks to the success of the NES.  Third parties were naturally attracted to the increasingly successful system, but Nintendo was a hard business partner.  Nintendo required companies to buy cartridges manufactured by Nintendo, required cartridge orders in large unit quantities, limited the number of cartridges a company could release in a year and scrutinized the content of the games to be published.  After Tengen showed that it was possible to develop and release cartridges without Nintendo's sanction, other companies like AVE and Color Dreams entered the market as unlicensed publishers.  But they needed games to sell and the number of programmers who could handle Nintendo's console were limited, so sometimes they turned to Taiwan.

Product Review : Retro-bit's Metal Storm NES Re-release

Reproductions of NES games are nothing new, people have been making them and selling them illegally for years.  Recently the retro gaming market has shown such strength and durability that legitimate companies have felt there was sufficient interest in making new copies of original games.  These games would come packaged as "Anniversary Editions" or "Collector's Editions" and come in packaging and with extras that would easily eclipse the original game's.  This of course requires contacting the rights holder and negotiating for permission to release more copies of their game.  Recently, the relatively uncommon but well-regarded NES game Metal Storm received a release from retro-bit and I had the chance for it to come into my possession, so let me use this blog entry to review the game and explain why I had the opportunity to briefly handle it.

I have often in conversation referred to retro-bit as one of the "Four Horsemen of the Retro-Gaming Apocalypse", one of four well-known companies (Hyperkin, atgames and Gamerz-Tek) that have consistently released garbage retro video game products over the years.  They are hardly alone among lousy retro gaming product makers, but they are the most prominent.  Hyperkin can put out a decent controller, so I guess it has graduated, just barely, from the "Horsemen".  Can retro-bit do the same with its release of Metal Storm?  Let's find out.

Nintendo's 8-bit Obsession with Golf

Golf is popular in most parts of the world with any concentration of wealth.  It is rather popular in Japan, at least for those who can afford to play it.  Green fees and club memberships are extremely pricey in Japan, so it may not be any surprise that many people who enjoy the game may have to turn to less expensive alternatives to get 18 holes in.  Most video game systems have a golf game, or something intended to resemble golf, released for them.  When Nintendo was releasing early titles for its Famicom, a golf game was a natural addition to its sports library.  But Nintendo kept revisiting the sport with its 8-bit systems, so let's explore how its implementation of golf evolved throughout the 8-bit lifespan.

Of Bytes and Borders

There is more to the screen than those pixels or tiles which a graphics programmer had the ability to manipulate into graphical images.  In many vintage consoles and home computers, their display hardware could sometimes display color outside the active display area.  In this blog post we will review some of these devices, try to identify the size of the borders and any special purposes to which they may have been put.

Newly-Made High Quality Controllers for Vintage Consoles

When you see new controllers being sold for your retro video game systems in your local retro video game store and in many online stores, they are typically of the atgames, Tomee, Cirka, Retro-bit, Gamerz-Tek or Hyperkin quality, which is essentially no-quality.  When you buy these controllers, expect cheap plastic, stiff or rattling buttons, thin and short wires, useless turbo options and terrible D-pads.  Occasionally one can find quality products that go above and beyond and try to compete or exceed the quality of original, first-party controllers.  Let's take a look at some of the respectable options for your classic consoles.

Exciting Developments for NES ROMs

When it comes to the NES, everybody at one point or another has emulated the NES.  NES emulation has been around for a long time and has improved so much that often the experience of playing a game on an emulator is indistinguishable from playing the game on real hardware (accounting for video improvements via emulation.)  But NES emulation is continually evolving as we find more games to dump and understand better the hardware found inside previously-dumped games.  In this blog post let me share some recent developments regarding NES ROMs.

Investigating the Games on the NES, Famicom and SNES Classic Editions

Nintendo's latest efforts to "cash in" on its retro properties, the NES Classic Edition and the SNES Classic Edition, have gone very well.  The hardware is inexpensive to make and the games, for the most, part, are held in high regard.  The consoles sell very well, sometimes too well.  All across the three major markets, they were in high demand at launch.  One interesting thing about these devices for me is the software included on these devices.  These are emulator boxes and they run ROMs, just like the Virtual Console for the Wii U and Wii and previous releases for the GameCube.  Let's see what kind of ROMs they use.

NES Clones Reversed Duty Cycles - Why you should Reject them

Clones of the Famicom have been around since the mid-1980s, but clones of the Nintendo Entertainment System were very rare until Nintendo's patents expired in 2005.  Since then, clones have become quite common, all advertising such features as improved cartridge insertion mechanisms, lower cost (compared to the official NES top loader), x-in-1s with Genesis or SNES hardware and more recently built-in HDMI support.  However, the hardware in many of these clone consoles is fatally flawed and will not give a genuine experience.  The flaw comes in the reproduction of the NES's audio in the form of reversed duty cycles.  In this blog post, I will explain why this is an issue, how to detect it and why you should not buy second-rate clone consoles.