NES Classic Edition/NES Mini - Nintendo's Official Emulation Box

North American Packaging

On July 14, Nintendo announced that it would be releasing a "new" console, the NES Classic Edition.  For Europe, it is called the Nintendo Classic Mini.  It will be released on November 11, 2016 and will cost $59.99.  The console is an emulation box will include 30 built-in NES games.

The NES Mini will have an HDMI port for audio and video.  It supports two controllers, which look identical to the standard NES controller except for the Wii connector plug.  One will come with the system.  A second controller will cost $9.99 and will be available for purchase separately.  The NES Mini will be powered by a USB port.  The North American version will come with an AC adapter, but the European version will not (presumably because of the different shapes of the power sockets across Europe).  New games cannot be added to the console and it cannot connect to the Internet.  That dust cover flap is not real and the device cannot work with cartridges.  The USB port is for power only.

The NES Classic will be a small console, it can fit within the palm of an adult hand, but the controllers will be full-size like the original 7-pin controllers.  The cables are rather short compared to the originals, they look to be about 3' long instead of the 6' we enjoy with the 7-pin plug.  The Power and Reset buttons work like the originals (spring/latch and spring).

Nosferatu and the Public Domain

I.  Rights in Nosferatu

Abraham "Bram" Stoker died on April 20, 1912.  When he died, his estate consisted mainly of his literary work.  To support his wife Florence Stoker, the only work with any continuing market value was his most famous novel, Dracula.  Unfortunately, that revenue was not particularly impressive at the time.

In 1921, Albin Grau had co-founded a studio called Prana Films and decided to make a loose adaptation of Dracula.  This film was finished in late 1921 and released in 1922 and called Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens.  It has become a classic film of the German Silent Expressionist movement.  It has widely been considered to be in the public domain, but as I will show here, that may not necessarily be the case.

Video Potpourri

I am going to discuss a pair of video topics in this post which do not by themselves merit full blog entries on their own.  Each discussion will have a link to a Youtube video demonstrating the topic discussed.

I.  Hercules Graphics Tidbits

Someone remarked on the VOGONS forum that certain 16-color LucasArts SCUMM games, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Adventure Game and LOOM, do not support Hercules Graphics.  Earlier SCUMM games, Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders support Hercules Graphics in both their original and Enhanced releases.  The Secret of Monkey Island, which came immediately after LOOM, also supports Hercules Graphics in its original 16-color release.

Memories of Ultima Online

In September of 1997, I considered myself a very lucky person.  I was in my freshman year in college and I quickly fell in love with the high speed internet access available to colleges and universities.  I was looking for a new game to play and Ultima Online was the game I had to play.  I had ordered it and it shipped to my home address, but my mother drove an hour to deliver it to me at college so I would not have to drive home in the middle of the school week to take possession of it.

Starting the Ultima Online Demo on The Second Age CD

In those days, you had to pay full price for the game ($64.95) and an additional monthly subscription fee ($9.95).  I did not buy the Charter Edition (which came with 3 months free), I bought the regular retail edition.  That edition came with the cloth map, the UO pin and rather sparse documentation.  I was puzzled because there was little more than a pair of quick reference cards to tell you how to play this massive game.  Nonetheless, I installed the game on my computer, registered an account, gave my credit card information and began my journey by logging in.  

60 Game Boy Color Games Worth Playing

The Game Boy Color is often seen as something of a stop-gap.  Released in late 1989, the original monochrome Game Boy was already nine years old when the GBC was released in 1998.  Color had already come to handhelds with the Sega Game Gear and the Atari Jaguar, but the Game Boy had firmly established its dominance over those competing systems and every other competitor.

The GB had several advantages over its rivals, lower price, Tetris and a much higher battery life.  Nintendo was designing a true 16-bit successor to the GB, but it would take time.  By 1997, the GB's lifespan was already unprecedented in terms of a console generation, and sales and games were slowing.  So in order to extend the life of the basic 8-bit design, Nintendo decided to add color capability.  Instead of four gray shades, you could have up to 56 colors chosen from a 32,768 color palette.  CPU speed was doubled, CPU RAM quadrupled, Video RAM doubled.  A higher speed Game Link connection and an optional infrared port was now available.  Sound capabilities and input remained the same.

Famicom Homebrew : So Close, Yet So Far

NES homebrew has been around for a very, very long time.  Chris Covell's Solar Wars, which is the first complete NES game developed independently, came out in October, 1999.  This was a mere four years after the NES was officially discontinued in 1995.  In those days, the Nesticle was the emulator of choice for playing NES games, but was very inaccurate at emulating the hardware.  Nonetheless, Solar Wars established an important precedent by working on real Nintendo hardware.

Unfortunately, if you wanted to play Solar Wars back in 1999, you had to modify an existing NES cartridge. Fortunately it uses a common PCB, but not everyone had access to an EPROM programmer and soldering and desoldering tools.  The next step was the release of the first homebrew cartridge the Garage Cart, was released by Joey Parsell (Memblers) in 2005.  It cost $42.00 and included Solar Wars and two other small games.  While it still used a donor board, it was significant in that you could purchase one and play it on your real NES without any programming or soldering hassles.  

Recovering 240p from Video Capture Devices and Putting it Online

Video capture devices are often used to backup NTSC video sources like VHS cassettes and DVDs.  Many consumer level devices on the market have this purpose in mind.  You can use these devices to backup old video recordings, unprotected commercial video tapes and DVDs.  Your retro consoles and some computers also output an NTSC signal, but there is a substantial difference between the two.

Your standard NTSC-M video source uses a 480i resolution.  The picture is constructed from two fields, each containing half the data of a frame.  These fields are interlaced so that the odd lines of the frame are displayed first, then the even lines of the frame.  The eye usually cannot notice the interlacing effect when viewing a CRT TV screen at a reasonable distance.   In NTSC, there are 59.94 fields displayed in each second, half odd, half even.  This gives an actual frame rate of 29.97 frames per second.

All consoles from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo 64 typically output 240p video.  Many computers, including virtually all the 8-bit home computers from Apple, Commodore, Atari, Texas Instruments, Timex Sinclair, Mattel and Coleco output 240p.  Some more advanced home computers, like the IBM PC with CGA, the IBM PCjr and Tandy 1000, the Atari ST, Apple //gs and Commodore Amiga also can output a 240p signal.  All these hardware devices output 240p do this by tricking the screen.  Instead of sending the proper signal for an odd and an even field, they send the signal for two odd fields.  The resolution is reduced to no more than 240 lines, and often there are fewer visible lines drawn and the rest of the lines are filled with a background color, often black.  On the positive side, the images are drawn twice as frequently, 60 times per second.  Because the screen is not evenly covered, scanlines are more visible in 240p than 480i.  This was not part of the NSTC-M standard, but works on every NTSC CRT TV and monitor ever made and most LCD monitors and TVs that could accept a composite input until recently.

DRAM Addressing Capacity

Dynamic RAM is typically used in computers because it is cheaper than Static RAM.

Dynamic RAM must be periodically refreshed by an access to RAM or the data contained within the RAM cell decays.  Static RAM does not need refreshing, all it needs is a steady supply of power.  Computers typically had a method of refreshing the RAM, often tied to the video controller, which refreshes the screen fifty or sixty times per second.  Steve Wozniak for example used a unified memory architecture where the video controller circuitry would access the RAM 50-60 times per second, which was sufficiently reliable to keep the RAM contents from degrading.

Virtually all vintage home computers used discrete DRAM chips.  However, if you look at the printed circuit board of any old computer, you will see memory chips in columns of eight (or nine) chips.  Why is that?  This is because a DRAM chip typically holds one bit of data for each memory cell.  So you need eight chips to hold a byte.  By contrast, you only need one SRAM chip to hold a byte.  Despite the need for a refresh circuit and the extra space and complexity required to interface eight DRAM chips compared to one SRAM chip, DRAM was still so much cheaper that it was almost always used.

Vintage consoles more often used SRAM because it made their boards cheaper to manufacture, an important concern when you intend to sell millions of systems based on the same board design.  The Atari 2600 used 128 bytes of SRAM, but it was embedded within the RIOT chip.  The Atari 5200 used 16KB of DRAM chips, but it was based on the design of the Atari 8-bit computers.  The Colecovision uses 1KB of DRAM chips for CPU memory but also a 16KB SRAM chip for the video memory.  The NES uses 2KB SRAMs for CPU and PPU memory, but its sprite RAM uses embedded DRAM on the CPU.  The SNES uses DRAM throughout, which tends to cause the white stripe issue with its video due to the refresh signal.

In a system with a sixteen bit data bus, you need sixteen chips.  In this system, the CPU deals in two bytes (a word) at a time.  So the first eight chips hold one byte and the second eight chips hold the next byte.  An earlier IBM PC AT system has two banks of eighteen chips each (see parity below).  When fully populated, you will have a whopping 512KB of RAM.  Each socket uses a pair of 64Kb chips, one piggybacked on top of the other, for 128Kb.  So each row of chips provides 128KB.  The CPU sees a pair of rows in a 128Kx16bit configuration, but in real purposes you have 256x8bits.

IBM systems, except for the PCjr., use parity memory.  Parity memory uses a ninth DRAM chip for each eight DRAM chips.  The extra chip is not usable memory, it instead alerts the system to a memory error.

By the mid eighties, some companies were using four bit DRAMs.  Four bit DRAMs hold four times the bit capacity as a one bit DRAM.  So when you used to need eight chips to form a bank of eight bit DRAM, now you only need two chips.

One bit DRAMs typically have a marking on them like 4116 or 4164, denoting 16Kb and 64Kb parts, respectively.  (In this article, a "B" as in KB means byte and a "b" as in Kb means bit).  Four bit DRAMs have markings like 4416 and 4464 for the same respective parts.    They are also commonly shown as 16Kx1 and 16Kx4.

You can find 1Kb, 4Kb, 16Kb, 64Kb, 256Kb and even 1Mb DRAM chips.  You will not find 2Kb, 8Kb, 32Kb, 128Kb or 512Kb chips.  Why is that?  This is because of the way DRAM is addressed.  DRAM is addressed more in a matrix-fashion than a true linear fashion.  DRAM uses address lines just like SRAM and ROM chips, but fewer than you would expect.

SRAM can be had in virtually any power of two capacity.  1KB, 2KB, 4KB, 8KB, 16KB, 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, 512KB and 1MB SRAM chips exist.  Many chips of the lower capacities can be found in NES and SNES cartridges.

A 64KB SRAM chip has sixteen address lines, but a 64Kb DRAM chip only has eight.  We all know that 2^16 = 64KB, right?  In order to get to 64Kb in a DRAM chip, you need the Row Access Strobe (RAS) and the Column Access Strobe (CAS) signals.  So, first you send a read or write via the address lines and RAS signal, then you send the read or write via the address lines and the CAS signal.  Since you are using eight bits twice to get to the correct memory cell, you get your sixteen address bits.  If you add a ninth address line to your chip, you will get eighteen bit addressing, which gives you 256Kb.  This is why there is no such thing as a 128Kb DRAM chip.