#### Back to index | # Info for nes

Nintendo Entertainment System / Famicom (1985 USA)
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Bios = None required
The Nintendo Entertainment System (called Famicom in
Japan) was an instant hit with such popular titles as
Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Excitebike.
It was released to the states in August, 1985. The
8-bit graphics were far superior to any-home based
console that had come before it. Strong sales were
were driven by the gamers wanting the feeling of
real-life arcade games in their homes.
The NES boasts an impressive library of games with
over 8000 games (Cowering goodnes), offering a
smorgasbord of titles for fans of every genre.The
Nintendo continued it's reign with other big hits such
as The Mega Man series, Ninja Gaiden, Contra,
Castlevania, Double Dragon and of course, Super Mario
Bros 3. The NES continued it's strong sales with over
36 million units sold worldwide by its official
cancellation in January 1996 but not before releasing
a remodeled NES.
Usage
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Note that the one player hand controller Select is
mapped as Coin 1 (default key 5), and
Start is mapped as Player 1 Start (default key 1).
This makes it convenient to use the driver with a
"MAME" configured controller.
Famicom Disk System switching is mapped to Player 1
Button 3 (default key [space]).
Features
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Main Processor: 8bit NMOS 6502 CPU with a secondary

PPU (Picture Processing Unit). Clock Speed:
1.7897725MHz for NTSC and 1.773447MHz for the PAL
version.
Data Path width: 8-bits
Color Palette: 256; 16 max on screen
Sprites: 64 (8x8 or 8x16)
Sound: FM with 5 sound channels (4 analog, 1 digital)
Video Ram: 16 Kbits
SPR-RAM: 256 Bytes
Rom addressing: 8k
Cart Size: 64k - 4 Megabit
Controls: 8 directional D-Pad, A, B, select, and
start buttons.
Links
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Nintendo - www.nintendo.com
NES World - nesworld.parodius.com
The Warp Zone - www.classicgaming.com/thewarpzone
MESS Emulation State
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The NES driver should run most of the images currently
out there with very little problem. It doesn't yet
support the obscure one-game mappers used by many
"pirate carts".
The NES driver has quite accurate sound and sample
playback. For example, you can hear speech samples in
Bayou Billy, Gauntlet, Dirty Harry, and Skate or Die
that are not present in a few other NES emulators.
The main focus up until this point has been in getting
the NES driver as accurate as possible.
Unfortunately, the scanline rendering method is quite
slow, so future efforts will be focusing on bringing
up the speed.
Wanted: I'd appreciate any info on some of the more
obscure mappers. If you have any of this, please drop
me a line at bradman@pobox.com

created on Wed May 15 07:18:19 2002