Nintendo Entertainment System

  • Also known as: Nintendo, NES1), Family Computer 2), Famicom 3), FC

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Personality

Audio

Visual

The NES/Famicom palette is a strong icon of the era. NES games tend to flicker a lot, caused by having too many sprites sharing a horizontal division of the screen.

See Also

Design

Library

Protypes, Concept drawings, and Artist's Impressions

Appearances

NES cameos / Famicameos.

Joy Mech Fight

Periphera

Controller

Famicom BASIC

Famicom Data Recorder

A cassette recorder for saving data created with Famicom BASIC, and a small selection of released games: Mach Rider, Excite Bike, Wrecking Crew, and Castle Excellent.

It's just a regular tape player, so, theoretically, could be easily substituted.

Famicom Disk System

Zapper

ROB

Other Hardware Versions

Famiclones

Famiclones are unoffical versions of Famicom/NES hardware. Though initially they were proper copies, they are now made with NES-on-a-chip (often shortened to NOAC), which, though imperfect, are tiny, and cheap to manufacture. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes: some mimic Nintendo hardware, some mimic other consoles, some are handhelds, some are original designs. There are hundreds of them. Compatibility is never perfect, and there are common video and audio problems, but they are cheap and strange and curious.

Pirate Carts

Pirate Carts tend to go hand-in-hand with Famicones. Famiclones usually come with one, and they are easily purchasable in markets where Famiclones are popular. That being said it was not unusual for me to come across them in video rental shops as a kid, even though I'd never seen a Famiclone.

Typically they're multicarts, with names like 4-in-1, or 100-in-1. Also typically they actually feature far less games than they advertise, most of the separate titles being clones with tweaked graphics, difficulties, scoring rules, and other trivialities. The same games tend to show up on all of them too—mostly early, simple, Famicom games—though there are original pirates games too! They pretty much always have great nonsensical labels, with graphics taken from manga, and who-the-heck-knows.

See Also

Dendy family

The Dendy series of Famiclones were made in Taiwan for the Russian market—which never saw an official Nintendo presence in that era. There are ? models: Dendy Classic, Dendy Classic II, Dendy Junior, Dendy Junior II and Dendy Junior IVP.

See Also

See Also

Famicom Titler

PAL Famicom

A curiosity from Hong Kong, which is mostly a Japanese Famicom with a unique method of converting its output to PAL.

See Also

Sharp C1 / Sharp Nintendo Television

Twin Famicom

An officially licensed version of the Famicom made by Sharp. Apart from being one of the most attractive consoles ever manufactured (the red version, at least), it is notable for including a built-in Famicom Disk System, and composite A/V output.

Emulation

Nestopia is the most accurate, and has some really nice NTSC filtering.
You may also find FCEUX handy for the odd occasion Nestopia doesn't play nice.

Last updated: September 6th, 2011

See Also

1) Pronounced 'N-E-S', 'Nes', or 'Nezz', depending on how intelligent you are
2) in Japan
3) a portmanteau of Family Computer
 
 hardware/nes.txt · Last modified: 2017/12/19 20:02 by the_blueberry_hill
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