Consider supporting this channel on Patreon: / 8bitguy1 In this episode I take a look at how ROM cartridge games worked, what their advantages and disadvantages were.
I designed the development cartridge for Sega Genesis. It was called the RamCart and used static memory to hold the cartridge image. Data was written to it by access to a couple of phantom registers. Once the final image was confirmed, that image was used in the ROMs for production. I worked on a lot of the early 8 bit and 16 bit games platforms.
@@GodzillaGoesGaga thats awesome! I would love to sit down and pick your brain. The cartridges you mentioned sound a lot like sega channel. But better.
Fun fact: The expansion sound on NES cartridges is still there; it's just there's no pin on the cartridge that connects to the speakers. There are ten unused pins on the cartridge that go to a port on the bottom of the console, and the expansion audio in such games is usually connected to pin number 5. There's a gadget you can plug in underneath the console to bridge the expansion audio into the NES's sound output.
Licensed NES cartridges all looked the same because Nintendo wouldn't let other companies manufacture them - they made the carts themselves, and shipped them in limited quantity to companies that ordered them. This was done to keep them from flooding the market with crappy games, which is what killed Atari in 1983. This is why some bigger game companies made games under multiple brand names (i.e. Konami and Ultra) - to get around the order size limitation and make more money selling more games by pretending to be separate companies.
The multiple brand names were created to get around one rule Nintendo had back then, a publishing company could only distribute 5 games a year. That rule changed when game companies cold make their games for more than one console that actually threatened Nintendos position as market leader (ie. the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive).
I did similar experiments as a kid with my Playstation, but I remember removing a disk would not cause the game to stop unless you navigated a new menu or performed an action that required new content to be read from the disk. Helps explain a lot about how data from physical storage "lives" in computer memory (volatile memory)
Only data in RAM is volatile memory whereas hard drives are permanent storage for data as it can retain data even with the power switched off and RAM will lose data completely without power
Also isopropanol works pretty good. I prefer isopropanol to vinegar because the latter reeks for a while. But if you got alkaline corrosion, you have no choice but vinegar. Generally, it depends on the type of corrosion or filth. Sodium bicarbonate might work wonders with everything but alkaline corrosion.
For anyone who wonder why the Famicom that showed up in this video is different from the usual one we've seen, It's because THAT wasn't the original Famicom. It was a Twin Famicom which only released in Japan and can play both Famicom and Famicom Disk System games in one system. Also another point out is that only the Famicom Disk System have an additional sound chip. Since Twin Famicom contain both system you can hear an additional sound. However, I don't think any cartridge games used an additional sound chip because if you don't own a Twin Famicom, You can't use a cartridge games while using Disk System anyway. Only the Disk System games used an additional sound chip. Update : There are some Famicom games that had an additional sound chip! like Castlevania III for example.
Some Famicom carts did have an extra sound chip in, like Castlevania III as they showed. But yeah the disk system did also have extra audio functionality of its own.
Wait I'm confused, you're saying the red and gold one was the original, right? It's the one ROB matches the colors of, after all. i was also expecting to hear something about that whole legal thing nintendo did with its cartridges and what a butt it was.. and how there were a few unusual ones for patent reasons. also the game genie.
Dude yes. I may have a softer spot for floppies, but cartridges are still magical. Especially those like on the TI-99/4A, where they called them Solid State Command Modules. I mean, that still sounds straight from the future, I love it.
You actually enhance and augment my childhood. You fill in the blanks I had as a child and that enhances my memories of my time with the Atari 2600, C64, NES and so on.
Bank switching on the NES was ridiculously effective. Games that employed that could switch banks so rapidly without error that said games could bank-switch in the middle of drawing a frame to extend the game's graphics. A simple example is the status bar in Super Mario Bros 3, which runs on a completely different set of tiles than the rest of the level. The animated tiles in that game were also animated via bank switching. And the way the NES enabled extending its capability through hardware on the cartridge was much different from other gaming consoles. As I understand it, part of the system's PPU was directly connected to the cartridge, and so instead of simply plugging in an array of memory, the cartridge is actually part of the rendering hardware. This allowed the system to have games that expand the capabilities far beyond the original specs than any of the later and more advanced consoles could.
Yeah I was scratching my head for a moment when I saw a video of doom being ran on an NES using a raspberry pi inside a cartridge. I'd like to know how the nes architecture compared to other consoles in that way. Late NES games like Batman, Kirby, Smb3 etc look like a different generation compared to the first couple years of the famicom
Back in the days when I considered myself a hacker with my Atari 800XL I was able to actually save an image of a ROM cartridge to disk. I wrote a small machine language program in the boot sector of a floppy drive which would stand by for a specific key press. The Atari 800XL was built in such a way that you could insert and remove cartridges without crashing the computer (if the cartridge was not running of course). If you were careful you could insert the cartridge and its content would just show up in their corresponding location in memory (always the same 16K block). My program would wait for the key press and dump a copy of the contents of that memory lock onto disk. Then I booted normally and recovered the image from that disk using another machine language program that would save it to a regular disk file.
I learned the trick for doing the same thing with a VIC-20 cartridge. You would cut a trace on the cartridge board and add an on-off switch. You turn the switch off before inserting the cartridge. Then you boot the VIC-20. The computer does not sense a cartridge so it boots to BASIC. Then you flip the switch to on. Now the computer can read the game ROM code. Then you could just write a bit of code in BASIC to copy the game code to floppy.
Minor correction to "For example all Nintendo [NES] cartridges look more or less exactly the same no matter of what company actually made them". In direct response to the American crash of 1984, all licensed NES games were manufactured solely by Nintendo [and later Konami due to preferential treatment]. This involved a process in which developers would submit their finished game code to Nintendo and then be forced to wait for Nintendo to manufacture the games. This is why all licensed NES games use the exact same gray cartridge shell and mix of pcb designs. Regardless of the developer, all NES games were produced by Nintendo [although later Konami game pcbs were produced by Konami themselves]. THis was NOT the case with the Famicom, the Japanese NES. in Japan, Famicom games were produced by the publisher, of which there were dozens and dozens. This is why Famicom games very greatly in size, shape and color, and what makes Famicom collecting so interesting. Virtually no two Famicom games look alike.
licensed being the key word. i remember 'king of kings the early years' (a really good game actually. well, the camel one was good) had a different cartridge.
Not only that, to ensure compliance the NES has a special lockout chip which checks for the presence of a similar chip in the cartridge and resets the system if the check fails.
Notably, the Tengen games which were actually made by Atari, and were unlicensed and manufactured by Atari rather than Nintendo. Sega did something similar with the Genesis, but EA wanted to be able to manufacture their own cartridges so that's why all EA games on the system are taller and have that yellow tab.
There was a cart for the Atari 800 called Monkey Wrench, and it was made to be plugged in the right cartridge slot of the atari 800 with basic in the left slot. It would add all sorts of features and function to atari basic. Cheers!
Most US NES licensed cartridges were the same because, while other companies made the games, they had to buy the cartridges from Nintendo per Nintendo's licensing agreement. Some unlicensed NES carts were different but most were still very similar because they had to fit into and be removed from the front-loading NES.
Too bad really cos Famicom carts show lots of variety. The Irem ones even have a little LED on the top that lights up when the game is on, for some reason.
Yeah when SNES came out Nintendo really uped their lock out chip game so NO ONE could make an unlicensed game there was only 1 SNES unlicensed game that came out and you had to plug in a regular SNES cart into it for it to even work
Monkey PunchZ The Japanese Master System had an expansion chip (the YM2414) that gave it an extra FM Soundfont that went along with the built in PSG Soundfont on the Master System. It was only released in Japan and you'd need to mod an American Master System to actually use it.
I heard the only reason we didn't get the VRC6 sound chip in the American release was because Nintendo of America didn't want expansion hardware in NES carts. It seems like they changed their tune by the time of SNES
@@knightshousegames It was a bit more complicated. The VRC6's sound channels used the same connection pins as the Famicom Disk System's added sound channel did. Problem was the American NES moved those connection pins to the expansion slot on the console's bottom to make it more streamlined (the FDS attached to the Famicom in a rather clunky manner). Thus even if they got Nintendo's blessing in order to fully port the VRC6 chip they would have had to figure out some way to reroute the sound channel's connectors to the bottom of the console. Probably decided it wasn't worth it just for one game (There were other VRC6/VRC7 games, but they were never ported outside Japan).
My brother had the official Game Boy Cleaning Kit, which came with a cleaning cartridge (with replaceable pads), and a plastic stick with a bit of white leather on the end-effectively a pencil eraser, but you could use cleaning chemical with it (we used pencil erasers to clean battery and light bulb contacts).
A pencil eraser sounds like a good way to rip off the contacts and/or traces as well if you push too hard. I prefer a cotton swab and isopropyl alcohol myself.
Just wanted to say you make fantastic content man, it's so interesting learning about this stuff. You also make it easy to understand for people who don't know much about these things. Keep it up man!
I had a VTech Learning-Window computer in the 1980s. We got two application packs to go with it (I think spelling, and math), which included a cartridge and an overlay for the keyboard. I wanted the voice synthesizer cartridge, but we never got it.
If you look at the MSX systems, which often had 2 cartridge slots, where both slots were actually used. As cartridges not only were used for games, but also for extension hardware such as soundchips (OPL, OPLL, OPL4, SCC, etc), extra RAM, and even graphics chips (for instance V9990), or in rare cases copy-protection dongles, it isn't uncommon for both slots to be used by these extension cards, to be used by for instance disk-based games. Or, in the case of several Konami games, combining certain game cartridges, would enable hidden cheat modes, replace certain graphics, or even be required for the good ending. It wasn't just limited to 2 carts though; using a slot-expander, even more than 2 carts can be used at the same time. For instance combining 2-3 different sound chips with extra RAM, DOS 2.x support and a better graphics chip. Or, in more recent years, for flash-memory based storage such as CompactFlash or SD cards. :)
"If you look at the MSX systems, which often had 2 cartridge slots, where both slots were actually used." If I do this.... what happens? It's okay, when the Times and the Post can't be bothered to check whether sentences are sentences, i'm insane for caring about youtube comments 😊
This guy does such a good job of these videos, that even though I barely understand what he's talking about, I find them very enjoyable to watch. I sure miss my old Commodore Vic 20
Wow! I remember my father bringing home a PCB loaded with 32 EEPROM's that plugged into our Atari 2600. You would have to flip DIP switches with the power off to select the game you wanted. (The first version was a single flip socket that you had to insert the different EEPROM's into but as you can imagine with children, the pins got bent)
All the official NES games look the same because no matter which company designed the program they had to buy the carts from Nintendo. Bootleg games look very different because they were just slapping together something that would fit in the slot.
Tengen, a division of Atari, made their own cartridges. They frivolously sued Nintendo (I don't remember what for, and was probably a subsidiary) and the way the legal system at the time worked at the time Nintendo had to produce the source code for their DRM chip. Years later when Nintendo started getting stingy with their licenses (or maybe a cartridge shortage) Tengen decided to roll their own.
Nintendo was stingy with their licencing because they were extremely concerned about quality control. Companies were churning out dozens of games per year that were crappy reskins of similar games (think the mobile game market today), so Nintendo had to get picky to keep up their reputation. This was just after the console crash of 1985, so the industry was on really shaky footing at this point, so a reputation for quality was important.
I love the crappy offbrand unlicensed NES carts you'd find at flea markets and independent video rental shops. Their weird shapes always set them apart.
10:58 That's actually the Sharp Twin Famicom, a two-in-one system that Nintendo licensed Sharp to make. The Twin Famicom can play both Famicom and Famicom Disk System games, unlike Nintendo's first-party Famicom, which requires an additional accessory to play Famicom Disk System games.
Actually it's the Turbo Twin Famicom. It has a power light, which was the first time the Famicom ever had a power light. Although it still had hardwired controllers the cords were the longest of any original Famicom, even beating the regular Twin Famicom which already had longer cords the the original Famicom. It also came with turbo controllers, the first and only Nintendo console to do so.
I was hoping you would cover how carts went on to the memory maps of the 64k computers, and also maybe a tidbit about initialization vectors - basically how the computer knew to run the cart rather than going in to BASIC. Still good video to complement the tape and disk videos! :)
I only know from the Commodore C64 that the cartridges contain some ASCII characters as a kind of magic word at a specific location. The C64 startup routine reads these bytes and starts to execute the cartridge instead of BASIC if they are there.
If the bus is properly pulled up (or down) and the first byte of cartridge address space is never 0x00 or 0xFF based on which way the bus is pulled to, the BASIC ROM can start with something like this (described using x86 assembler but you get the idea) cmpb rombase, $0 ; if pulled down, $0xff if pulled up jnz rombase
Giana Sisters was one of mine and my brothers favorite games on the C64. Was really the poor man's Mario Bros. Great game, I'd take it over Mario every day :D However, we had Giana Sisters on cassette, not on disk.
This is the hardest thing to convince people on, the cartridges were a circuit board meaning the creativity of what goes on that circuit board is almost unlimited, it's limit is only that of the budget and the creativity of the developers. People seem to only think of cartridges as a dump of rom code, I've even had people argue with me on this, "a cartridge is just a dump of rom code on a chip" but it could be so much more and many companies took advantage of that when releasing certain games.
I miss instant-on. Turn on. Play. Now when I try to play my PS4: Turn on TV. Update TV software. Turn on PS4. Update system software. Hit Agree. Restart. Connect to PSN. Update game. Restart. Load game. Play.
this makes the console relatively useless (by useless i mean: you can get a PC and you can play at least as fast as on a console (and have more features))
Having started to learn to dev for the mega drive I can say that having to work with such tiny rom size, I have nothing but respect for game devs back then!!
I've been wathching your videos for a bit over a year now, you do a great job at explaining things I've wondered as a young kid. I think it would be a great idea of you could breakdown the difference between today's gamecards and yesteryears cartridges. If you did it would be greatly appreciated.
On the subject of C64 carts, I recall that there were a few games up to 512k were on carts, a game I can name that used more than 16k is Terminator 2 for example.
A number of games aren't really possible without being stored on cart. Toki is a notable example of a gamle that does extensive bank switching to flip in graphics. It wouldn't work to have it on disk - both the actual volume of data and the access speed requires a cartridge. There are versions cracked to disk, but they have taken away animations or all audio to fit more into RAM.
13:39... "all cartridges of NES looks exactly the same regardless of the company that made them", except if the company in question happens to be Tengen, then it looks black with a curved top.
Yeah unlicensed NES cartridges look different, all officially licensed carts were actually made by Nintendo, and they required third party developers buy the carts from them for officially licensed games. This was part of Nintendo's access control scheme for the NES, they wanted a far greater degree of control over what got released on their console than other console producers, and got involved in a few lawsuits against unauthorized game production.
An interesting feature of MSX computers should have been mentioned here. Namely one can combine two cartridges for some special stuff or even advantages, kind of hardware cheat codes. Konami was known for prominently using this technique in their games. For example: inserting a Metal Gear cartridge alongside one containing a game called Usas will reduce received damage by half. Another interesting example is the original 1988 release of Snatcher, which had floppy disks with actual game data on them, and a cartridge containing Konami SCC sound extension chip.
I saw this video back in 2016 but I didn't understand much about it, now that I have knowledge in electronics, Arduino and so the video makes perfectly sense and it's highly valuable even these days. Thank you David.
I'm sorry but a twin famicom is not the "japanese version of the NES", it is a completely different machine and it wasn't even made by Nintendo (it was made by Sharp and it included the famicom disk system built in). While it served the purpose of explaining how Castlevania III had more sound channels and voices than the american version, the way the system was portrayed can lead to confusion.
yeah tell me about it what a baka gaijin he's not like us nipponese folk **slices the twin famicom in half with the katana my dad bought me at the mall** **naruto runs away**
you're like this guy chad who used to take my lunch all the time in high school **does a backflip and slices both you and chad's heads off** **bows in the nipponese manner of respect** **steals ur credit card to go and buy more naruto anime books**
omg some sounds are nostalgic.. i want my 80's back!!! ghost busters!! with that reciter voice hahaha omg i was 15 years back then :P I had complete forgotten this hahhaha great Video!
@@Tretheperson what do you mean this is spam? this is a channel that has a lot of subscribers. also they're just people who frequently comment on these videos, and you're gonna call them "spam"?
It's interesting that we use cartridge consoles today. They're the portable Nintendo 3DS and its predecessors. The rumors are the Nintendo NX will use a small cartridge as well since we can fit 64+GB on one of them with faster access speeds than Blu-ray and most mechanical hard drives. CARTRIDGES RULE!!!
Or, pretty much like SSDs on a PC or installed in a console. Both have no moving parts and instant access like the cartridges of old. the Nintendo NX potential cartridges may be special cheap small SSDs in a specific format.... like a cartridge.
I wonder why this would be better than putting solid state memory on the device itself. If it's actual ROM you could go back to no loading times, but that sounds expensive.
Modern ROM is significantly cheaper & better than it was back in the 1980s. The real reason the games console industry went to CDs was the storage issues at the time... There were quite a few JRPGS that never came over to the USA (or came over butchered) because it was literally impossible to fit the translated text into the cart. Ditto higher quality art & music assets. Cost wise, cartridges were marketing for the same ~$60 you would pay for a modern game. The real driver was the data storage issues.
The video is super! Thank you and your guest! You are super cool retro guys! I liked this format very much. I live in Russia and I am a crazy retro gamer too! I collect retro consoles and cartridges. It is very difficult to find especially such cartridges with a sound chip. Sanctions and regionalism have never happened, but we are gradually looking for and sending friends from Vladivostok-Japan. We also buy on aliexpress and do homemade reconstructions! Good luck and Respect!
haha true, cartridges are very indestructible. a few of my gameboy games (pokemon red, kirby, some others) went through the washer and dryer because they were in my pockets as a kid and they still work to this day!
Two things I have noticed in this tutorial! 1. Removing cartridges while game is being played - had done this a tones of time. 2. Blow cartridges quite seldom when a game does not get to load. Not the least - absolute amazed to know the fact that you people also had done these actions back in ‘80 and ‘90’s.
Some computers, like the tandy CoCo, used one set of contacts to sense a program or disk controller and auto execute the cart. If you taped over the specific contacts with a little cello tape, it would disable the auto execute. Then you could indeed save the memory addresses for the cartridge slot to a tape.
11:26 That is friggin SNES-like music, it's awesome. I've watched some videos that demonstrated some incredible capabilities of the NES, like detailed graphics or enhanced sound, playing with code in very interesting ways.
That happened to me as well. There was a video rental van that came round the schemes that also rented games. Someone swapped the internals of an et cartridge into a gorf cartridge.
I really enjoyed listening to him talk about trying to save cartridge data to tape:) I tried doing weird stuff like that with my c64 as a kid....none of it ever worked:)
Audiomancer I saved my Omega Race cartridge on my C64 to disk. It loaded into memory just below the lower ROM bank. Just had to load it back into RAM and execute a SYS command to start it - small basic program did the trick.
There were snapshot programs for the C-64 that copied the entire memory onto the 1541 floppy so you could play cart games without the cart. I had one plus I hacked my Fastload cartridge and installed a warm reboot button, saved a lot of wear and tear when changing games.
My first Atari came with a cassette player that was used to load software. It took a long time to load games because it was so slow. Eventually, some software companies took advantage of a memory location that controlled the speed and were able to cut the loading time down to almost half.
I had a hacked Atari 800 which gave me a built in debugger. Cartridges were easy to copy to disk at first. Later cartridges had software protection schemes that would stop the copy from working. Thanks to my hacked Atari, I could single step through the copied cartridge, find the write protection scheme and remove it. Then I would save it back to disk. And no, I wasn't a pirate. I bought most of my stuff from work, since at the time I worked at a video store that also sold computer software - I got them at cost. I just wanted a backup in case I lost the cartridge.
I was half expecting mention of Codemasters and their cartridges with the extra 2 control ports. Was so cool to play games like Micro Machines on the Mega Drive with 4 players without the need of a 4 player multitap.
8:28 - The Apple II in fact had several ROM-sockets (i.e standard 24/28-pin DIL-sockets on the pcb). You seem to use the term "ROM-sockets" for cartridge slots as well as for general bus-expansion slots, but not for actual ROM-sockets.
Pro Tip: the best way to clean the contacts in your cartridges is to use a simple pencil eraser. Just rub it up and down until the contact is shiny again.
My first computer was the Tandy Color Computer which also took cartridges. I think I tried the same trick as you did, but I learnt quickly that the program was stored on the cartridge and not the computer itself. Best computer ever - I learnt so much on it.
yeah. a CD is more like an optical version of a vinyl record than it is like a floppy (it is a single long spiral that the read-head aligns with and follows). though, CD's do have something in common with floppies in that they both organize their data into blocks/sectors (2kB on a CD, vs typically 512 bytes on a floppy). then there was Laserdisc, which effectively was using the disk as an optical version of a record (no data blocks or compressed digital video, just an analog composite A/V signal recorded directly to the disc).
***** well, those came after DVD. Laserdisc basically predated CD's, and were about the same size as vinyl records and likewise usually stored in sleeves. they were not popular though because they were expensive and not recordable (unlike VHS). when audio CD's came along, they switched over to recording the signal as data. later on, VCD and DVD stored the video as compressed MPEG bitstreams.
In fact we created multi-sided CD's just for fun from single CD's which had one 12 minutes long song and rest of space wasn't used. Both 6-sided and 8-sided shapes played well after cutting.
When I was growing up, my dad had an Atari 800. From what I remember, we could have Basic on the left side and then what game my dad programmed on the right (he made a few, and I think they were taken from books or magazines).
@ 11:00 No, that is NOT the Japanese Version of the Nintendo Entertainment System...!!! That is a Sharp Twin Famicom AN-505-BK...!! The Japanese Version is called: Nintendo Family Computer, commonly known as the "Nintendo Famicom" or just "Famicom". The Sharp Twin Famicom AN-505-BK was made by a collaboration between them with a licence from Nintendo to Sharp to manufacture... I think it is cool though, because it also contains the Nintendo Disk System, that was an add-on to the Nintendo's "Famicom"
If you're refering to the original Famicom as the "red and white model", then later. The original was released in 1983, the machine in the vid is the Sharp Twin Famicom, which had the regular Famicom, plus Famicom Disk System built in. It came out in '86.
yeah, his statement is a little confusing, that is not the 'Japanese version of the NES' it's a special version of the famicom, made by Sharp, that had the disk system built in. On top of that it's a second revision of that system.....
What's really funny, cartridges are starting to make a comeback. The 3DS and Switch are both cartridge based. Although it should be noted that these cartridges are nothing at all like the ones from the 8/16-bit days. The ones of today are basically modified SD cards, which are a storage medium rather than a ROM cartridge. Back when CD's/DVD's/Blu-ray first came out they stored far more than you could on any non-optical media. Nowadays it's gone back the other way, there are SD cards that store 2TB.
While maybe not reaching the same size as a CD you *could* make huge cartridges - they would just cost hundreds of dollars like the Neo Geo games. And probably be physically huge, again like the Neo Geo games.
That's Nintendo being cheap and stubborn. Mobile gaming is the last place you want to carry and swap tiny cards. You can keep a stack of games next to your home console fine.
Cleaning the Nintendo cartridge copper with "Rubbing Alcohol and Cotton Swabs lightly dipped then slightly dried then the cleaning process began, rubbing each (key) if you will", worked great! But your idea is pretty cool never thought or heard of it, yet makes great sense.
wow I am am shocked You didn't know the Atari 800 could copy game cartridges!!!! You'd run a program in basic .So put the basic cart in left slot, then run a piece of software in basic. I had 2 disk drives so no problem there. Run the program and it would then ask you to insert game cart in the right slot. Obviously you even showed that inserting carts with power on can crash the system, after a couple tries in would not lockup and gave you back to basic and the copy program.Which then allowed the game you placed in the right slot to be copied to floppy disk. Its a tiny file. Many game carts could fit on just one floppy awesome for my BBS. Eventually Atari got wise to this practice and put some kind of protection on the carts. I specifically remember Joust would copy and play with no sound then crash.
@@John-ik2eg This method is legit, there was 3 ways to do it depending on the game, the media it came on (cart/disk/tape/etc), and the hardware of the console/computer: 1. Copiers that hid in video/screen memory. This was a brute force method that did not always work and was not popular; the copier code would hide itself in video memory using black text/pixels on a black background so you wouldn't see garbled stuff on screen. It could not hide in any other memory because most games filled up all memory space and would overwrite the copier when they loaded. ''Lerm Tape Copier'' is an example of this method. 2. Simple BASIC ''loaders'' that could be typed in individually or loaded from a collection on tape/disk. This was the most common method as it always worked for supported games and cost nothing. Gaming and computer magazines often printed these ''loaders'' for you to type in, they would load and decrypt the game then you could make a copy of it on tape/disk or hack the game code etc. Each loader was targeted against a specific DRM copy protection scheme, and would only load the game(s) which used that version. Many of these loaders were designed to hack the game to give infinite lives etc, being able to copy the game was a side effect of the loader decrypting it. 3. Hardware plug-ins such as the Multiface One or much more well known Action Replay. Again these were designed for cheating in games, but they also allowed you to pause the game and copy a memory image to disk/tape, effectively creating a pir8ed copy. A little similar to method #2 but MUCH easier and cost money. Many magazines printed ''POKES'' or Action Replay codes for use with these devices, little mini hacks that gave infinite lives etc by changing a memory address or two. Using an EPROM burner was an extreme method that almost nobody did, because these burners were incredibly expensive and far too technically difficult for most people. It required de-soldering the ROM chip out of the game cart to copy it, further adding complexity and expense. Very smart people who had access to EPROM burners are the reason we have ROM images of old cart and arcade games today for use in emulators, but back then there were much easier and cheaper methods to copy a game.
@@sl9sl9 "...eprom burner that almost nobody did..." Err, actually, that's exactly what nerds did, back in the 80s everyone was hand coding in machine code, hacking the hardware and disassembling the ROM for the mighty Z80
I had a heavily modified Atari 800. Behind the slots there were 3 spaces for ram cartridges. You could have as much as 48K in 3 Atari cartridges, and some manufacturers provided 48K on 1 cart. This was in addition to the cart slots. Inserting a rom cart would map that memory to areas that would have been in ram. There were ways to switch the power to the ram while mapping the rom, so you could copy the rom to memory. Some copy protection soon prevented this method. The right slot mapped into a lower memory as I recall (the highest memory was the system rom, which Atari provided source code for!). In the end I had a Frankenstein monster, with a switch for ram and rom and a cart which had some sort of copy protection break. Those were the days you could have a debugger running to examine a 16K cart, and know exactly how it accomplished its tasks. It helped to know a few of the developers too.
I remember at least one product intended for the Atari 800 right slot: it was some sort of expander that added extra commands to BASIC. Never saw one but I remember it being advertised in magazines.
awesome video! The only thing I would like to point out is that there were several NES games that did look different. For example... Tengen's Gauntlet. It was kinda a weird... sloped black cartridge.
@@southpolaroid5 jesus christ dude why do you have to be mean? I mean after all he is talking about his memories, and this channel talks about retro stuff. so why do you have to be mean? I mean after all they're talking on topic but you have to ruin it for them by saying "no one cares"
I remember when I had my Atari and in the Enduro game I got to remove part of the cartridge tilted and put back. The car came to a stop outside the lane. So just hold the button and win. I put a toothpick to hold the button. In place of the trophy began to appear strange symbols, because the game was not prepared for so many victories.
Games on the VIC and Atari 2600 were so primitive that a large portion of code had to go to keep track of and displaying the score of the players. In some games, because of memory limitations, the score either reset or bugged out when it got too high. I love reading books and articles about how early video games were made. I find the subject infinitely fascinating.
I used to be able to get my score on Space Invaders (Atari VCS) to reset to zero when it went above 9999, if I remember correctly. Ah, those were the days...
The Atari had the power to play much better games than we had. The tiny amount of space on the carts really strangled it. You would like this article: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger Also search it here to see some of those games in action, amazing graphic s for the 2600
Even older: the Altair 8800, basically the first personal computer, shipped with a handful of LEDs to function as a "display". Later on MITS, the company behind the Altair, manufactured video cards.
Unless he means it was the first GPU in the sense of modern 3d accelerators, where the programmer just sends polygon data and it does the rendering for you. Which might yet not be the case. I used to think it was (because it is presented as a chipset for 3d and all games had the same flat polygon rendering). But I read somewhere that even the SuperFX is not GPU like, the programmer is not sending polygons. It's still a quite more powerful general purpose CPU where the programmer has to write his own software renderer to render polygons or any other thing he desires.
+Optimus6128 >SuperFX is not GPU like, the programmer is not sending polygons. Correct, the SuperFX is more of a DSP than a GPU. It uses a custom RISC architecture tailored to primitive 3D and advanced 2D workloads, but the programmer is still responsible for creating the rendering engine that runs on it. Back in the bad old days, there was no off the shelf code libraries or engines, everything had to be made from scratch. This is why there was such a disparity in quality between games on a console. You needed a really skilled programmer to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of such limited hardware in those times.
I think the most marvelous SNES (or more accurately, Super Famicom) hardware chips was the additional sound chip that Tales of Phantasia provided. Not entirely sure of how the technology worked, but it did something along the lines of allow for rapid swapping of sound bites that allowed the game to have extensive use of voice acting. The opening to that game is simply a technical miracle, it's so hard to believe that a SNES was capable of having a full song accompany the game's intro.
Thanks, that's the one I was thinking of too. I remember it adding some functionality to the BASIC cartridge too, because I always had to plug the 2 in together.
Awesome episode! As a cartridge lover i remember one cartridge I got for the Commodore 64. It was a cartridge with one button on it and 5 or 6 different operating systems on it. Unfortunately I could not manage to select the other operating systems, but maybe with this episode in my mind and a lot of experience I can give it another shot :-) and yes, I have a couple of old C64... maybe I will make a short footage when I find some time and that weird and fascinating cartridge... LoL
C64 version of Pitfall II only had standard sound but I think the amazing thing was how they fit such a detailed game into an 8K ROM. Kudos to the programmers
For future reference google "commodore 64 space game" and then going to images will give you an instant find in cases like this, just replace the system and genre of game.
Not really. The Game Card for the Switch as it's known, actually uses flash RAM which is set to read only. ROM storage is a completely different technology, which did stop around the time of the N64 in terms of gaming consoles.
I designed the development cartridge for Sega Genesis. It was called the RamCart and used static memory to hold the cartridge image. Data was written to it by access to a couple of phantom registers. Once the final image was confirmed, that image was used in the ROMs for production. I worked on a lot of the early 8 bit and 16 bit games platforms.
Anything a gen z’er would recognize? Besides the genesis, which I own
Probably not. Tech goes obsolete so quickly. This stuff was purely for game developers and not the general public.
@@GodzillaGoesGaga thats awesome! I would love to sit down and pick your brain. The cartridges you mentioned sound a lot like sega channel. But better.
I used to work for Sega.
@@GodzillaGoesGaga make a channel!
Fun fact: The expansion sound on NES cartridges is still there; it's just there's no pin on the cartridge that connects to the speakers. There are ten unused pins on the cartridge that go to a port on the bottom of the console, and the expansion audio in such games is usually connected to pin number 5. There's a gadget you can plug in underneath the console to bridge the expansion audio into the NES's sound output.
Licensed NES cartridges all looked the same because Nintendo wouldn't let other companies manufacture them - they made the carts themselves, and shipped them in limited quantity to companies that ordered them. This was done to keep them from flooding the market with crappy games, which is what killed Atari in 1983. This is why some bigger game companies made games under multiple brand names (i.e. Konami and Ultra) - to get around the order size limitation and make more money selling more games by pretending to be separate companies.
The multiple brand names were created to get around one rule Nintendo had back then, a publishing company could only distribute 5 games a year. That rule changed when game companies cold make their games for more than one console that actually threatened Nintendos position as market leader (ie. the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive).
Tengen made their own carts
@@AemVR because they were unlicensed carts because of nintendos rules about publishing games.
@@AemVR I remember having one of their games and as a kid always wondered why I had one janky looking cart
@@AemVR and wisdom tree too. Was he trolling us?
I did similar experiments as a kid with my Playstation, but I remember removing a disk would not cause the game to stop unless you navigated a new menu or performed an action that required new content to be read from the disk. Helps explain a lot about how data from physical storage "lives" in computer memory (volatile memory)
Only data in RAM is volatile memory whereas hard drives are permanent storage for data as it can retain data even with the power switched off and RAM will lose data completely without power
Japanese Castlevania III sounds freaking cool!!
Chiptune bliss, really well composed
I just fixed an old saga game after watching this video, I never would have thought vinegar would be safe to use but it worked!
Also isopropanol works pretty good. I prefer isopropanol to vinegar because the latter reeks for a while. But if you got alkaline corrosion, you have no choice but vinegar. Generally, it depends on the type of corrosion or filth. Sodium bicarbonate might work wonders with everything but alkaline corrosion.
You can use electrical contact cleaner from an electronics store as well.
@@waltercomunello121 try deoxit instead of vinegar. Wipe excess, then wipe with alcohol.
Old sAga cartridge
vinegar might be save but still a bad idea. A mild abrasive like toothpaste is better.
For anyone who wonder why the Famicom that showed up in this video is different from the usual one we've seen, It's because THAT wasn't the original Famicom. It was a Twin Famicom which only released in Japan and can play both Famicom and Famicom Disk System games in one system.
Also another point out is that only the Famicom Disk System have an additional sound chip. Since Twin Famicom contain both system you can hear an additional sound. However, I don't think any cartridge games used an additional sound chip because if you don't own a Twin Famicom, You can't use a cartridge games while using Disk System anyway. Only the Disk System games used an additional sound chip.
Update : There are some Famicom games that had an additional sound chip! like Castlevania III for example.
Cool
It was also not made by Nintendo, but by Sharp. And it came in two color variations.
Some Famicom carts did have an extra sound chip in, like Castlevania III as they showed. But yeah the disk system did also have extra audio functionality of its own.
" It was a Twin Famicom which only released in Japan"
All Famicoms were only released in Japan. Outside Japan they were NESes.
Wait I'm confused, you're saying the red and gold one was the original, right? It's the one ROB matches the colors of, after all.
i was also expecting to hear something about that whole legal thing nintendo did with its cartridges and what a butt it was.. and how there were a few unusual ones for patent reasons. also the game genie.
Dude yes. I may have a softer spot for floppies, but cartridges are still magical.
Especially those like on the TI-99/4A, where they called them Solid State Command Modules. I mean, that still sounds straight from the future, I love it.
Yes, the TI 99/4A cartridge system was pretty special in terms of memory map etc. Quite a subject onto itself.
hi clint eastwood or should i say clint woodgrain!!!!!!!!!!!!
TMS9900 MASTER RACE will riiiise again! xD
Let's not forget you can add carts to the TI while it's turned on and the system will reboot. Pretty slick.
What the... you are everywhere
The second cartridge port was actually intended for the "Monkey Wrench" cartridge, which was made to significantly expand the capabilities of BASIC.
You actually enhance and augment my childhood. You fill in the blanks I had as a child and that enhances my memories of my time with the Atari 2600, C64, NES and so on.
It is almost like he puts a ROM cartridge in your memory slot, expanding your experiences..
Bank switching on the NES was ridiculously effective. Games that employed that could switch banks so rapidly without error that said games could bank-switch in the middle of drawing a frame to extend the game's graphics. A simple example is the status bar in Super Mario Bros 3, which runs on a completely different set of tiles than the rest of the level. The animated tiles in that game were also animated via bank switching.
And the way the NES enabled extending its capability through hardware on the cartridge was much different from other gaming consoles. As I understand it, part of the system's PPU was directly connected to the cartridge, and so instead of simply plugging in an array of memory, the cartridge is actually part of the rendering hardware. This allowed the system to have games that expand the capabilities far beyond the original specs than any of the later and more advanced consoles could.
Yeah I was scratching my head for a moment when I saw a video of doom being ran on an NES using a raspberry pi inside a cartridge. I'd like to know how the nes architecture compared to other consoles in that way. Late NES games like Batman, Kirby, Smb3 etc look like a different generation compared to the first couple years of the famicom
Whenever I don't know what to watch, I always find myself coming back to your videos
I do the same thing as you
Back in the days when I considered myself a hacker with my Atari 800XL I was able to actually save an image of a ROM cartridge to disk. I wrote a small machine language program in the boot sector of a floppy drive which would stand by for a specific key press. The Atari 800XL was built in such a way that you could insert and remove cartridges without crashing the computer (if the cartridge was not running of course). If you were careful you could insert the cartridge and its content would just show up in their corresponding location in memory (always the same 16K block). My program would wait for the key press and dump a copy of the contents of that memory lock onto disk. Then I booted normally and recovered the image from that disk using another machine language program that would save it to a regular disk file.
Shame you didn't patent it fam...
Luis R how old where you? You must be like 60 now
Shit now that’s impressive
patenting something like that could land you in a lot of legal trouble with people pirating games using the program
I learned the trick for doing the same thing with a VIC-20 cartridge. You would cut a trace on the cartridge board and add an on-off switch. You turn the switch off before inserting the cartridge. Then you boot the VIC-20. The computer does not sense a cartridge so it boots to BASIC. Then you flip the switch to on. Now the computer can read the game ROM code. Then you could just write a bit of code in BASIC to copy the game code to floppy.
Minor correction to "For example all Nintendo [NES] cartridges look more or less exactly the same no matter of what company actually made them".
In direct response to the American crash of 1984, all licensed NES games were manufactured solely by Nintendo [and later Konami due to preferential treatment]. This involved a process in which developers would submit their finished game code to Nintendo and then be forced to wait for Nintendo to manufacture the games. This is why all licensed NES games use the exact same gray cartridge shell and mix of pcb designs. Regardless of the developer, all NES games were produced by Nintendo [although later Konami game pcbs were produced by Konami themselves].
THis was NOT the case with the Famicom, the Japanese NES. in Japan, Famicom games were produced by the publisher, of which there were dozens and dozens. This is why Famicom games very greatly in size, shape and color, and what makes Famicom collecting so interesting. Virtually no two Famicom games look alike.
licensed being the key word. i remember 'king of kings the early years' (a really good game actually. well, the camel one was good) had a different cartridge.
Not only that, to ensure compliance the NES has a special lockout chip which checks for the presence of a similar chip in the cartridge and resets the system if the check fails.
same with Tengen Vindicators, while mostly the same it had an angled end, i remember it was sorta weird trying to remove it from my old NES
Notably, the Tengen games which were actually made by Atari, and were unlicensed and manufactured by Atari rather than Nintendo. Sega did something similar with the Genesis, but EA wanted to be able to manufacture their own cartridges so that's why all EA games on the system are taller and have that yellow tab.
I really like my colourful Japanese cartridges, lots of unlicensed multicarts with no NES10 chip.
There was a cart for the Atari 800 called Monkey Wrench, and it was made to be plugged in the right cartridge slot of the atari 800 with basic in the left slot. It would add all sorts of features and function to atari basic.
Cheers!
Most US NES licensed cartridges were the same because, while other companies made the games, they had to buy the cartridges from Nintendo per Nintendo's licensing agreement. Some unlicensed NES carts were different but most were still very similar because they had to fit into and be removed from the front-loading NES.
Too bad really cos Famicom carts show lots of variety. The Irem ones even have a little LED on the top that lights up when the game is on, for some reason.
Anthony Flack original famicom didnt have a power light. That may be the reason of why some fami carts had a power light.
Yeah when SNES came out Nintendo really uped their lock out chip game so NO ONE could make an unlicensed game there was only 1 SNES unlicensed game that came out and you had to plug in a regular SNES cart into it for it to even work
@@PuppetMaster8707 How do the super everdrive and FXPAK Pro?
That famicom castlevania soundtrack was pretty lit, not gonna lie.
The Master System had some kind of sound card extension port that made some games sound a lot better.
Monkey PunchZ The Japanese Master System had an expansion chip (the YM2414) that gave it an extra FM Soundfont that went along with the built in PSG Soundfont on the Master System. It was only released in Japan and you'd need to mod an American Master System to actually use it.
It kind of sounds like a PC engine game. Dare I say it sounds even better?
I heard the only reason we didn't get the VRC6 sound chip in the American release was because Nintendo of America didn't want expansion hardware in NES carts. It seems like they changed their tune by the time of SNES
@@knightshousegames It was a bit more complicated. The VRC6's sound channels used the same connection pins as the Famicom Disk System's added sound channel did. Problem was the American NES moved those connection pins to the expansion slot on the console's bottom to make it more streamlined (the FDS attached to the Famicom in a rather clunky manner). Thus even if they got Nintendo's blessing in order to fully port the VRC6 chip they would have had to figure out some way to reroute the sound channel's connectors to the bottom of the console. Probably decided it wasn't worth it just for one game (There were other VRC6/VRC7 games, but they were never ported outside Japan).
A pencil eraser works well for cleaning cartridge edge contacts also.
My brother had the official Game Boy Cleaning Kit, which came with a cleaning cartridge (with replaceable pads), and a plastic stick with a bit of white leather on the end-effectively a pencil eraser, but you could use cleaning chemical with it (we used pencil erasers to clean battery and light bulb contacts).
But your wiping the data
@@Hennrz10 I don't think that's how it works
@@Hennrz10 that's.....not how that works.
A pencil eraser sounds like a good way to rip off the contacts and/or traces as well if you push too hard. I prefer a cotton swab and isopropyl alcohol myself.
Just wanted to say you make fantastic content man, it's so interesting learning about this stuff. You also make it easy to understand for people who don't know much about these things. Keep it up man!
"All Nintendo cartridges look more or less exactly the same"
Except them weirdo Tengen or Color Dreams ones.
I guess he should have said "All officially licensed Nintendo cartridges look more or less the same."
They had to buy the cartridges from Nintendo, the unlicensed games made their own I believe.
RBI baseball!!
I remember a Gold Adventures of Link cartridge.
@@birdoffire1549 Yes, Zelda 1 and 2 had gold carts. But they used the same Nintendo mold.
I was this old when I learned the speak and spell had ROMs that my parents were too cheap to buy....
I had a VTech Learning-Window computer in the 1980s. We got two application packs to go with it (I think spelling, and math), which included a cartridge and an overlay for the keyboard. I wanted the voice synthesizer cartridge, but we never got it.
If you look at the MSX systems, which often had 2 cartridge slots, where both slots were actually used. As cartridges not only were used for games, but also for extension hardware such as soundchips (OPL, OPLL, OPL4, SCC, etc), extra RAM, and even graphics chips (for instance V9990), or in rare cases copy-protection dongles, it isn't uncommon for both slots to be used by these extension cards, to be used by for instance disk-based games. Or, in the case of several Konami games, combining certain game cartridges, would enable hidden cheat modes, replace certain graphics, or even be required for the good ending.
It wasn't just limited to 2 carts though; using a slot-expander, even more than 2 carts can be used at the same time. For instance combining 2-3 different sound chips with extra RAM, DOS 2.x support and a better graphics chip.
Or, in more recent years, for flash-memory based storage such as CompactFlash or SD cards. :)
"If you look at the MSX systems, which often had 2 cartridge slots, where both slots were actually used." If I do this.... what happens? It's okay, when the Times and the Post can't be bothered to check whether sentences are sentences, i'm insane for caring about youtube comments 😊
Memory expansion was very expensive back then unfortunately.
My dad had one for his ti-99 and a floppy drive pretty awesome I thought as a kid.
This guy does such a good job of these videos, that even though I barely understand what he's talking about, I find them very enjoyable to watch. I sure miss my old Commodore Vic 20
Wow! I remember my father bringing home a PCB loaded with 32 EEPROM's that plugged into our Atari 2600. You would have to flip DIP switches with the power off to select the game you wanted. (The first version was a single flip socket that you had to insert the different EEPROM's into but as you can imagine with children, the pins got bent)
Nice video
Cartriges were really awesome and lighting fast with no loading from disks or casettes at the time :)
Indeed, it is amazing for fast multi gigabyte games load faster today than games for the C-64 using the 1541 floppy drive.
That's because they don't have to load from a disk in a 1541.
The Nintendo Switch has a cartridge slot for games
@@Aresydatch But it has to load some stuff for whatever reason, even for a cartridge system :I
Realmasterorder 69 likes
All the official NES games look the same because no matter which company designed the program they had to buy the carts from Nintendo. Bootleg games look very different because they were just slapping together something that would fit in the slot.
Tengen, a division of Atari, made their own cartridges. They frivolously sued Nintendo (I don't remember what for, and was probably a subsidiary) and the way the legal system at the time worked at the time Nintendo had to produce the source code for their DRM chip. Years later when Nintendo started getting stingy with their licenses (or maybe a cartridge shortage) Tengen decided to roll their own.
Nintendo was stingy with their licencing because they were extremely concerned about quality control. Companies were churning out dozens of games per year that were crappy reskins of similar games (think the mobile game market today), so Nintendo had to get picky to keep up their reputation. This was just after the console crash of 1985, so the industry was on really shaky footing at this point, so a reputation for quality was important.
Considering the kinds of games AVGN reviewed over the years, quality control was clearly not a priority.
I love the crappy offbrand unlicensed NES carts you'd find at flea markets and independent video rental shops. Their weird shapes always set them apart.
@@knightshousegames quality control was just an excuse. Tons of crappy Nintendo games, original ones and horrible ports.
10:58
That's actually the Sharp Twin Famicom, a two-in-one system that Nintendo licensed Sharp to make. The Twin Famicom can play both Famicom and Famicom Disk System games, unlike Nintendo's first-party Famicom, which requires an additional accessory to play Famicom Disk System games.
I was wondering why it looked so different lmao
Actually it's the Turbo Twin Famicom. It has a power light, which was the first time the Famicom ever had a power light. Although it still had hardwired controllers the cords were the longest of any original Famicom, even beating the regular Twin Famicom which already had longer cords the the original Famicom. It also came with turbo controllers, the first and only Nintendo console to do so.
I was hoping you would cover how carts went on to the memory maps of the 64k computers, and also maybe a tidbit about initialization vectors - basically how the computer knew to run the cart rather than going in to BASIC. Still good video to complement the tape and disk videos! :)
I thought about going into that.. along with the pin-diagrams and stuff.. but decided it was just too in depth.
+The 8-Bit Guy
For _one_ video, yes.... But maybe not for two? **wink-wink**
I only know from the Commodore C64 that the cartridges contain some ASCII characters as a kind of magic word at a specific location.
The C64 startup routine reads these bytes and starts to execute the cartridge instead of BASIC if they are there.
If the bus is properly pulled up (or down) and the first byte of cartridge address space is never 0x00 or 0xFF based on which way the bus is pulled to, the BASIC ROM can start with something like this (described using x86 assembler but you get the idea)
cmpb rombase, $0 ; if pulled down, $0xff if pulled up
jnz rombase
That's actually the stuff I thought you would cover and why I watched the vid.
5:40 totally not a super mario bros copy XD
dilozva gameplays I got impressed when I saw that gameplay
Giana Sisters was one of mine and my brothers favorite games on the C64. Was really the poor man's Mario Bros. Great game, I'd take it over Mario every day :D However, we had Giana Sisters on cassette, not on disk.
I was looking for this comment, and wondering if it wasn't mario that was a copy. But wiki says, mario is from 1985 and Giana Sisters from 1987.
I used to play it on a flip phone.
This is one of the Best commodore 64 games.
This is the hardest thing to convince people on, the cartridges were a circuit board meaning the creativity of what goes on that circuit board is almost unlimited, it's limit is only that of the budget and the creativity of the developers. People seem to only think of cartridges as a dump of rom code, I've even had people argue with me on this, "a cartridge is just a dump of rom code on a chip" but it could be so much more and many companies took advantage of that when releasing certain games.
I miss instant-on. Turn on. Play.
Now when I try to play my PS4: Turn on TV. Update TV software. Turn on PS4. Update system software. Hit Agree. Restart. Connect to PSN. Update game. Restart. Load game. Play.
First world problems...
this makes the console relatively useless
(by useless i mean: you can get a PC and you can play at least as fast as on a console (and have more features))
This is why I stopped supporting consoles, they're obsolete and dragging down the industry.
LoadStation.
turn on pc. click play. boom ez (assuming you automatically have steam startup and you dont have autoupdates on (which 99.999% of people do)
Having started to learn to dev for the mega drive I can say that having to work with such tiny rom size, I have nothing but respect for game devs back then!!
I've been wathching your videos for a bit over a year now, you do a great job at explaining things I've wondered as a young kid.
I think it would be a great idea of you could breakdown the difference between today's gamecards and yesteryears cartridges. If you did it would be greatly appreciated.
This is kinda funny, because at 11:16, you can tell that TheObsoleteGeek is spreading his legs to keep his head in frame.
The groin muscle pain took a few days to subside.
That's what she said.
Tall people problems, amirite ?
k
On the subject of C64 carts, I recall that there were a few games up to 512k were on carts, a game I can name that used more than 16k is Terminator 2 for example.
A number of games aren't really possible without being stored on cart. Toki is a notable example of a gamle that does extensive bank switching to flip in graphics. It wouldn't work to have it on disk - both the actual volume of data and the access speed requires a cartridge. There are versions cracked to disk, but they have taken away animations or all audio to fit more into RAM.
13:39... "all cartridges of NES looks exactly the same regardless of the company that made them", except if the company in question happens to be Tengen, then it looks black with a curved top.
Yes, but I believe Tengen wasn't 'quality' approved by Nintendo either. Wasn't there lawsuits over this?
@@stuartburke2174 yep.
Yeah unlicensed NES cartridges look different, all officially licensed carts were actually made by Nintendo, and they required third party developers buy the carts from them for officially licensed games. This was part of Nintendo's access control scheme for the NES, they wanted a far greater degree of control over what got released on their console than other console producers, and got involved in a few lawsuits against unauthorized game production.
Last time I was this early,
this channel was called "The Ibook Guy"
oh shit what happened my dude
you've been late of late
I'm never on time for these videos :(
Last time I was this late my D wasn't out for Harambe
How dare you! It was called "The iBook Guy"
An interesting feature of MSX computers should have been mentioned here. Namely one can combine two cartridges for some special stuff or even advantages, kind of hardware cheat codes. Konami was known for prominently using this technique in their games. For example: inserting a Metal Gear cartridge alongside one containing a game called Usas will reduce received damage by half. Another interesting example is the original 1988 release of Snatcher, which had floppy disks with actual game data on them, and a cartridge containing Konami SCC sound extension chip.
I saw this video back in 2016 but I didn't understand much about it, now that I have knowledge in electronics, Arduino and so the video makes perfectly sense and it's highly valuable even these days. Thank you David.
I'm sorry but a twin famicom is not the "japanese version of the NES", it is a completely different machine and it wasn't even made by Nintendo (it was made by Sharp and it included the famicom disk system built in). While it served the purpose of explaining how Castlevania III had more sound channels and voices than the american version, the way the system was portrayed can lead to confusion.
yeah that is like jvc x'eye or wondermega is the sega genesis.
yeah tell me about it what a baka gaijin he's not like us nipponese folk **slices the twin famicom in half with the katana my dad bought me at the mall** **naruto runs away**
you're like this guy chad who used to take my lunch all the time in high school
**does a backflip and slices both you and chad's heads off**
**bows in the nipponese manner of respect**
**steals ur credit card to go and buy more naruto anime books**
*runs on tip-toes while leaning forward, with such mighty speed he leaves his arms behind him.*
You done?
omg some sounds are nostalgic.. i want my 80's back!!!
ghost busters!! with that reciter voice hahaha omg i was 15 years back then :P
I had complete forgotten this hahhaha
great Video!
love your cable management in the background awesome 🤤
13:39 except, of course, the golden Legend of Zelda cartridge!
Euquila But the shape was the same. The color was different.
what about unlicensed tengen carts
Logface 202
Yeah...
That wasn’t the only golden NES cartridge...
Shinobi. Was different.
Blowing the cartridges actually makes a little part of your soul go onto the connectors and through the power of love instantly make it work 🥰🥰🥰
10:59 oh look! Its a Sharp Twin Famicom. It's a base Famicom and its disk expansion system in one console.
Wow you bring back the memories.
Are you memories in RAM or ROM?
sure does.
@@Tretheperson what do you mean this is spam? this is a channel that has a lot of subscribers. also they're just people who frequently comment on these videos, and you're gonna call them "spam"?
@@Tretheperson
YOUR JUST JEALOUS !!!!!!!!!!!1
PLEAS LOOK FOR A LIVE YOU ARE MAKING EVERYONE UPSET!!!!!
It's interesting that we use cartridge consoles today. They're the portable Nintendo 3DS and its predecessors. The rumors are the Nintendo NX will use a small cartridge as well since we can fit 64+GB on one of them with faster access speeds than Blu-ray and most mechanical hard drives. CARTRIDGES RULE!!!
Or, pretty much like SSDs on a PC or installed in a console. Both have no moving parts and instant access like the cartridges of old. the Nintendo NX potential cartridges may be special cheap small SSDs in a specific format.... like a cartridge.
we use them because thay are a very advanced technology
I wonder why this would be better than putting solid state memory on the device itself. If it's actual ROM you could go back to no loading times, but that sounds expensive.
Modern ROM is significantly cheaper & better than it was back in the 1980s. The real reason the games console industry went to CDs was the storage issues at the time...
There were quite a few JRPGS that never came over to the USA (or came over butchered) because it was literally impossible to fit the translated text into the cart. Ditto higher quality art & music assets.
Cost wise, cartridges were marketing for the same ~$60 you would pay for a modern game. The real driver was the data storage issues.
JohnnyNismo the rumors are true. the nintendo switch has a some kind of a "game card" or a cartridge.
The video is super! Thank you and your guest! You are super cool retro guys! I liked this format very much. I live in Russia and I am a crazy retro gamer too! I collect retro consoles and cartridges. It is very difficult to find especially such cartridges with a sound chip. Sanctions and regionalism have never happened, but we are gradually looking for and sending friends from Vladivostok-Japan. We also buy on aliexpress and do homemade reconstructions! Good luck and Respect!
haha true, cartridges are very indestructible. a few of my gameboy games (pokemon red, kirby, some others) went through the washer and dryer because they were in my pockets as a kid and they still work to this day!
You covered bank switching! 👍
Two things I have noticed in this tutorial!
1. Removing cartridges while game is being played - had done this a tones of time.
2. Blow cartridges quite seldom when a game does not get to load.
Not the least - absolute amazed to know the fact that you people also had done these actions back in ‘80 and ‘90’s.
The Obsolete Geek showin some love for Chicago with that Superdawg shirt!
I remember some of these scenes
u here? ôó
I should hope so. I didn't drug you and force you to say those things!
Wow, that's a pretty specific denial there, Guy.
man please do for CDs and these video is amazing i have been waiting for long time finally i got your video.....
how long ago did you do them, and was that your IBM?
Some computers, like the tandy CoCo, used one set of contacts to sense a program or disk controller and auto execute the cart. If you taped over the specific contacts with a little cello tape, it would disable the auto execute. Then you could indeed save the memory addresses for the cartridge slot to a tape.
I like your Mr. Meeseeks Shirt!
LOOK AT MEEEEE!!!
Existence is pain to a Meseeks!
Meeseeks and Destroy!
YESSSIRREEE, CAN DO!!!!
the shirt tho
Hi 8-Bit Guy!
Regarding the NES cartridges shape, the Tengen ones are different than any other.
11:26 That is friggin SNES-like music, it's awesome. I've watched some videos that demonstrated some incredible capabilities of the NES, like detailed graphics or enhanced sound, playing with code in very interesting ways.
I remember renting a Genesis game and it wasn't the one inside, someone swapped the internals and that gave me a bad idea as a pre teen
What game was it, and what game was it supposed to be? I'm curious. XD
That happened to me as well. There was a video rental van that came round the schemes that also rented games. Someone swapped the internals of an et cartridge into a gorf cartridge.
who didnt that as a kid? .... no one? just me?
I really enjoyed listening to him talk about trying to save cartridge data to tape:) I tried doing weird stuff like that with my c64 as a kid....none of it ever worked:)
Audiomancer I saved my Omega Race cartridge on my C64 to disk. It loaded into memory just below the lower ROM bank. Just had to load it back into RAM and execute a SYS command to start it - small basic program did the trick.
There were snapshot programs for the C-64 that copied the entire memory onto the 1541 floppy so you could play cart games without the cart.
I had one plus I hacked my Fastload cartridge and installed a warm reboot button, saved a lot of wear and tear when changing games.
My first Atari came with a cassette player that was used to load software. It took a long time to load games because it was so slow. Eventually, some software companies took advantage of a memory location that controlled the speed and were able to cut the loading time down to almost half.
I had a hacked Atari 800 which gave me a built in debugger. Cartridges were easy to copy to disk at first. Later cartridges had software protection schemes that would stop the copy from working. Thanks to my hacked Atari, I could single step through the copied cartridge, find the write protection scheme and remove it. Then I would save it back to disk.
And no, I wasn't a pirate. I bought most of my stuff from work, since at the time I worked at a video store that also sold computer software - I got them at cost. I just wanted a backup in case I lost the cartridge.
I was half expecting mention of Codemasters and their cartridges with the extra 2 control ports. Was so cool to play games like Micro Machines on the Mega Drive with 4 players without the need of a 4 player multitap.
8:28 - The Apple II in fact had several ROM-sockets (i.e standard 24/28-pin DIL-sockets on the pcb). You seem to use the term "ROM-sockets" for cartridge slots as well as for general bus-expansion slots, but not for actual ROM-sockets.
bbc micro also had them, they were called sideways roms if I recall on the bbc
The buttons on the Atari XE remind me of Sweet Tarts candies
OMG that drone sound when you pulled the cart, I swear I could smell the way the vic 20 and office smelled the memory triggered was so strong..
Pro Tip: the best way to clean the contacts in your cartridges is to use a simple pencil eraser. Just rub it up and down until the contact is shiny again.
I mostly watch this video to ear his pronunciation of the word “cartridge”. I watch this for soothing purposes
My first computer was the Tandy Color Computer which also took cartridges. I think I tried the same trick as you did, but I learnt quickly that the program was stored on the cartridge and not the computer itself. Best computer ever - I learnt so much on it.
nice shirt man love rick and morty
Hopefully next episode is about CD-ROMs.
same as floppy only a laser reads them.
yeah. a CD is more like an optical version of a vinyl record than it is like a floppy (it is a single long spiral that the read-head aligns with and follows). though, CD's do have something in common with floppies in that they both organize their data into blocks/sectors (2kB on a CD, vs typically 512 bytes on a floppy).
then there was Laserdisc, which effectively was using the disk as an optical version of a record (no data blocks or compressed digital video, just an analog composite A/V signal recorded directly to the disc).
*****
well, those came after DVD. Laserdisc basically predated CD's, and were about the same size as vinyl records and likewise usually stored in sleeves.
they were not popular though because they were expensive and not recordable (unlike VHS). when audio CD's came along, they switched over to recording the signal as data.
later on, VCD and DVD stored the video as compressed MPEG bitstreams.
I guess, it will be episode about hexagonal and octagonal CD's :)
In fact we created multi-sided CD's just for fun from single CD's which had one 12 minutes long song and rest of space wasn't used. Both 6-sided and 8-sided shapes played well after cutting.
When I was growing up, my dad had an Atari 800. From what I remember, we could have Basic on the left side and then what game my dad programmed on the right (he made a few, and I think they were taken from books or magazines).
6:53 Those are RAM slots, you could add up to 48k RAM, but then THEY removed it as memory became cheap so they all were released with 48k
@ 11:00 No, that is NOT the Japanese Version of the Nintendo Entertainment System...!!! That is a Sharp Twin Famicom AN-505-BK...!! The Japanese Version is called: Nintendo Family Computer, commonly known as the "Nintendo Famicom" or just "Famicom". The Sharp Twin Famicom AN-505-BK was made by a collaboration between them with a licence from Nintendo to Sharp to manufacture... I think it is cool though, because it also contains the Nintendo Disk System, that was an add-on to the Nintendo's "Famicom"
The cord routings on your wall pleases my OCD. Thank you for that.
I've never seen that model of the NES. Did come before or after the red and white model?
If you're refering to the original Famicom as the "red and white model", then later. The original was released in 1983, the machine in the vid is the Sharp Twin Famicom, which had the regular Famicom, plus Famicom Disk System built in. It came out in '86.
Horzuhammer
Ah I see, it is a two in one.
yeah, his statement is a little confusing, that is not the 'Japanese version of the NES' it's a special version of the famicom, made by Sharp, that had the disk system built in. On top of that it's a second revision of that system.....
jaffaman99
The disk system was only release in Japan though? right?
foufoufun0
Yeah, as was the Sharp machine.
While not my favourite to play, I absolutley adore retro consoles as historical pieces for tech and games in general.
This channel is super cool!
What's really funny, cartridges are starting to make a comeback. The 3DS and Switch are both cartridge based. Although it should be noted that these cartridges are nothing at all like the ones from the 8/16-bit days. The ones of today are basically modified SD cards, which are a storage medium rather than a ROM cartridge. Back when CD's/DVD's/Blu-ray first came out they stored far more than you could on any non-optical media. Nowadays it's gone back the other way, there are SD cards that store 2TB.
While maybe not reaching the same size as a CD you *could* make huge cartridges - they would just cost hundreds of dollars like the Neo Geo games. And probably be physically huge, again like the Neo Geo games.
That's Nintendo being cheap and stubborn. Mobile gaming is the last place you want to carry and swap tiny cards. You can keep a stack of games next to your home console fine.
Omg he had a Mr.Meeseeks shirt from Rick and Morty!
I know I love that show.
Cleaning the Nintendo cartridge copper with "Rubbing Alcohol and Cotton Swabs lightly dipped then slightly dried then the cleaning process began, rubbing each (key) if you will", worked great! But your idea is pretty cool never thought or heard of it, yet makes great sense.
wow I am am shocked You didn't know the Atari 800 could copy game cartridges!!!! You'd run a program in basic .So put the basic cart in left slot, then run a piece of software in basic. I had 2 disk drives so no problem there. Run the program and it would then ask you to insert game cart in the right slot. Obviously you even showed that inserting carts with power on can crash the system, after a couple tries in would not lockup and gave you back to basic and the copy program.Which then allowed the game you placed in the right slot to be copied to floppy disk. Its a tiny file. Many game carts could fit on just one floppy awesome for my BBS. Eventually Atari got wise to this practice and put some kind of protection on the carts. I specifically remember Joust would copy and play with no sound then crash.
@@John-ik2eg This method is legit, there was 3 ways to do it depending on the game, the media it came on (cart/disk/tape/etc), and the hardware of the console/computer:
1. Copiers that hid in video/screen memory. This was a brute force method that did not always work and was not popular; the copier code would hide itself in video memory using black text/pixels on a black background so you wouldn't see garbled stuff on screen. It could not hide in any other memory because most games filled up all memory space and would overwrite the copier when they loaded. ''Lerm Tape Copier'' is an example of this method.
2. Simple BASIC ''loaders'' that could be typed in individually or loaded from a collection on tape/disk. This was the most common method as it always worked for supported games and cost nothing. Gaming and computer magazines often printed these ''loaders'' for you to type in, they would load and decrypt the game then you could make a copy of it on tape/disk or hack the game code etc. Each loader was targeted against a specific DRM copy protection scheme, and would only load the game(s) which used that version. Many of these loaders were designed to hack the game to give infinite lives etc, being able to copy the game was a side effect of the loader decrypting it.
3. Hardware plug-ins such as the Multiface One or much more well known Action Replay. Again these were designed for cheating in games, but they also allowed you to pause the game and copy a memory image to disk/tape, effectively creating a pir8ed copy. A little similar to method #2 but MUCH easier and cost money. Many magazines printed ''POKES'' or Action Replay codes for use with these devices, little mini hacks that gave infinite lives etc by changing a memory address or two.
Using an EPROM burner was an extreme method that almost nobody did, because these burners were incredibly expensive and far too technically difficult for most people. It required de-soldering the ROM chip out of the game cart to copy it, further adding complexity and expense. Very smart people who had access to EPROM burners are the reason we have ROM images of old cart and arcade games today for use in emulators, but back then there were much easier and cheaper methods to copy a game.
@@sl9sl9 "...eprom burner that almost nobody did..." Err, actually, that's exactly what nerds did, back in the 80s everyone was hand coding in machine code, hacking the hardware and disassembling the ROM for the mighty Z80
I had a heavily modified Atari 800. Behind the slots there were 3 spaces for ram cartridges. You could have as much as 48K in 3 Atari cartridges, and some manufacturers provided 48K on 1 cart. This was in addition to the cart slots. Inserting a rom cart would map that memory to areas that would have been in ram. There were ways to switch the power to the ram while mapping the rom, so you could copy the rom to memory. Some copy protection soon prevented this method. The right slot mapped into a lower memory as I recall (the highest memory was the system rom, which Atari provided source code for!). In the end I had a Frankenstein monster, with a switch for ram and rom and a cart which had some sort of copy protection break. Those were the days you could have a debugger running to examine a 16K cart, and know exactly how it accomplished its tasks. It helped to know a few of the developers too.
RICK N MORTY shirt is epic!
I wondered who would be the first to catch that.
This is gettin weird
Oh, we're welllll past that!
Best show ever
when will the rick n morty series continue? i really miss it to bits :(
I remember at least one product intended for the Atari 800 right slot: it was some sort of expander that added extra commands to BASIC. Never saw one but I remember it being advertised in magazines.
Vinegar is his favorite "solution"? *snort*
Ahhh chemistry jokes... We have fun here.
darksideavatar ha!
0:29 holy F drive... I had that toy :O
Well, im a computer nerd, but I never really study old computer hardware, so you have definitely earned yourself a subscriber
awesome video!
The only thing I would like to point out is that there were several NES games that did look different.
For example... Tengen's Gauntlet. It was kinda a weird... sloped black cartridge.
All Tengen games were in those cartrides. "The Gaming Historian" has a vid about it.
Tengen wasn't exactly known for following Nintendo guidelines
there is something so magical about holding a cartridge
I found this seriously enlightening and educational. Good work! :D
Personally i have a preference for cartridges over apps.
My first computer was the Atari 65 XE
Shut the fuck bitch up no one cares
@@southpolaroid5 jesus christ dude why do you have to be mean? I mean after all he is talking about his memories, and this channel talks about retro stuff. so why do you have to be mean? I mean after all they're talking on topic but you have to ruin it for them by saying "no one cares"
spam
blowing into cartridges actually damages them over time due to getting liquid in them and corroding them faster
I remember when I had my Atari and in the Enduro game I got to remove part of the cartridge tilted and put back. The car came to a stop outside the lane. So just hold the button and win. I put a toothpick to hold the button. In place of the trophy began to appear strange symbols, because the game was not prepared for so many victories.
Games on the VIC and Atari 2600 were so primitive that a large portion of code had to go to keep track of and displaying the score of the players. In some games, because of memory limitations, the score either reset or bugged out when it got too high. I love reading books and articles about how early video games were made. I find the subject infinitely fascinating.
would it blow your mind if I told you there is a version of Doom on the Vic20? hehe
Have any good ones to recommend?
I used to be able to get my score on Space Invaders (Atari VCS) to reset to zero when it went above 9999, if I remember correctly. Ah, those were the days...
Check out "Racing the Beam" about 2600 game programing. www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X
The Atari had the power to play much better games than we had. The tiny amount of space on the carts really strangled it. You would like this article: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger
Also search it here to see some of those games in action, amazing graphic s for the 2600
12:11 Wow. The worlds first plug in graphics card.
No.
Not by far. As one example, the IBM PC had interchangeable graphics cards in 1982.
Even older: the Altair 8800, basically the first personal computer, shipped with a handful of LEDs to function as a "display". Later on MITS, the company behind the Altair, manufactured video cards.
Unless he means it was the first GPU in the sense of modern 3d accelerators, where the programmer just sends polygon data and it does the rendering for you.
Which might yet not be the case. I used to think it was (because it is presented as a chipset for 3d and all games had the same flat polygon rendering). But I read somewhere that even the SuperFX is not GPU like, the programmer is not sending polygons. It's still a quite more powerful general purpose CPU where the programmer has to write his own software renderer to render polygons or any other thing he desires.
+Optimus6128
>SuperFX is not GPU like, the programmer is not sending polygons.
Correct, the SuperFX is more of a DSP than a GPU. It uses a custom RISC architecture tailored to primitive 3D and advanced 2D workloads, but the programmer is still responsible for creating the rendering engine that runs on it.
Back in the bad old days, there was no off the shelf code libraries or engines, everything had to be made from scratch. This is why there was such a disparity in quality between games on a console. You needed a really skilled programmer to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of such limited hardware in those times.
I think the most marvelous SNES (or more accurately, Super Famicom) hardware chips was the additional sound chip that Tales of Phantasia provided. Not entirely sure of how the technology worked, but it did something along the lines of allow for rapid swapping of sound bites that allowed the game to have extensive use of voice acting. The opening to that game is simply a technical miracle, it's so hard to believe that a SNES was capable of having a full song accompany the game's intro.
The right cartridge slot of the Atari 800 did have a use. There was a cart called Money Wrench that would let you dump a cart from the left to disk.
Thanks, that's the one I was thinking of too. I remember it adding some functionality to the BASIC cartridge too, because I always had to plug the 2 in together.
11:12- Is that a Sharp Twin Famicom?
Awesome episode! As a cartridge lover i remember one cartridge I got for the Commodore 64. It was a cartridge with one button on it and 5 or 6 different operating systems on it. Unfortunately I could not manage to select the other operating systems, but maybe with this episode in my mind and a lot of experience I can give it another shot :-) and yes, I have a couple of old C64... maybe I will make a short footage when I find some time and that weird and fascinating cartridge... LoL
Doesn't the Magnavox Odyssey have the first cartridge games, my favourite is game number 3
Brady The Gamer They're actually just jumpers.
Cardosa Ronaldo cool, i actually did not know that
Brady The Gamer I think it was the channel f that had cartridge games first
Lamarr Dijey yeah just jumpers and a screen overlay.
He has the floppy disk intro.
He has the Datasette intro.
He needs a cartridge intro!!!
C64 version of Pitfall II only had standard sound but I think the amazing thing was how they fit such a detailed game into an 8K ROM. Kudos to the programmers
hey guys! whats the game at 5:24 ? Been looking for it for ages.
Did you figure it out? Ive been trying as well
Quick googling gave nothing. You should try one of the reddit arcade game communities and report back =)
I actually did find it !!! Its called Zaxxon
Cheers!
Thank you and good day to you sir!=)
For future reference google "commodore 64 space game" and then going to images will give you an instant find in cases like this, just replace the system and genre of game.
"Game Systems as new as the Nintendo 64"
Have to back-edit that, because the Nintendo Switch still uses ROM cartridges when it was released in 2017.
Not really.
The Game Card for the Switch as it's known, actually uses flash RAM which is set to read only.
ROM storage is a completely different technology, which did stop around the time of the N64 in terms of gaming consoles.