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Hello there!

I have been browsing this board for some time and finally decided to register. I am a Sega fan for the usual reasons, but mainly because I had one of these machines back in the late 80s/ early 90s.

Now for my question: While I am somewhat interested in what is called 'retro gaming' the technical details still elude me. I am currently having a rather fierce talk with a friend of mine about 8 bit videogame systems, namely the SMS and the N. Entertainment System.

What I wonder is: What system is technically better than the other? How about colours e.g.? Some developers are able to perform some tricks, so I do not trust the technical specs. How many colours can be displayed on those systems? What about sprites, how many layers of scolling background are supported?

In my opinion the SMS games make a much more colorful impression on me. The NES on the other hand has a range of absolute blockbusters available (which were exclusive for that system due to N's restrictive licensing policy). Oh, and what about the sound?
Could anyone post pictures of the same game on both system so that I can compare the shots?

I don't want to start a system war or anything, but comparing the two machines is something I wanted to do for a long time, and I'd like to hear the opinion of people that have a better understanding of the technical aspects than me.
Thank you so much in advance!

they say a picture is worth a thousand words.... Who needs specifications when all you need to do is look at the picture.
http://raccoonlad.topcities.com/compare/compare.html Raccoonlad has put this really cool site together that is worth checking out.

It's always fun to discuss this.

I'll just say that for graphics, the SMS is more powerful, but the NES is more... flexible. The SMS can have background tiles use up to 16 colours, with one of two palettes (so 32 in total). The NES can have background tiles use up to 4 colours, with one of four palettes (so 16 in total... which gets winnowed down to only 13 usable colours in total because of mirroring). So of course, with a graphic tile taking up to 16 colours on SMS, versus 4 on the NES, the SMS looks much more colourful.

Sprites follow similarly, with SMS sprites fixed at 16 colours, and NES sprites fixed at 4 colours, but with one of 4 palettes selectable. Both SMS and NES sprites can be 8x8 or 8x16 pixels, with a maximum of 8 per scanline, and 64 sprites maximum.

Both the NES and SMS have 64 possible colours to choose from, but many on the NES are unusable, so it's really about 56 usable on the NES. However, the NES has a few registers that can alter (skew) the palette's RGB values, making some transparency/colour filtering effects possible -- but not often used.

As for graphic tiles, the SMS has about 448 usable for background, and 256 usable for sprites. The NES has 256 usable for background and 256 for sprites. However, this is where the flexibility of the NES comes in, since graphics tiles are usually on ROM in NES games, so several tile banks can be swapped in mid-screen and instantaneously, multiplying the number of tiles that can be used in a game (if used wisely.) On the SMS, which uses RAM for tiles, additional graphics must be written in so they can't really be changed instantaneously.

After this, each system has some idiosyncratic limitations to do with graphics, which I won't get into.

As for sound, the NES is more complex and powerful. It has 5 channels total, with 2 square wave, 1 triangle wave, 1 noise, and 1 sample channel (7 bits RAW/Delta). The SMS has 4 channels: 3 square and 1 noise, right? Of course the Japanese SMS has FM sound, but Japanese Famicom carts can also have additional sound chips, such as more PSG channels or even the same FM sound chip as the SMS (in Konami's Lagrange Point.)

There you go. If anybody spots some major errors in what I wrote, please correct me.

Youltar wrote

they say a picture is worth a thousand words.... Who needs specifications when all you need to do is look at the picture.
http://raccoonlad.topcities.com/compare/compare.html Raccoonlad has put this really cool site together that is worth checking out.

That site says it all! :D
But, Micromachines is missing there!

ccovell wrote

As for sound, the NES is more complex and powerful. It has 5 channels total, with 2 square wave, 1 triangle wave, 1 noise, and 1 sample channel (7 bits RAW/Delta). The SMS has 4 channels: 3 square and 1 noise, right? Of course the Japanese SMS has FM sound, but Japanese Famicom carts can also have additional sound chips, such as more PSG channels or even the same FM sound chip as the SMS (in Konami's Lagrange Point.)

There you go. If anybody spots some major errors in what I wrote, please correct me.

Major? Definitely not. I was just wondering whether the VRCVII chip used in Lagrange point really is an YM2413 in disguise?
http://www.tripoint.org/kevtris/nes/vrcvii.txt doesn't mention that, though it does mention that the VRCVII has most of its instruments fixed, just as on the Sega FM.

all i have to say is, compare the graphics on double dragon, master system is way better looking, nes versions colors and everything are really bland, especialy the music.

As I understand it, VCR7 is YM2413 with modified ROM data and no rhythm channels. Then again, Chris may be referring to a game with a YM2413 - I think there were several VCR7 games.

ccovell wrote

It's always fun to discuss this.

Sprites follow similarly, with SMS sprites fixed at 16 colours, and NES sprites fixed at 4 colours, but with one of 4 palettes selectable. Both SMS and NES sprites can be 8x8 or 8x16 pixels, with a maximum of 8 per scanline, and 64 sprites maximum.

It's probably also worth mentioning that on both system one of the colors is actually not a color at all, but a key for the graphics chip to not draw that pixel and have the background show through. That doesn't make a huge world of difference on the SMS, 15 colors is not much less than 16, but for the NES an already limited paletee of four colors becomes just three. This did give rise to some very distinctive pixel art styles being developed on the NES.

What's this about the NES and unusable color palette values?

Ian Covelli wrote

all i have to say is, compare the graphics on double dragon, master system is way better looking, nes versions colors and everything are really bland, especialy the music.

The NES had a more techically advanced sound chip, with the wider choice of waveforms, more bass range, and of course the PCM channel.

In general, though I find I prefer the sound of most SMS games. The vast majority of NES music seemed to have a 'plinky' quality that I found sort of irritating. I think this may have to do with the fact that the NES's sound chip had built in volume envelopes and NES musicians tended to rely on them rather than manually control their volume envelopes (i.e. fade in and out) like you had to do with the SMS. Consequently, many NES games had a lot of staccato 'bleeps' in their music, probably partly because the sound chip's envelopes didn't have attack (fade in) values, only decay (fade out), and seemed to have a limited range of envelope length choices. That's all subjective, of course, I think some NES fans find the SMS's lack of tone variety to sound rather 'flat'.

The PCM channel was radical, though, I with the SMS had had that instead of having to do CPU-hogging PSG tricks to play samples.

I'm utterly, utterly biased - but for me, the master system outdoes the nes in near every department. I can't talk about technical specifics, but I know what I like. ;)

Yes, the nes (apparently) seemed to get a lot of very enjoyable games made for it - but it isn't as if the master didn't, is it?!?
The graphics clearly work far better for sega's console, and I don't really notice the sound limitations, as a fair bit of the game music is so brilliantly composed and well utilised - which must mask those flaws expertly. All this helps to create the unique atmosphere of a game, too.

The best games on sms are the best testament to what 8-bit consoles can acheive, in my opinion.
Some even seem almost worthy of their 16-bit descendents - again, that's probably all in the look and overall feel of it.

Heliophobe wrote

What's this about the NES and unusable color palette values?

Take a look at the table of palette values I made for my NES Tech FAQ here: http://www.zyx.com/chrisc/NESTechFAQ.html#accuratepal

You'll see that some of the values are just black. The NES' palette works on NTSC chrominance & luminance, while the SMS works on RGB (which I prefer, of course). The only upshot to the NES' palette is that you can get about 6 shades of grey -- including black & white -- compared to the SMS' 4.

ccovell wrote

Heliophobe wrote

What's this about the NES and unusable color palette values?

Take a look at the table of palette values I made for my NES Tech FAQ here: http://www.zyx.com/chrisc/NESTechFAQ.html#accuratepal

You'll see that some of the values are just black. The NES' palette works on NTSC chrominance & luminance, while the SMS works on RGB (which I prefer, of course). The only upshot to the NES' palette is that you can get about 6 shades of grey -- including black & white -- compared to the SMS' 4.

Interesting, it's more like the Atari VCS and 8-bit computer's color palettes then.... I got quite familiar with that palette model (hue/luminence) when I started programming in Atari basic 20 years ago, and I had a hard time understanding the RGB concept, but now it seems strange that any consoles ever used anything but RGB.

I find the music criticisms unnecessary - a well played PSG sounds vastly superior to a generic NES tune, but there's good and bad on both.

The graphics are more of an issue - simply having a bigger palette, and hardware that supports horizontal scrolling without junk showing up on the other side of the screen, makes the SMS look and feel a generation later than NES.

The decision to expose more hardware on the cartridge port was an interesting tactic. It allowed for on-cart sound chips, mid-screen tilemap switching and other graphical tricks. It also meant that in a market where ROMs were expensive, requiring uncompressed graphics data meant that most NES games ended up cutting back on graphics, and on-cart chippery has always resulted in expensive games.

On the non-technical side, the fact of the NES's market domination in Japan and the US sadly means it has more good games - and more bad games. There's not much we can do about that.

Maxim wrote

I find the music criticisms unnecessary - a well played PSG sounds vastly superior to a generic NES tune, but there's good and bad on both.

Yes, a good melody is a good melody, no matter the hardware. But from a musician's (and listener's) standpoint, more channels means more complex melodies, and more varied waveforms means more complex sounds. The fact that the NES' square waves can change their duty cycles, for example, means that they can simulate a wider range of instruments than a fixed square wave; from something sounding like a flute to something more like a trumpet. There is fantastic music on both systems, but I still prefer the sound of the NES chip.

Maxim wrote

The decision to expose more hardware on the cartridge port was an interesting tactic. It allowed for on-cart sound chips, mid-screen tilemap switching and other graphical tricks. It also meant that in a market where ROMs were expensive, requiring uncompressed graphics data meant that most NES games ended up cutting back on graphics, and on-cart chippery has always resulted in expensive games.

True, Ni****do always insisted on cutting costs for the razor, and making customers pay more for the razor blades. However, an NES game can use either CHR-ROM or RAM (like the SMS), depending on what the programmers need for the game. And so the graphics were often compressed.

Erm, I like both systems ^ ^

I don't know much about tech specs and nothing about programming but as already mentioned the SMS games were more colorful and the NES has a very nice sound chip but I really like SMS music too.

Because of the different powerful special chips they included to the NES cartridges, the possibilities on NES became bigger during its life span. The first NES games from 1983 missed e.g. scrolling, colored backgrounds, etc. They're still fantastic games though! Later games like e.g. Super Mario Bros. 3 technically almost look like SMS games.

That there are more games and thus more classics for the NES isn't really surprising as the machine was much more successful. The SMS still has a lot of unique games that make the system comparable.

...it's the Dreamcast or GameCube of the 8bit era : )

While both systems would earn an active scene, it seems that today's independent SMS dev scene seems to be more active than the NES dev scene - must be because of this very nice community here ^ ^

Maxim wrote

I find the music criticisms unnecessary - a well played PSG sounds vastly superior to a generic NES tune, but there's good and bad on both.

In a thread contrasting the two systems I don't think it's out of place to point out the technical reasons behind the characteristic sounds of each system or even how the typical games made use of it. Each system had its musical masterpieces of course, but I'm referring more to the overall impression I've had from playing a variety of games on both systems. To my ear, I've found that the typical sounding SMS game is more pleasing than the typical sounding NES, due to the very sharp staccatto notes and bleeps that the NES's music and sound effects library is full of. That is subjective, of course, NES fans might find the lack of bass and tone variation on the SMS to be a major strike against. I got the impression that the thread poster wanted not only to understand the technical specs, but dig a little bit deeper and understand how they affected the games.

I would also say that SMS games sound better than Colecovision games, on average, even though the sound chips are nearly identical. For the Colecovision games that had music, most seemed to have that calliope sound due to the fact that very few of these games did anything with the volume envelopes other than to simply switch the volume on and off for each note (see: the colecovision rendition of Suicide is Painless).

Back to the technical differences:

If there was one gaping hole in the SMS's abilities it was the lack of the ability to flip sprite tiles. On the NES, you could use the image data for a left-facing character and flip it around so it displayed on the screen as a right-facing character, and you could also flip tiles vertically. On the SMS, sprite images could not be flipped so you had to store images for both orientations in video ram.

This ate up twice as much vram as would be needed if flipping were possible (four times if you need left/right/up/down flipping) which often meant fewer frame of animation, fewer different types of enemies on the screen, or simplified backgrounds to free up more tiles for the sprites. It could also mean more space wasted on the rom as some games stored left and right facing sprites in ROM so it could send as many new tiles into video ram as possible without having to wait for the CPU to flip the tiles in software.

Background tiles, curiously, could be flipped.

To answer a specific question in the original post, both systems have only one scroll layer, but with both it is possible to use certain tricks to fake having multiple scroll layers, such as adjusting the scroll positions at different scanlines, using sprites to simulate a static starfield behind the main scroll layer, or using a repeating pattern in the background and updating the tiles in that pattern so they seem to scroll at a different speed than the rest of the screen (see: the Breakout game in the arcade classics collection)

I think NES sound is generally superior. Add-on sound chips for the Japanese market notwithstanding, there are technical reasons for NES superiority. I wouldn't ascribe that much importance to the PCM channel, though, since it is very tricky for a limited 8-bit system to control. In most cases, it was quite far from what we usually intend by the term "PCM".
The one problem with NES sound is the low-frequency "hum" which can often be heard in the games. In my youth, I was so weaned on NES that I didn't really note it, but nowadays it can get tiring after a while. It is probably due to musicians employing the triangle channel for bass lines, and what with triangle waves having very little "character" (for a lack of better words) or energy, it never surpasses more than a hum.
The Master System sound chip is around five years older than the NES one, and thus a very simple one. Its main distinctive quality is its two different noise settings, which has really never been tapped. Listen to Hally's submission to this spring's music contest for an example.
This is also what makes MS music less interesting than NES music. There has been a much more limited number of musicians and corresponding sound drivers than on the NES. The repertoire consists mainly of Sega's inhouse musicians and Mr. Furniss for later European releases. Jeroen Tel's soundtrack to The Flash is one example of fresh blood being injected into the otherwise unvaried sound climate of the MS, but that only goes to show that there was not much room for variation here. I also suspect that Sega's musicians soon tired of the internal PSG, instead concentrating their attention to the FM sound, resorting to a quick port to the PSG afterwards. That's only my suspicion, but it serves as an explanation.

OTOH, it should be noted that the differences between the MS and the NES in the sound department are not so great as to make any of them come close to the C64's SID chip in terms of power and variation.

Heliophobe wrote

To my ear, I've found that the typical sounding SMS game is more pleasing than the typical sounding NES, due to the very sharp staccatto notes and bleeps that the NES's music and sound effects library is full of. That is subjective, of course, NES fans might find the lack of bass and tone variation on the SMS to be a major strike against.

Yes, unfortunately, many mid-80s NES and Famicom games have awful, high-pitched, repetitive music. I call it "Bandai Syndrome" because most of their early games had horrible music. In the 80s, most Japanese NES musicians focused on simple or good melodies that repeated too often, and didn't concentrate on instrumentation. On the other hand, I always loved the European musicians who made great melodies and interesting effects in NES games. Even when Japanese musicians were still working with bleeps and bloops, the folks at Rare and Software Creations (Follin Brothers) were making distinctive music.

idrougge wrote

I wouldn't ascribe that much importance to the PCM channel, though, since it is very tricky for a limited 8-bit system to control. In most cases, it was quite far from what we usually intend by the term "PCM".
The one problem with NES sound is the low-frequency "hum" which can often be heard in the games. In my youth, I was so weaned on NES that I didn't really note it, but nowadays it can get tiring after a while. It is probably due to musicians employing the triangle channel for bass lines, and what with triangle waves having very little "character" (for a lack of better words) or energy, it never surpasses more than a hum.

I do disagree here. The NES' PCM channel can either be fed a raw waveform, or triggered to play samples via DMA. This meant that either single samples (such as a drum hit) or looped samples (like guitar sounds) could be played, with the only necessary interaction from the program being the initial sample trigger. So the sample channel (used in the late 80s and 90s especially) added a whole dimension to the sound of many games.

So, I guess it's time to point to some good examples. Please check out Sunsoft's music, such as the fabulous Journey to Silius, and also Recca for some great use of the sample channel.

As for the triangle channel, yes it is sine-like, but it does get used for more than a continuous hum. Please check out some tunes like the jazzy Code Name: Viper, and especially the work of the European musicians like the Follins' Silver Surfer, Solstice; Jeroen Tel's Robocop 3, Overlord, and Neil Baldwin's Hero Quest, Magician, and James Bond Jr..

There, I've listed some great music to try out. Pick up an NSF player and some NSF tunes (like from www.zophar.net ) and form your own opinions.

The NES's triangle channel is really more, um, ziggurat shaped. With 16 steps rather than a smooth line. So that's where the volume control for it went, heheh. It can only be on or off. But the harmonics caused by those steps are kinda distinctive when it plays the really low frequencies.

One thing that's easy to appreciate on the SMS sound is that it has volume control for all the melodic channels. That can make a difference.

Seems like the NES's CPU would be faster, though there's no direct comparison I'd know of. From what I understand of the Z80, it uses 4 clocks to 1 instruction cycle versus 1:1 on 6502. The SMS was built with more RAM though, so that should take the edge off a bit, heheh.

It does seem really odd to me that the SMS flips background tiles, rather than sprites. That could allow for some pretty diverse background graphics though.

Memblers wrote

The NES's triangle channel is really more, um, ziggurat shaped. With 16 steps rather than a smooth line. So that's where the volume control for it went, heheh. It can only be on or off. But the harmonics caused by those steps are kinda distinctive when it plays the really low frequencies.

Ah, so the triangle channel is really just like a square wave channel with a self-modulating volume. Interesting.

Memblers wrote

Seems like the NES's CPU would be faster, though there's no direct comparison I'd know of. From what I understand of the Z80, it uses 4 clocks to 1 instruction cycle versus 1:1 on 6502.

I don't understand what you mean by that. Z80 instructions take more cycles to execute than their 6502 counterparts (where the 6502 has a cooresponding instruction), but the 6502 doesn't execute any instructions in a single cycle. The 6502 executes most instructions in the 2-6 cycle range, the Z80 in the 4-15 range with some special instructions taking up to 23.

Unless you were thinking that one 'cycle' on a z80 (aka t-states) is actually four clock pulses, which is not the case.

It's difficult to judge the speed, the clock speed of the NES is about half that of the SMS's, but the 6502 probably executes about the same number of instructions per second as the SMS (or slightly more) because the 6502 executes most opcodes in less time that the Z80's. However, the Z80's richer opcode set means that it can do more with fewer opcodes.

I would say the SMS has the speed edge but it may depend on the particular task.

Heliophobe wrote

Unless you were thinking that one 'cycle' on a z80 (aka t-states) is actually four clock pulses, which is not the case.

I was thinking more like 4 t-states to an instruction cycle (memory access). So the t-states would be the clock.

In that case, something like a JMP instruction would be 12 clocks (t-states) on Z80 versus 3 clocks on 6502. Thus about twice as fast on NES, though that's just a useless operation by itself.

Probably a more useful comparison would be how fast both systems can write to VRAM. Ignoring overhead etc., the absolute fastest on NES is 6 cycles per byte (using self-modifying code in RAM), but maybe around 11-13 cycles for more casual ways. Using unrolled loops in both cases.

I am overwheImed. I never expected so detailed and thorough information. Thank you very much, this is something I always wanted to know and now I think I have a better understanding of the technical details concerning the two systems. I especially appriciate the Link from Youltar and the detailed explanation from ccovell, but others made excellent contributions as well.

It's interesting to note how it was sufficient for some games to be reduced in colours and resolution to make a conversion on the SMS, while on the NES some graphics had to be redrawn completely. Mortal Kombat and SF2 come to mind and I like how the garage door in Double Dragon is shamefully closed on the NES conversion so they did not have to go through the trouble of showing the sports car.

Also I never knew there were so many sega in-house productions available for the 'rival' console. Afterburner, Altered Beast, even Shinobi and others came as a surprise to me, as these games were meant to make the difference and win fans over to sega. They probably came months after their release on the SMS and maybe Sega had priorities set to gain money from conversions of their coin-ups rather than win the system war, who knows.

As for the sound I do not have enough experience with the NES sound to compare them as those were not so common here in Europe. All I can say is that the SMS had that specific "metallic" (for lack of a better word) sound.
Rather plain, hardly modulated, but at the same time very "videogame-ish" as opposed to the computers (C64) I was used to. Well, that is difficult to describe.

Anyway, thank you for all the info! You really helped me a lot with that.

Karo wrote

It's interesting to note how it was sufficient for some games to be reduced in colours and resolution to make a conversion on the SMS, while on the NES some graphics had to be redrawn completely. Mortal Kombat and SF2 come to mind and I like how the garage door in Double Dragon is shamefully closed on the NES conversion so they did not have to go through the trouble of showing the sports car.

Also I never knew there were so many sega in-house productions available for the 'rival' console. Afterburner, Altered Beast, even Shinobi and others came as a surprise to me, as these games were meant to make the difference and win fans over to sega. They probably came months after their release on the SMS and maybe Sega had priorities set to gain money from conversions of their coin-ups rather than win the system war, who knows.

It must be mentioned that Mortal Kombat and SF2 on the NES (Famicom) were pirate productions, and were in no way connected to or condoned by Midway or Capcom. So, it's not really fair to compare those.

And as for the rivals, it seems that in Japan it's "okay" to license a production to a rival system. This continued into the Megadrive's era, with Sega arcade conversions showing up on the PC-Engine in dazzling conversions. After Burner II, Out Run, Power Drift, Shinobi, (Space Harrier)...

Memblers wrote

Probably a more useful comparison would be how fast both systems can write to VRAM. Ignoring overhead etc., the absolute fastest on NES is 6 cycles per byte (using self-modifying code in RAM), but maybe around 11-13 cycles for more casual ways. Using unrolled loops in both cases.

On SMS the best way (as far as I know) is unrolled OUTI instruction blocks, which comes to 12 cycles per byte or 291KB/s. That's pretty mch identical.

Memblers wrote

Heliophobe wrote

Unless you were thinking that one 'cycle' on a z80 (aka t-states) is actually four clock pulses, which is not the case.

I was thinking more like 4 t-states to an instruction cycle (memory access). So the t-states would be the clock.

In that case, something like a JMP instruction would be 12 clocks (t-states) on Z80 versus 3 clocks on 6502. Thus about twice as fast on NES, though that's just a useless operation by itself.

Probably a more useful comparison would be how fast both systems can write to VRAM. Ignoring overhead etc., the absolute fastest on NES is 6 cycles per byte (using self-modifying code in RAM), but maybe around 11-13 cycles for more casual ways. Using unrolled loops in both cases.

Here's how I understand it, someone smarter than me feel free to chime in and correct me:

Z80 timing charts often use M-cycles and T-states, but generally t-states are all we use on both the emulator and programming side, at least on the SMS. An M cycle (as I understand it) is a memory access (including port i/o) so an instructions M code count is a count of how many memory accesses an opcode can execute. However, M-cycle count does not determine execution speed, t-state count does. M-cycle count would only be a restrictive factor if there were some limit on how often a memory fetch could occur , such as if you had a slow memory bus or if you are operating in a system that has DMA access and DMA is capable of stalling the Z80 when it needs to fetch a byte of RAM.

Therefore, there isn't a 1:4 coorespondence between memory fetches and t-states. Take, for example: add hl,de. The instruction does a 16 bit add of two internal register, and takes 7 t-states, although it only does a single fetch for the opcode itself. Or jp nnnn, which does a jump to an absolute address. That does three memory fetches, but completes in ten t-states, not twelve. Of course there isn't a 1:1 coorelation on the 6502, but it seems more consistant, generally coming out to the number of memory access plus 1, with a few other variables.

I'm looking at the instruction tables on both and it looks like on average, where there are comparable instructions, the 6502 instruction is about 2-4 times faster, or 1 to 2 times faster, taking clock speeds into account. It's really hard to compare the two, though. The design philosophy between the two are quite different. The Z80 has more registers and a larger instructions set to minimize the number of memory accesses, while the 6502 is optimized to execute more instructions and do memory fetches more quickly. I'd venture to guess that the 6502 might be optimized to handle repetative, memory intensive tasks with unrolled loops better while the z80 is better at complex algorithms, but that might not be right either.

Quote

...and I like how the garage door in Double Dragon is shamefully closed on the NES conversion so they did not have to go through the trouble of showing the sports car.

In every production there are tradeoffs that must be made due to limited cartridge space. In the case of the of Double Dragon, both the SMS and NES versions were 256k, but the NES version had some extras not in the arcade or SMS version that took some extra space, as well as the larger versions of the character sprites for VS. mode, so they felt they had to simplify some of the backgrounds.

There's no good reason for the SMS version not to have had the garage door initially closed and then open when the players appear, like in the arcade version. That was just lazy.

Heh, the graphics in Fantasy Zone look better in the NES version. How ironic.

lCEknight wrote

Heh, the graphics in Fantasy Zone look better in the NES version. How ironic.

You think? I haven't seen NES Fantasy Zone in motion but looking at screenshots it seems less colorful (naturally) but the backgrounds are a bit more detailed. I do find it interesting that the NES version has the original bosses from the arcade version rather than the SMS versions. The 4th and 6th bosses were replaced and the second boss modified to reduce sprite flicker. I imagine the NES version might have a bit of a flickering problem with the original versions of the bosses.

Well the 6th level boss isn't exactly the same on the NES, it's got smaller clouds and three arms instead of six.

IIRC aren't there two NES versions of Fantasy Zone? :o

Phred wrote

IIRC aren't there two NES versions of Fantasy Zone? :o

As far as I know there's a Famicom (disc?) version and an NES version. The NES version, ported by Sunsoft, is the superior version.

Well I've played with the NES version a bit, it is truer to the arcade version in that it has 8-way scrolling, a larger game info display, and the bases/monster generators are sprites rather than part of the background. Consequently, though, there is quite a bit of problem with sprite limitation and they did not implement a flickering algorithm so you get a lot of sprite disappearance. The SMS version has less of a flicker problem but the enemy bases are not animated. Of course the SMS version is more colorful. I can't say the music is better in one or the other, just different. But given a choice, I'd play the SMS version, Though ultimately the arcade version is the definative Fantasy Zone.

Heliophobe wrote

As far as I know there's a Famicom (disc?) version and an NES version. The NES version, ported by Sunsoft, is the superior version.

The NES version is from Tengen. The Famicom version is from Sunsoft.

A similar thing happened with Afterburner too. Sunsoft made a (better) Famicom version and Tengen made an NES version. Both cartridges are also the only ones I know of that display their background tilemap directly from ROM, I guess so the whole background can rotate/spin instantly.

Weren't those versions by Tengen just modifications of the Famicom releases, with the sound dumbed down so it wouldn't use any of those special [and expensive] sound chips?

lCEknight wrote

Weren't those versions by Tengen just modifications of the Famicom releases, with the sound dumbed down so it wouldn't use any of those special [and expensive] sound chips?

That's essentially the case with Alien Syndrome. The Tengen version is basically the Sanritsu/Sunsoft version with the opening cutscene cut out (and maybe some other changes I can't think of off-hand). But the two Fantasy Zones are truly different.

See RaccoonLad's FZ page:
http://raccoonlad.topcities.com/fzone/fza.html

too bad I didn't see this earlier.

I think the SMS's graphics are better by a long shot. Some companies used the NES very well (capcom), employing diverse backgrounds and even parallax in some situations.

Soundwise, the NES kicks the SMS's behind so hard. The SMS can't hit low frequencies and can't modulate its frequency (at least, not without some tricks!). I like the sound of the triangle playing bass- you have to get decent speakers to hear it sometimes though, as crappy ones won't pick it up well at low frequencies. If you want to hear great NES music, check out stuff by either Konami or Tim Follin..

IMO the SMS was the console of choice, graphics wise the games where far more pleasing on the eye! as for sound it is pretty debatable as the nes's sound does not always come from the onboard sound chip.

If you where to compare the 2 consoles soley on the hardware built into the consoles then I would pick the SMS hands down it was just a shame that it lacked some of the truely great programming talents of the particular era.

No, the NES' sound always comes from the onboard sound chip. There are Famicom games that use extra chips. If we are to include/exclude the built-in hardware vs. add-ons, then we should treat the add-on sound chips for the Famicom as we would the FM unit on the Mark III.

OK. more examples.

I always find most SMS music to be high-pitched, plinky, squealy. You people always reference some of the worst NES games in terms of music to compare.

We should have a "contest" to see who can post better-sounding music from their favorite console.

/me reaches for Ys, The Flash, Wonder Boy III...

Try any of Sunsoft's late NES titles such as Super Spy Hunter or Ufouria, those had great music.

Hey dont get me wrong I grew up on Sega and will die a Sega Gamer,
My most favorite game is Wonderboy in Monster World. What I was getting at was that due to the general lack of support there where not the amount of A grade titles for the SMS, but in the same light there was not the amount of trash either!

As for the sound Issue everyone has there opinions and preferences, mine just happens to be the SMS's sound not the NES's but hey what ever floats your boat

SMS has much better color capabilities. On a 8x8 tile, the NES can use 3 colors + transparant, while the SMS can use 15 colors + transparant. This gives the NES an advantage in that the same tile can be used in 4 different color versions, but the SMS is obviously more colorful.

i think this little test should prove which console is superior. as a sega fanboy i am a little biased but this test is in my opinion much better than any tech specs. comparing my sms power base to my nes the most obvious difference is that unlike my sms my nes does not work. so while i still enjoy my sms after all these years, my Ni****do has died and displays nothing but a grey screen. so we could all argue till the cows come home about which one is technically better but we cannot argue with the much smarter sms design. the western nes was much worse than the famicom, the famicom's top loading cartridge design was brilliant and bulletproof but the nes sucked bad, looked ugly and eventually broke down. it took Ni****do till the 90's to properly fix the nes.
the only things really better about the nes was rca outputs for video/audio, pause on the controllers and that is about it really.
the other main point is that i have hardly ever seen the sega software error message whereas the nes one i have seen so many times i can only guess i have seen it hundreds of times.
ps. is it only me or is it suspicious Ni****do's gameboy was running the z80 processor, the same used in the sms. Ni****do probably realised it was making inferior hardware and used the z80 instead. the 6502 has apperared on atari vcs as well as apple ii and the commodore 64, which are all massively inferior to sms as well as nes

burn_georges_bush wrote

i think this little test should prove which console is superior. as a sega fanboy i am a little biased but this test is in my opinion much better than any tech specs.

So something based off your opinion (which as you said is quite biased) is better than tech specs, which can't be changed. Heh, ok.

burn_georges_bush wrote

comparing my sms power base to my nes the most obvious difference is that unlike my sms my nes does not work. so while i still enjoy my sms after all these years, my Nintendo has died and displays nothing but a grey screen.

Oh wah. My original NES still works just fine- I don't even have to "blow off" the cartridges. I have a friend whose sms is broken after all these years, stuff won't run. So clearly using your logic, I win.

burn_georges_bush wrote

so we could all argue till the cows come home about which one is technically better but we cannot argue with the much smarter sms design. the western nes was much worse than the famicom, the famicom's top loading cartridge design was brilliant and bulletproof but the nes sucked bad, looked ugly and eventually broke down. it took Nintendo till the 90's to properly fix the nes.

Yeah I'll give you this one. The NES design wasn't the best, and the cartridges were mostly wasted space. On the other hand, your saying that the NES "sucked bad, looked ugly, and eventually broke down" isn't necessarily true. I don't think it looked so bad, mine never broke down, and it didn't suck bad thanks to many great games.

burn_georges_bush wrote

the only things really better about the nes was rca outputs for video/audio, pause on the controllers and that is about it really.
the other main point is that i have hardly ever seen the sega software error message whereas the nes one i have seen so many times i can only guess i have seen it hundreds of times.

Yeah RCA output was nice, and the fact that you can hack it to do stereo is cool too. By the way, what's the NES software error you speak of? I've never seen such a message..

burn_georges_bush wrote

ps. is it only me or is it suspicious Nintendo's gameboy was running the z80 processor, the same used in the sms. Nintendo probably realised it was making inferior hardware and used the z80 instead. the 6502 has apperared on atari vcs as well as apple ii and the commodore 64, which are all massively inferior to sms as well as nes

Well Nintendo might have been smart here and realized that the 6502 eats power up compared to the Z80 (I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong here). I don't think it's really the processor's problem-- I think it was more of the implementation. Also, the SMS runs at 3.5Mhz, while the NES is running at 1.7 or so, right? If that were the case, shouldn't SMS games run infinitely faster than NES games since the Z80 is supposedly such a better CPU? Besides, the gameboy was faster than even the SMS, and it was slower while playing many many NES clone games. I remember Mario 2 and nearly all the Mega Mans slowing wayyyy down a lot on Gameboy, but not nearly as much as on the NES.

RushJet1 wrote

Well Nintendo might have been smart here and realized that the 6502 eats power up compared to the Z80 (I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong here). I don't think it's really the processor's problem-- I think it was more of the implementation. Also, the SMS runs at 3.5Mhz, while the NES is running at 1.7 or so, right? If that were the case, shouldn't SMS games run infinitely faster than NES games since the Z80 is supposedly such a better CPU? Besides, the gameboy was faster than even the SMS, and it was slower while playing many many NES clone games. I remember Mario 2 and nearly all the Mega Mans slowing wayyyy down a lot on Gameboy, but not nearly as much as on the NES.

No clue about the power draw between the 6502 and z80 but Zilog has been in the business of making lowpower versions of their z80's for embedded applications for some time so it was probably easier and cheaper for Ni****do to go with a z80 derivative than to find a low power 6502.

As for why the GB ports of some NES games might be slower, unfamiliarity with the z80 for programmers used to the 6502 may have had something to do with it, especially if they had to port over a lot of code. The two CPU's are vastly different and how you plot out algorithms can vary depending on which CPU you are writing for. A direct port from 6502 to z80, or vice versa could be slower than the original. Also, it appears (some correct me if I'm wrong) that they moved from the NES model of having video data pulled directly from the cart to having video ram that needs to be loaded from the cartridge, as was the case on the SMS. There are pros and cons of that approach, but a game designed for instant cart access could be slowed down if it had to be rewritten to update video ram often.

Also, the GB-z80 is not exactly identical to the regular z80. It has several CPU registers removed, and some opcodes have been removed or replaced with new opcodes. I'm really not sure if instruction timings have changed or if the different opcode set/loss of registers would have an overall detrimental effect on execution speed.

Other than that, yeah, I appreciate burn_georges_bush's enthusiasm but I don't think he'd do well in debate club.

burn_georges_bush wrote

ps. is it only me or is it suspicious Ni****do's gameboy was running the z80 processor, the same used in the sms. Ni****do probably realised it was making inferior hardware and used the z80 instead. the 6502 has apperared on atari vcs as well as apple ii and the commodore 64, which are all massively inferior to sms as well as nes

I'd imagine they chose their hardware based on more mundane reasons such as cost-effectiveness and (to a lesser degree) familiarity. If you were potentially buying a million custom CPUs, I bet you'd be shopping around too, heheh.

But Ni****do also was using 8080s, and later Z80s, in almost all of their arcade games (only exception would probably be the VS. series). A lot of their arcade games have Z80s and 2A03s running side by side.

debating club eh? as for the error msg have you never seen the flashing scene that alternates between grey and black or even the on that stays permanantly grey? have you never had to re-insert a cartridge so many times you lose count and then give up in frustration? or maybe my nes is cursed or indeed yours might be magical. i am not just a n***endo basher, i have had a nes,snes and gameboy. sure n***endo had some good games but i am not blind to the fact that the sms was indeed superior. i have bought 4 ,master systems in my time (2 power bases+2 Sms2's) and all have worked perfectly. the nes was the only console i had so much trouble gettin to work, therefore it is infererior in my opinion, nuff said

tho i did get some use out of my nes, bored out of my brains i modded my nes pad to work on my sms (pointless but fun)

I take it you have never encountered the SOFTWARE ERROR screen on your Powerbase, then?

burn_georges_bush wrote

debating club eh? as for the error msg have you never seen the flashing scene that alternates between grey and black or even the on that stays permanantly grey? have you never had to re-insert a cartridge so many times you lose count and then give up in frustration? or maybe my nes is cursed or indeed yours might be magical. i am not just a n***endo basher, i have had a nes,snes and gameboy. sure n***endo had some good games but i am not blind to the fact that the sms was indeed superior. i have bought 4 ,master systems in my time (2 power bases+2 Sms2's) and all have worked perfectly. the nes was the only console i had so much trouble gettin to work, therefore it is infererior in my opinion, nuff said

oh that's not really an error message per se, just what the nes does when it screws up.

it's like calling your pc's freezing up on you an error message

yeah i have, but never constantly. in the 15 odd years i have owned the powerbase i have hardly seen the error screen. i may go months between seeing a software error on a powerbase but everytime i try my nes i may have to blow, clean the cart connectors and re-insert the cartridge up to 10 times. if i have an error on the sms it will usually be fixed by cleaning the conductors on the cart end

Author	Message
Karo Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 2	SMS versus NES Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 12:39 pm
Karo Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 2	Hello there! I have been browsing this board for some time and finally decided to register. I am a Sega fan for the usual reasons, but mainly because I had one of these machines back in the late 80s/ early 90s. Now for my question: While I am somewhat interested in what is called 'retro gaming' the technical details still elude me. I am currently having a rather fierce talk with a friend of mine about 8 bit videogame systems, namely the SMS and the N. Entertainment System. What I wonder is: What system is technically better than the other? How about colours e.g.? Some developers are able to perform some tricks, so I do not trust the technical specs. How many colours can be displayed on those systems? What about sprites, how many layers of scolling background are supported? In my opinion the SMS games make a much more colorful impression on me. The NES on the other hand has a range of absolute blockbusters available (which were exclusive for that system due to N's restrictive licensing policy). Oh, and what about the sound? Could anyone post pictures of the same game on both system so that I can compare the shots? I don't want to start a system war or anything, but comparing the two machines is something I wanted to do for a long time, and I'd like to hear the opinion of people that have a better understanding of the technical aspects than me. Thank you so much in advance!

Youltar Site Admin Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 306 Location: Wisconsin, U.S.A.	Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 12:53 pm
	they say a picture is worth a thousand words.... Who needs specifications when all you need to do is look at the picture. http://raccoonlad.topcities.com/compare/compare.html Raccoonlad has put this really cool site together that is worth checking out.

ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 1:04 pm
ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	It's always fun to discuss this. I'll just say that for graphics, the SMS is more powerful, but the NES is more... flexible. The SMS can have background tiles use up to 16 colours, with one of two palettes (so 32 in total). The NES can have background tiles use up to 4 colours, with one of four palettes (so 16 in total... which gets winnowed down to only 13 usable colours in total because of mirroring). So of course, with a graphic tile taking up to 16 colours on SMS, versus 4 on the NES, the SMS looks much more colourful. Sprites follow similarly, with SMS sprites fixed at 16 colours, and NES sprites fixed at 4 colours, but with one of 4 palettes selectable. Both SMS and NES sprites can be 8x8 or 8x16 pixels, with a maximum of 8 per scanline, and 64 sprites maximum. Both the NES and SMS have 64 possible colours to choose from, but many on the NES are unusable, so it's really about 56 usable on the NES. However, the NES has a few registers that can alter (skew) the palette's RGB values, making some transparency/colour filtering effects possible -- but not often used. As for graphic tiles, the SMS has about 448 usable for background, and 256 usable for sprites. The NES has 256 usable for background and 256 for sprites. However, this is where the flexibility of the NES comes in, since graphics tiles are usually on ROM in NES games, so several tile banks can be swapped in mid-screen and instantaneously, multiplying the number of tiles that can be used in a game (if used wisely.) On the SMS, which uses RAM for tiles, additional graphics must be written in so they can't really be changed instantaneously. After this, each system has some idiosyncratic limitations to do with graphics, which I won't get into. As for sound, the NES is more complex and powerful. It has 5 channels total, with 2 square wave, 1 triangle wave, 1 noise, and 1 sample channel (7 bits RAW/Delta). The SMS has 4 channels: 3 square and 1 noise, right? Of course the Japanese SMS has FM sound, but Japanese Famicom carts can also have additional sound chips, such as more PSG channels or even the same FM sound chip as the SMS (in Konami's Lagrange Point.) There you go. If anybody spots some major errors in what I wrote, please correct me.

Cyberquake Joined: 10 Jan 2005 Posts: 60 Location: Porto, Portugal	Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 3:04 pm
	Youltar wrote they say a picture is worth a thousand words.... Who needs specifications when all you need to do is look at the picture. http://raccoonlad.topcities.com/compare/compare.html Raccoonlad has put this really cool site together that is worth checking out. That site says it all! :D But, Micromachines is missing there!

idrougge Joined: 01 Jan 2005 Posts: 360 Location: Stockholm, Sweden	Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 7:30 pm
	ccovell wrote As for sound, the NES is more complex and powerful. It has 5 channels total, with 2 square wave, 1 triangle wave, 1 noise, and 1 sample channel (7 bits RAW/Delta). The SMS has 4 channels: 3 square and 1 noise, right? Of course the Japanese SMS has FM sound, but Japanese Famicom carts can also have additional sound chips, such as more PSG channels or even the same FM sound chip as the SMS (in Konami's Lagrange Point.) There you go. If anybody spots some major errors in what I wrote, please correct me. Major? Definitely not. I was just wondering whether the VRCVII chip used in Lagrange point really is an YM2413 in disguise? http://www.tripoint.org/kevtris/nes/vrcvii.txt doesn't mention that, though it does mention that the VRCVII has most of its instruments fixed, just as on the Sega FM.

Ian Covelli Guest	Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 9:40 pm
Ian Covelli Guest	all i have to say is, compare the graphics on double dragon, master system is way better looking, nes versions colors and everything are really bland, especialy the music.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14756 Location: London	Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 10:10 pm
	As I understand it, VCR7 is YM2413 with modified ROM data and no rhythm channels. Then again, Chris may be referring to a game with a YM2413 - I think there were several VCR7 games.

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 11:53 pm
	ccovell wrote It's always fun to discuss this. Sprites follow similarly, with SMS sprites fixed at 16 colours, and NES sprites fixed at 4 colours, but with one of 4 palettes selectable. Both SMS and NES sprites can be 8x8 or 8x16 pixels, with a maximum of 8 per scanline, and 64 sprites maximum. It's probably also worth mentioning that on both system one of the colors is actually not a color at all, but a key for the graphics chip to not draw that pixel and have the background show through. That doesn't make a huge world of difference on the SMS, 15 colors is not much less than 16, but for the NES an already limited paletee of four colors becomes just three. This did give rise to some very distinctive pixel art styles being developed on the NES. What's this about the NES and unusable color palette values?

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 12:51 am
	Ian Covelli wrote all i have to say is, compare the graphics on double dragon, master system is way better looking, nes versions colors and everything are really bland, especialy the music. The NES had a more techically advanced sound chip, with the wider choice of waveforms, more bass range, and of course the PCM channel. In general, though I find I prefer the sound of most SMS games. The vast majority of NES music seemed to have a 'plinky' quality that I found sort of irritating. I think this may have to do with the fact that the NES's sound chip had built in volume envelopes and NES musicians tended to rely on them rather than manually control their volume envelopes (i.e. fade in and out) like you had to do with the SMS. Consequently, many NES games had a lot of staccato 'bleeps' in their music, probably partly because the sound chip's envelopes didn't have attack (fade in) values, only decay (fade out), and seemed to have a limited range of envelope length choices. That's all subjective, of course, I think some NES fans find the SMS's lack of tone variety to sound rather 'flat'. The PCM channel was radical, though, I with the SMS had had that instead of having to do CPU-hogging PSG tricks to play samples.

transbot Guest	Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 2:06 am
transbot Guest	I'm utterly, *utterly* biased - but for me, the master system outdoes the nes in near every department. I can't talk about technical specifics, but I know what I like. ;) Yes, the nes (apparently) seemed to get a lot of very enjoyable games made for it - but it isn't as if the master didn't, is it?!? The graphics clearly work far better for sega's console, and I don't really notice the sound limitations, as a fair bit of the game music is so brilliantly composed and well utilised - which must mask those flaws expertly. All this helps to create the unique atmosphere of a game, too. The best games on sms are the best testament to what 8-bit consoles can acheive, in my opinion. Some even seem almost worthy of their 16-bit descendents - again, that's probably all in the look and overall feel of it.

ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 2:20 am
ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Heliophobe wrote What's this about the NES and unusable color palette values? Take a look at the table of palette values I made for my NES Tech FAQ here: http://www.zyx.com/chrisc/NESTechFAQ.html#accuratepal You'll see that some of the values are just black. The NES' palette works on NTSC chrominance & luminance, while the SMS works on RGB (which I prefer, of course). The only upshot to the NES' palette is that you can get about 6 shades of grey -- including black & white -- compared to the SMS' 4.

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 6:03 am
	ccovell wrote Heliophobe wrote What's this about the NES and unusable color palette values? Take a look at the table of palette values I made for my NES Tech FAQ here: http://www.zyx.com/chrisc/NESTechFAQ.html#accuratepal You'll see that some of the values are just black. The NES' palette works on NTSC chrominance & luminance, while the SMS works on RGB (which I prefer, of course). The only upshot to the NES' palette is that you can get about 6 shades of grey -- including black & white -- compared to the SMS' 4. Interesting, it's more like the Atari VCS and 8-bit computer's color palettes then.... I got quite familiar with that palette model (hue/luminence) when I started programming in Atari basic 20 years ago, and I had a hard time understanding the RGB concept, but now it seems strange that any consoles ever used anything but RGB.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14756 Location: London	Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 9:15 am
	I find the music criticisms unnecessary - a well played PSG sounds vastly superior to a generic NES tune, but there's good and bad on both. The graphics are more of an issue - simply having a bigger palette, and hardware that supports horizontal scrolling without junk showing up on the other side of the screen, makes the SMS look and feel a generation later than NES. The decision to expose more hardware on the cartridge port was an interesting tactic. It allowed for on-cart sound chips, mid-screen tilemap switching and other graphical tricks. It also meant that in a market where ROMs were expensive, requiring uncompressed graphics data meant that most NES games ended up cutting back on graphics, and on-cart chippery has always resulted in expensive games. On the non-technical side, the fact of the NES's market domination in Japan and the US sadly means it has more good games - and more bad games. There's not much we can do about that.

ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 1:38 pm
ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Maxim wrote I find the music criticisms unnecessary - a well played PSG sounds vastly superior to a generic NES tune, but there's good and bad on both. Yes, a good melody is a good melody, no matter the hardware. But from a musician's (and listener's) standpoint, more channels means more complex melodies, and more varied waveforms means more complex sounds. The fact that the NES' square waves can change their duty cycles, for example, means that they can simulate a wider range of instruments than a fixed square wave; from something sounding like a flute to something more like a trumpet. There is fantastic music on both systems, but I still prefer the sound of the NES chip. Maxim wrote The decision to expose more hardware on the cartridge port was an interesting tactic. It allowed for on-cart sound chips, mid-screen tilemap switching and other graphical tricks. It also meant that in a market where ROMs were expensive, requiring uncompressed graphics data meant that most NES games ended up cutting back on graphics, and on-cart chippery has always resulted in expensive games. True, Ni****do always insisted on cutting costs for the razor, and making customers pay more for the razor blades. However, an NES game can use either CHR-ROM or RAM (like the SMS), depending on what the programmers need for the game. And so the graphics were often compressed.

Christuserloeser Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 295 Location: Pangea	Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 2:57 pm
	Erm, I like both systems ^ ^ I don't know much about tech specs and nothing about programming but as already mentioned the SMS games were more colorful and the NES has a very nice sound chip but I really like SMS music too. Because of the different powerful special chips they included to the NES cartridges, the possibilities on NES became bigger during its life span. The first NES games from 1983 missed e.g. scrolling, colored backgrounds, etc. They're still fantastic games though! Later games like e.g. Super Mario Bros. 3 technically almost look like SMS games. That there are more games and thus more classics for the NES isn't really surprising as the machine was much more successful. The SMS still has a lot of unique games that make the system comparable. ...it's the Dreamcast or GameCube of the 8bit era : ) While both systems would earn an active scene, it seems that today's independent SMS dev scene seems to be more active than the NES dev scene - must be because of this very nice community here ^ ^

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 5:35 pm
	Maxim wrote I find the music criticisms unnecessary - a well played PSG sounds vastly superior to a generic NES tune, but there's good and bad on both. In a thread contrasting the two systems I don't think it's out of place to point out the technical reasons behind the characteristic sounds of each system or even how the typical games made use of it. Each system had its musical masterpieces of course, but I'm referring more to the overall impression I've had from playing a variety of games on both systems. To my ear, I've found that the typical sounding SMS game is more pleasing than the typical sounding NES, due to the very sharp staccatto notes and bleeps that the NES's music and sound effects library is full of. That is subjective, of course, NES fans might find the lack of bass and tone variation on the SMS to be a major strike against. I got the impression that the thread poster wanted not only to understand the technical specs, but dig a little bit deeper and understand how they affected the games. I would also say that SMS games sound better than Colecovision games, on average, even though the sound chips are nearly identical. For the Colecovision games that had music, most seemed to have that calliope sound due to the fact that very few of these games did anything with the volume envelopes other than to simply switch the volume on and off for each note (see: the colecovision rendition of Suicide is Painless). Back to the technical differences: If there was one gaping hole in the SMS's abilities it was the lack of the ability to flip sprite tiles. On the NES, you could use the image data for a left-facing character and flip it around so it displayed on the screen as a right-facing character, and you could also flip tiles vertically. On the SMS, sprite images could not be flipped so you had to store images for both orientations in video ram. This ate up twice as much vram as would be needed if flipping were possible (four times if you need left/right/up/down flipping) which often meant fewer frame of animation, fewer different types of enemies on the screen, or simplified backgrounds to free up more tiles for the sprites. It could also mean more space wasted on the rom as some games stored left and right facing sprites in ROM so it could send as many new tiles into video ram as possible without having to wait for the CPU to flip the tiles in software. Background tiles, curiously, could be flipped. To answer a specific question in the original post, both systems have only one scroll layer, but with both it is possible to use certain tricks to fake having multiple scroll layers, such as adjusting the scroll positions at different scanlines, using sprites to simulate a static starfield behind the main scroll layer, or using a repeating pattern in the background and updating the tiles in that pattern so they seem to scroll at a different speed than the rest of the screen (see: the Breakout game in the arcade classics collection)

idrougge Joined: 01 Jan 2005 Posts: 360 Location: Stockholm, Sweden	Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 6:05 pm
	I think NES sound is generally superior. Add-on sound chips for the Japanese market notwithstanding, there are technical reasons for NES superiority. I wouldn't ascribe that much importance to the PCM channel, though, since it is very tricky for a limited 8-bit system to control. In most cases, it was quite far from what we usually intend by the term "PCM". The one problem with NES sound is the low-frequency "hum" which can often be heard in the games. In my youth, I was so weaned on NES that I didn't really note it, but nowadays it can get tiring after a while. It is probably due to musicians employing the triangle channel for bass lines, and what with triangle waves having very little "character" (for a lack of better words) or energy, it never surpasses more than a hum. The Master System sound chip is around five years older than the NES one, and thus a very simple one. Its main distinctive quality is its two different noise settings, which has really never been tapped. Listen to Hally's submission to this spring's music contest for an example. This is also what makes MS music less interesting than NES music. There has been a much more limited number of musicians and corresponding sound drivers than on the NES. The repertoire consists mainly of Sega's inhouse musicians and Mr. Furniss for later European releases. Jeroen Tel's soundtrack to The Flash is one example of fresh blood being injected into the otherwise unvaried sound climate of the MS, but that only goes to show that there was not much room for variation here. I also suspect that Sega's musicians soon tired of the internal PSG, instead concentrating their attention to the FM sound, resorting to a quick port to the PSG afterwards. That's only my suspicion, but it serves as an explanation. OTOH, it should be noted that the differences between the MS and the NES in the sound department are not so great as to make any of them come close to the C64's SID chip in terms of power and variation.

ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 2:14 am
ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Heliophobe wrote To my ear, I've found that the typical sounding SMS game is more pleasing than the typical sounding NES, due to the very sharp staccatto notes and bleeps that the NES's music and sound effects library is full of. That is subjective, of course, NES fans might find the lack of bass and tone variation on the SMS to be a major strike against. Yes, unfortunately, many mid-80s NES and Famicom games have awful, high-pitched, repetitive music. I call it "Bandai Syndrome" because most of their early games had horrible music. In the 80s, most Japanese NES musicians focused on simple or good melodies that repeated too often, and didn't concentrate on instrumentation. On the other hand, I always loved the European musicians who made great melodies and interesting effects in NES games. Even when Japanese musicians were still working with bleeps and bloops, the folks at Rare and Software Creations (Follin Brothers) were making distinctive music. idrougge wrote I wouldn't ascribe that much importance to the PCM channel, though, since it is very tricky for a limited 8-bit system to control. In most cases, it was quite far from what we usually intend by the term "PCM". The one problem with NES sound is the low-frequency "hum" which can often be heard in the games. In my youth, I was so weaned on NES that I didn't really note it, but nowadays it can get tiring after a while. It is probably due to musicians employing the triangle channel for bass lines, and what with triangle waves having very little "character" (for a lack of better words) or energy, it never surpasses more than a hum. I do disagree here. The NES' PCM channel can either be fed a raw waveform, or triggered to play samples via DMA. This meant that either single samples (such as a drum hit) or looped samples (like guitar sounds) could be played, with the only necessary interaction from the program being the initial sample trigger. So the sample channel (used in the late 80s and 90s especially) added a whole dimension to the sound of many games. So, I guess it's time to point to some good examples. Please check out Sunsoft's music, such as the fabulous Journey to Silius, and also Recca for some great use of the sample channel. As for the triangle channel, yes it is sine-like, but it does get used for more than a continuous hum. Please check out some tunes like the jazzy Code Name: Viper, and especially the work of the European musicians like the Follins' Silver Surfer, Solstice; Jeroen Tel's Robocop 3, Overlord, and Neil Baldwin's Hero Quest, Magician, and James Bond Jr.. There, I've listed some great music to try out. Pick up an NSF player and some NSF tunes (like from www.zophar.net ) and form your own opinions.

Memblers Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 18	Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 6:04 am
Memblers Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 18	The NES's triangle channel is really more, um, ziggurat shaped. With 16 steps rather than a smooth line. So that's where the volume control for it went, heheh. It can only be on or off. But the harmonics caused by those steps are kinda distinctive when it plays the really low frequencies. One thing that's easy to appreciate on the SMS sound is that it has volume control for all the melodic channels. That can make a difference. Seems like the NES's CPU would be faster, though there's no direct comparison I'd know of. From what I understand of the Z80, it uses 4 clocks to 1 instruction cycle versus 1:1 on 6502. The SMS was built with more RAM though, so that should take the edge off a bit, heheh. It does seem really odd to me that the SMS flips background tiles, rather than sprites. That could allow for some pretty diverse background graphics though.

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 10:10 am
	Memblers wrote The NES's triangle channel is really more, um, ziggurat shaped. With 16 steps rather than a smooth line. So that's where the volume control for it went, heheh. It can only be on or off. But the harmonics caused by those steps are kinda distinctive when it plays the really low frequencies. Ah, so the triangle channel is really just like a square wave channel with a self-modulating volume. Interesting. Memblers wrote Seems like the NES's CPU would be faster, though there's no direct comparison I'd know of. From what I understand of the Z80, it uses 4 clocks to 1 instruction cycle versus 1:1 on 6502. I don't understand what you mean by that. Z80 instructions take more cycles to execute than their 6502 counterparts (where the 6502 has a cooresponding instruction), but the 6502 doesn't execute any instructions in a single cycle. The 6502 executes most instructions in the 2-6 cycle range, the Z80 in the 4-15 range with some special instructions taking up to 23. Unless you were thinking that one 'cycle' on a z80 (aka t-states) is actually four clock pulses, which is not the case. It's difficult to judge the speed, the clock speed of the NES is about half that of the SMS's, but the 6502 probably executes about the same number of instructions per second as the SMS (or slightly more) because the 6502 executes most opcodes in less time that the Z80's. However, the Z80's richer opcode set means that it can do more with fewer opcodes. I would say the SMS has the speed edge but it may depend on the particular task.

Memblers Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 18	Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 12:10 pm
Memblers Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 18	Heliophobe wrote Unless you were thinking that one 'cycle' on a z80 (aka t-states) is actually four clock pulses, which is not the case. I was thinking more like 4 t-states to an instruction cycle (memory access). So the t-states would be the clock. In that case, something like a JMP instruction would be 12 clocks (t-states) on Z80 versus 3 clocks on 6502. Thus about twice as fast on NES, though that's just a useless operation by itself. Probably a more useful comparison would be how fast both systems can write to VRAM. Ignoring overhead etc., the absolute fastest on NES is 6 cycles per byte (using self-modifying code in RAM), but maybe around 11-13 cycles for more casual ways. Using unrolled loops in both cases.

Karo Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 2	Great! Thanks! Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 12:37 pm
Karo Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 2	I am overwheImed. I never expected so detailed and thorough information. Thank you very much, this is something I always wanted to know and now I think I have a better understanding of the technical details concerning the two systems. I especially appriciate the Link from Youltar and the detailed explanation from ccovell, but others made excellent contributions as well. It's interesting to note how it was sufficient for some games to be reduced in colours and resolution to make a conversion on the SMS, while on the NES some graphics had to be redrawn completely. Mortal Kombat and SF2 come to mind and I like how the garage door in Double Dragon is shamefully closed on the NES conversion so they did not have to go through the trouble of showing the sports car. Also I never knew there were so many sega in-house productions available for the 'rival' console. Afterburner, Altered Beast, even Shinobi and others came as a surprise to me, as these games were meant to make the difference and win fans over to sega. They probably came months after their release on the SMS and maybe Sega had priorities set to gain money from conversions of their coin-ups rather than win the system war, who knows. As for the sound I do not have enough experience with the NES sound to compare them as those were not so common here in Europe. All I can say is that the SMS had that specific "metallic" (for lack of a better word) sound. Rather plain, hardly modulated, but at the same time very "videogame-ish" as opposed to the computers (C64) I was used to. Well, that is difficult to describe. Anyway, thank you for all the info! You really helped me a lot with that.

ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Re: Great! Thanks! Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 1:42 pm
ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Karo wrote It's interesting to note how it was sufficient for some games to be reduced in colours and resolution to make a conversion on the SMS, while on the NES some graphics had to be redrawn completely. Mortal Kombat and SF2 come to mind and I like how the garage door in Double Dragon is shamefully closed on the NES conversion so they did not have to go through the trouble of showing the sports car. Also I never knew there were so many sega in-house productions available for the 'rival' console. Afterburner, Altered Beast, even Shinobi and others came as a surprise to me, as these games were meant to make the difference and win fans over to sega. They probably came months after their release on the SMS and maybe Sega had priorities set to gain money from conversions of their coin-ups rather than win the system war, who knows. It must be mentioned that Mortal Kombat and SF2 on the NES (Famicom) were pirate productions, and were in no way connected to or condoned by Midway or Capcom. So, it's not really fair to compare those. And as for the rivals, it seems that in Japan it's "okay" to license a production to a rival system. This continued into the Megadrive's era, with Sega arcade conversions showing up on the PC-Engine in dazzling conversions. After Burner II, Out Run, Power Drift, Shinobi, (Space Harrier)...

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14756 Location: London	Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 6:57 pm
	Memblers wrote Probably a more useful comparison would be how fast both systems can write to VRAM. Ignoring overhead etc., the absolute fastest on NES is 6 cycles per byte (using self-modifying code in RAM), but maybe around 11-13 cycles for more casual ways. Using unrolled loops in both cases. On SMS the best way (as far as I know) is unrolled OUTI instruction blocks, which comes to 12 cycles per byte or 291KB/s. That's pretty mch identical.

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2005 1:31 am
	Memblers wrote Heliophobe wrote Unless you were thinking that one 'cycle' on a z80 (aka t-states) is actually four clock pulses, which is not the case. I was thinking more like 4 t-states to an instruction cycle (memory access). So the t-states would be the clock. In that case, something like a JMP instruction would be 12 clocks (t-states) on Z80 versus 3 clocks on 6502. Thus about twice as fast on NES, though that's just a useless operation by itself. Probably a more useful comparison would be how fast both systems can write to VRAM. Ignoring overhead etc., the absolute fastest on NES is 6 cycles per byte (using self-modifying code in RAM), but maybe around 11-13 cycles for more casual ways. Using unrolled loops in both cases. Here's how I understand it, someone smarter than me feel free to chime in and correct me: Z80 timing charts often use M-cycles and T-states, but generally t-states are all we use on both the emulator and programming side, at least on the SMS. An M cycle (as I understand it) is a memory access (including port i/o) so an instructions M code count is a count of how many memory accesses an opcode can execute. However, M-cycle count does not determine execution speed, t-state count does. M-cycle count would only be a restrictive factor if there were some limit on how often a memory fetch could occur , such as if you had a slow memory bus or if you are operating in a system that has DMA access and DMA is capable of stalling the Z80 when it needs to fetch a byte of RAM. Therefore, there isn't a 1:4 coorespondence between memory fetches and t-states. Take, for example: add hl,de. The instruction does a 16 bit add of two internal register, and takes 7 t-states, although it only does a single fetch for the opcode itself. Or jp nnnn, which does a jump to an absolute address. That does three memory fetches, but completes in ten t-states, not twelve. Of course there isn't a 1:1 coorelation on the 6502, but it seems more consistant, generally coming out to the number of memory access plus 1, with a few other variables. I'm looking at the instruction tables on both and it looks like on average, where there are comparable instructions, the 6502 instruction is about 2-4 times faster, or 1 to 2 times faster, taking clock speeds into account. It's really hard to compare the two, though. The design philosophy between the two are quite different. The Z80 has more registers and a larger instructions set to minimize the number of memory accesses, while the 6502 is optimized to execute more instructions and do memory fetches more quickly. I'd venture to guess that the 6502 might be optimized to handle repetative, memory intensive tasks with unrolled loops better while the z80 is better at complex algorithms, but that might not be right either. Quote ...and I like how the garage door in Double Dragon is shamefully closed on the NES conversion so they did not have to go through the trouble of showing the sports car. In every production there are tradeoffs that must be made due to limited cartridge space. In the case of the of Double Dragon, both the SMS and NES versions were 256k, but the NES version had some extras not in the arcade or SMS version that took some extra space, as well as the larger versions of the character sprites for VS. mode, so they felt they had to simplify some of the backgrounds. There's no good reason for the SMS version not to have had the garage door initially closed and then open when the players appear, like in the arcade version. That was just lazy.

lCEknight Guest	Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 3:30 pm
lCEknight Guest	Heh, the graphics in Fantasy Zone look better in the NES version. How ironic.

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 6:10 pm
	lCEknight wrote Heh, the graphics in Fantasy Zone look better in the NES version. How ironic. You think? I haven't seen NES Fantasy Zone in motion but looking at screenshots it seems less colorful (naturally) but the backgrounds are a bit more detailed. I do find it interesting that the NES version has the original bosses from the arcade version rather than the SMS versions. The 4th and 6th bosses were replaced and the second boss modified to reduce sprite flicker. I imagine the NES version might have a bit of a flickering problem with the original versions of the bosses. Well the 6th level boss isn't exactly the same on the NES, it's got smaller clouds and three arms instead of six.

Phred Guest	Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2005 9:34 pm
Phred Guest	IIRC aren't there two NES versions of Fantasy Zone? :o

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2005 7:20 am
	Phred wrote IIRC aren't there two NES versions of Fantasy Zone? :o As far as I know there's a Famicom (disc?) version and an NES version. The NES version, ported by Sunsoft, is the superior version. Well I've played with the NES version a bit, it is truer to the arcade version in that it has 8-way scrolling, a larger game info display, and the bases/monster generators are sprites rather than part of the background. Consequently, though, there is quite a bit of problem with sprite limitation and they did not implement a flickering algorithm so you get a lot of sprite disappearance. The SMS version has less of a flicker problem but the enemy bases are not animated. Of course the SMS version is more colorful. I can't say the music is better in one or the other, just different. But given a choice, I'd play the SMS version, Though ultimately the arcade version is the definative Fantasy Zone.

CRV Joined: 02 Jan 2005 Posts: 668	Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2005 8:55 am
CRV Joined: 02 Jan 2005 Posts: 668	Heliophobe wrote As far as I know there's a Famicom (disc?) version and an NES version. The NES version, ported by Sunsoft, is the superior version. The NES version is from Tengen. The Famicom version is from Sunsoft.

Memblers Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 18	Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2005 8:12 am
Memblers Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 18	A similar thing happened with Afterburner too. Sunsoft made a (better) Famicom version and Tengen made an NES version. Both cartridges are also the only ones I know of that display their background tilemap directly from ROM, I guess so the whole background can rotate/spin instantly.

lCEknight Guest	Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2005 12:39 am
lCEknight Guest	Weren't those versions by Tengen just modifications of the Famicom releases, with the sound dumbed down so it wouldn't use any of those special [and expensive] sound chips?

CRV Joined: 02 Jan 2005 Posts: 668	Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2005 2:45 am
CRV Joined: 02 Jan 2005 Posts: 668	lCEknight wrote Weren't those versions by Tengen just modifications of the Famicom releases, with the sound dumbed down so it wouldn't use any of those special [and expensive] sound chips? That's essentially the case with Alien Syndrome. The Tengen version is basically the Sanritsu/Sunsoft version with the opening cutscene cut out (and maybe some other changes I can't think of off-hand). But the two Fantasy Zones are truly different. See RaccoonLad's FZ page: http://raccoonlad.topcities.com/fzone/fza.html

RushJet1 Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 90 Location: Georgia, USA	Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2005 1:07 am
	too bad I didn't see this earlier. I think the SMS's graphics are better by a long shot. Some companies used the NES very well (capcom), employing diverse backgrounds and even parallax in some situations. Soundwise, the NES kicks the SMS's behind so hard. The SMS can't hit low frequencies and can't modulate its frequency (at least, not without some tricks!). I like the sound of the triangle playing bass- you have to get decent speakers to hear it sometimes though, as crappy ones won't pick it up well at low frequencies. If you want to hear great NES music, check out stuff by either Konami or Tim Follin..

Emuaust Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Posts: 79	Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2005 9:15 am
Emuaust Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Posts: 79	IMO the SMS was the console of choice, graphics wise the games where far more pleasing on the eye! as for sound it is pretty debatable as the nes's sound does not always come from the onboard sound chip. If you where to compare the 2 consoles soley on the hardware built into the consoles then I would pick the SMS hands down it was just a shame that it lacked some of the truely great programming talents of the particular era.

ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2005 1:31 pm
ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	No, the NES' sound always comes from the onboard sound chip. There are Famicom games that use extra chips. If we are to include/exclude the built-in hardware vs. add-ons, then we should treat the add-on sound chips for the Famicom as we would the FM unit on the Mark III.

RushJet1 Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 90 Location: Georgia, USA	Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2005 1:48 pm
	OK. more examples. I always find most SMS music to be high-pitched, plinky, squealy. You people always reference some of the worst NES games in terms of music to compare. We should have a "contest" to see who can post better-sounding music from their favorite console.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14756 Location: London	Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2005 3:18 pm
	/me reaches for Ys, The Flash, Wonder Boy III...

ICEknight Joined: 03 Apr 2001 Posts: 601 Location: Asturias	Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2005 4:10 pm
	Try any of Sunsoft's late NES titles such as Super Spy Hunter or Ufouria, those had great music.

Emuaustr Guest	Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2005 3:53 am
Emuaustr Guest	Hey dont get me wrong I grew up on Sega and will die a Sega Gamer, My most favorite game is Wonderboy in Monster World. What I was getting at was that due to the general lack of support there where not the amount of A grade titles for the SMS, but in the same light there was not the amount of trash either! As for the sound Issue everyone has there opinions and preferences, mine just happens to be the SMS's sound not the NES's but hey what ever floats your boat

Phred Guest	Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2005 12:16 pm
Phred Guest	SMS has much better color capabilities. On a 8x8 tile, the NES can use 3 colors + transparant, while the SMS can use 15 colors + transparant. This gives the NES an advantage in that the same tile can be used in 4 different color versions, but the SMS is obviously more colorful.

burn_georges_bush Joined: 10 Mar 2005 Posts: 50 Location: Adelaide, Australia	Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2005 10:06 am
	i think this little test should prove which console is superior. as a sega fanboy i am a little biased but this test is in my opinion much better than any tech specs. comparing my sms power base to my nes the most obvious difference is that unlike my sms my nes does not work. so while i still enjoy my sms after all these years, my Ni**do has died and displays nothing but a grey screen. so we could all argue till the cows come home about which one is technically better but we cannot argue with the much smarter sms design. the western nes was much worse than the famicom, the famicom's top loading cartridge design was brilliant and bulletproof but the nes sucked bad, looked ugly and eventually broke down. it took Nido till the 90's to properly fix the nes. the only things really better about the nes was rca outputs for video/audio, pause on the controllers and that is about it really. the other main point is that i have hardly ever seen the sega software error message whereas the nes one i have seen so many times i can only guess i have seen it hundreds of times. ps. is it only me or is it suspicious Nido's gameboy was running the z80 processor, the same used in the sms. Ni**do probably realised it was making inferior hardware and used the z80 instead. the 6502 has apperared on atari vcs as well as apple ii and the commodore 64, which are all massively inferior to sms as well as nes

RushJet1 Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 90 Location: Georgia, USA	Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2005 3:36 pm
	burn_georges_bush wrote i think this little test should prove which console is superior. as a sega fanboy i am a little biased but this test is in my opinion much better than any tech specs. So something based off your opinion (which as you said is quite biased) is better than tech specs, which can't be changed. Heh, ok. burn_georges_bush wrote comparing my sms power base to my nes the most obvious difference is that unlike my sms my nes does not work. so while i still enjoy my sms after all these years, my Nintendo has died and displays nothing but a grey screen. Oh wah. My original NES still works just fine- I don't even have to "blow off" the cartridges. I have a friend whose sms is broken after all these years, stuff won't run. So clearly using your logic, I win. burn_georges_bush wrote so we could all argue till the cows come home about which one is technically better but we cannot argue with the much smarter sms design. the western nes was much worse than the famicom, the famicom's top loading cartridge design was brilliant and bulletproof but the nes sucked bad, looked ugly and eventually broke down. it took Nintendo till the 90's to properly fix the nes. Yeah I'll give you this one. The NES design wasn't the best, and the cartridges were mostly wasted space. On the other hand, your saying that the NES "sucked bad, looked ugly, and eventually broke down" isn't necessarily true. I don't think it looked so bad, mine never broke down, and it didn't suck bad thanks to many great games. burn_georges_bush wrote the only things really better about the nes was rca outputs for video/audio, pause on the controllers and that is about it really. the other main point is that i have hardly ever seen the sega software error message whereas the nes one i have seen so many times i can only guess i have seen it hundreds of times. Yeah RCA output was nice, and the fact that you can hack it to do stereo is cool too. By the way, what's the NES software error you speak of? I've never seen such a message.. burn_georges_bush wrote ps. is it only me or is it suspicious Nintendo's gameboy was running the z80 processor, the same used in the sms. Nintendo probably realised it was making inferior hardware and used the z80 instead. the 6502 has apperared on atari vcs as well as apple ii and the commodore 64, which are all massively inferior to sms as well as nes Well Nintendo might have been smart here and realized that the 6502 eats power up compared to the Z80 (I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong here). I don't think it's really the processor's problem-- I think it was more of the implementation. Also, the SMS runs at 3.5Mhz, while the NES is running at 1.7 or so, right? If that were the case, shouldn't SMS games run infinitely faster than NES games since the Z80 is supposedly such a better CPU? Besides, the gameboy was faster than even the SMS, and it was slower while playing many many NES clone games. I remember Mario 2 and nearly all the Mega Mans slowing wayyyy down a lot on Gameboy, but not nearly as much as on the NES.

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2005 9:17 pm
	RushJet1 wrote Well Nintendo might have been smart here and realized that the 6502 eats power up compared to the Z80 (I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong here). I don't think it's really the processor's problem-- I think it was more of the implementation. Also, the SMS runs at 3.5Mhz, while the NES is running at 1.7 or so, right? If that were the case, shouldn't SMS games run infinitely faster than NES games since the Z80 is supposedly such a better CPU? Besides, the gameboy was faster than even the SMS, and it was slower while playing many many NES clone games. I remember Mario 2 and nearly all the Mega Mans slowing wayyyy down a lot on Gameboy, but not nearly as much as on the NES. No clue about the power draw between the 6502 and z80 but Zilog has been in the business of making lowpower versions of their z80's for embedded applications for some time so it was probably easier and cheaper for Ni****do to go with a z80 derivative than to find a low power 6502. As for why the GB ports of some NES games might be slower, unfamiliarity with the z80 for programmers used to the 6502 may have had something to do with it, especially if they had to port over a lot of code. The two CPU's are vastly different and how you plot out algorithms can vary depending on which CPU you are writing for. A direct port from 6502 to z80, or vice versa could be slower than the original. Also, it appears (some correct me if I'm wrong) that they moved from the NES model of having video data pulled directly from the cart to having video ram that needs to be loaded from the cartridge, as was the case on the SMS. There are pros and cons of that approach, but a game designed for instant cart access could be slowed down if it had to be rewritten to update video ram often. Also, the GB-z80 is not exactly identical to the regular z80. It has several CPU registers removed, and some opcodes have been removed or replaced with new opcodes. I'm really not sure if instruction timings have changed or if the different opcode set/loss of registers would have an overall detrimental effect on execution speed. Other than that, yeah, I appreciate burn_georges_bush's enthusiasm but I don't think he'd do well in debate club.

Memblers Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 18	Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2005 10:23 pm
Memblers Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 18	burn_georges_bush wrote ps. is it only me or is it suspicious Ni**do's gameboy was running the z80 processor, the same used in the sms. Nido probably realised it was making inferior hardware and used the z80 instead. the 6502 has apperared on atari vcs as well as apple ii and the commodore 64, which are all massively inferior to sms as well as nes I'd imagine they chose their hardware based on more mundane reasons such as cost-effectiveness and (to a lesser degree) familiarity. If you were potentially buying a million custom CPUs, I bet you'd be shopping around too, heheh. But Ni**do also was using 8080s, and later Z80s, in almost all of their arcade games (only exception would probably be the VS. series). A lot of their arcade games have Z80s and 2A03s running side by side.

burn_georges_bush Joined: 10 Mar 2005 Posts: 50 Location: Adelaide, Australia	Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 1:14 am
	debating club eh? as for the error msg have you never seen the flashing scene that alternates between grey and black or even the on that stays permanantly grey? have you never had to re-insert a cartridge so many times you lose count and then give up in frustration? or maybe my nes is cursed or indeed yours might be magical. i am not just a n*endo basher, i have had a nes,snes and gameboy. sure n*endo had some good games but i am not blind to the fact that the sms was indeed superior. i have bought 4 ,master systems in my time (2 power bases+2 Sms2's) and all have worked perfectly. the nes was the only console i had so much trouble gettin to work, therefore it is infererior in my opinion, nuff said

burn_georges_bush Joined: 10 Mar 2005 Posts: 50 Location: Adelaide, Australia	Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 1:17 am
	tho i did get some use out of my nes, bored out of my brains i modded my nes pad to work on my sms (pointless but fun)

idrougge Joined: 01 Jan 2005 Posts: 360 Location: Stockholm, Sweden	Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 11:15 am
	I take it you have never encountered the SOFTWARE ERROR screen on your Powerbase, then?

RushJet1 Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 90 Location: Georgia, USA	Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 11:26 am
	burn_georges_bush wrote debating club eh? as for the error msg have you never seen the flashing scene that alternates between grey and black or even the on that stays permanantly grey? have you never had to re-insert a cartridge so many times you lose count and then give up in frustration? or maybe my nes is cursed or indeed yours might be magical. i am not just a n*endo basher, i have had a nes,snes and gameboy. sure n*endo had some good games but i am not blind to the fact that the sms was indeed superior. i have bought 4 ,master systems in my time (2 power bases+2 Sms2's) and all have worked perfectly. the nes was the only console i had so much trouble gettin to work, therefore it is infererior in my opinion, nuff said oh that's not really an error message per se, just what the nes does when it screws up. it's like calling your pc's freezing up on you an error message

burn_georges_bush Joined: 10 Mar 2005 Posts: 50 Location: Adelaide, Australia	Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 7:34 am
	yeah i have, but never constantly. in the 15 odd years i have owned the powerbase i have hardly seen the error screen. i may go months between seeing a software error on a powerbase but everytime i try my nes i may have to blow, clean the cart connectors and re-insert the cartridge up to 10 times. if i have an error on the sms it will usually be fixed by cleaning the conductors on the cart end

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