The Nintendo Entertainment System

The Family Computer was realised in Japan in 1983, it was a revolutionary 8-bit console games made by Nintendo, which had started to developed video games since the 70s. When the console come in USA in 1985 it was renamed as Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, the best selling console of those years, the console which solved the videogame crash of 1983. The success of the NES is due to its lineup and its revolutionary hardware.

Inside the NES

The America, Europe, Japan and Corea version of the NES uses a 8-bit microprocessor Ricoh (a Japanese multinational) 2A03 with a clock speed of 1.79 MHz. It is a variant of the MOS 6502, a microprocessor invented by MOS Technology in 1975, a not too much expensive CPU in the 70s and a economic processor in the 80s, the age of the NES.

The NES has 2 KB of RAM and 2 KB of video ram, which can be increased by a game cartridge. There are 16 KB of free space in the console to storage files as gaming progresses; while the entire game is stored in the cartridge which can have a storage between the 8 KB and 1 MB.

The Picture Processing Unit (PPU) was made by Ricoh and it operates at 5.37 MHz with 256 bytes to store object attribute memory. The color palette is made by 64 colours (6 bytes) but it is possible to use only 25 colours at a time. The resolution of the NES is far away from the modern standard resolution, it is just 256 by 240 pixels.

Memory management controller

This hardwere is more than acceptable for a console game sold in the 80s with a prize of $125-$150, but, to develop more complex and large games, Nintendo and videogames developer built the Memory management controller or the Multi-memory controllers (MMC), a chip which is able to extend the memory of the NES.

Nintendo, for the first time, granted to third-party companies the develop of the games for its console, the NES. That's way the MMCs was developed by Nintendo and games company which built their games around the models of MMC.
For example the game cartridge of the first The Leggend Of Zelda (1987) uses the MMC1, which increase the ram. While the MCC3 increases the Picture Processing Unit (PPU) RAM and the RAM dedicated to the audio, increasing the complexity of the graphic and the songs of the game; it was used to develop the famous video game Super Mario Bros 2.

Nintendo created fantastic new games, and the gaming market was able to improve without changing the NES and its hardware every years. In this way the video game crash of the 1983 was exceeded.

NES gamepad

A gamepad is a external controller for console. It is usually build to be used with 2 hands, it is not bonded to the console, but it can send inputs (pressing a botton) to the console with a cable (or the modern bluetooth).

The gamepad of the NES was a new and more complex kind of controller, it is the first controller developed for a console with the crosses directional (or d-pad); This technology was invented by Gumpei Yokoi (A Nintendo developer), while he was developing the first portable console Nintendo named Game & Watch.

The NES's gamepad has 4 buttons (2 for playing, 2 for selecting) and the crosses directional. This squared pad is the first gamepad which presents the same commands map of a mobile arcade, that is the d-pad (or joystick) on the left and the bottons on the right, the common setting of all the present console's gamepads.