Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) or Famicom
Tech specs and Hardware

Birth: 1983 (japan), 1986 (USA)

This is the NES, the most sold video-game machine ever! It has sold over 60 million copies worldwide and about 30 million in Japan alone. In Japan, the NES is named Famicom (comes from Family Computer). In 1993, Nintendo released a new Famicom in Japan  and later in the US (see picture to the right) that came bundled with a collection of FF1 and FF2. It was released during the Christmas rush in Japan and the FF collection helped it to sell 1 million copies that Christmas! That was more than the SNES sold in some cities! Read more about the history of the NES here!

The redesigned NES was released in Japan 1993

Chips n Bits

Click on a link below to go to that part of the document.

CPU   PPU   Bank-switching   MMC  MMC2   MMC3  MMC4   MMC5   LSI

The CPU Central Processing Unit

This is the heart in the NES. It´s the CPU that executes the codes in the game.

For a picture of the NES´s main chip click here.

The PPU Picture Processing Unit

The NES has a separate chip to handle the graphics, the PPU.

For a picture of the NES´s main chip click here.

Bank switching Game cartrigde built in ability

The first NES games (for example SMB1) could only use one "Bank" consisting of a PRG bank (Program memory, where the code are stored) and one CHR  bank (Character Memory, where all the grahpics are stored). However, these banks weren´t big enough to hold the desired information. So they created bankswitching. It basically means that when you come to a certain point in game, such as when you come to a new world, the game switches to a new bank, and when the next world comes then it switches to another bank and so on!

The MMC1 chip Game cartrigde built in chip

The MMC1 chips is a further development of the bankswitching technique and supports "switching" of both PRG and CHR banks. The MMC1-chip is the most popular of the MMC chips and is used in, for example, The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. The chip allows for selectable Name Table mirroring. This chip also featured a special RAM chip for saving games.

The maximum game page size is 8x16kb.

The MMC2 chip Game cartrigde built in chip

The only game that uses this chip is  the US/European version of  Mike Tyson´s Punch Out. The Japanese version used the MMC4 chip. I don´t know for sure, but i think that the chip makes it easier for the NES to handle big sprites.

The maximum game page size is 32x16kb.

The MMC3 chip Game cartrigde built in chip

This chip is used in Super Mario Bros 3. It enables split screen scrolling. That means that one part of the screen is scrolling (the playfield) while the other remains motionless (The display with stats and inventory). This chip also allows bank switching but here the CHR bank is replaced by a 8 KByte VRAM chip.

The maximum game page size is 32x16kb.

The MMC4 chip Game cartrigde built in chip

The only game that uses this chip is  the Japanese version of  Mike Tyson´s Punch Out. The US and European versions used the MMC2 chip. The MMC4 chip allows for bank switching of the CHR banks but, for some reason, not the PRG bank.

The MMC5 chip Game cartrigde built in chip

The MMC5 is only used in Castlevania III and Kirby´s Adventure. It allows for bank switching of both the PRG and CHR banks. It also improves the battery backup feature and has a customized mathematics module. It replaces the CPU in functions like the internal clock, and other repetitive functions. Just like the MMC3 chip this chip allows for split screen scrolling (see above). The MMC5 chip also extends the number of adressable tiles from 256 to 65536 and allows the palette colour to be assigned to a 2x2 grid, versus the old 4x4 (Note: this is NOT the same as the CHR tile that is 8x8 pixels in size). Basicall,y this means that a small area could have a larger number of different colors than before. However it does NOT allow for more colors on screen! The chip has a memory capacity of 8 Megs (1,048,576 bits).

this chip had a maximum game page size of 64x16kb.

The LSI chip Game cartrigde built in chip

A special chip developed by Konami that makes the game's sound and graphics better. Used in some of Konami´s NES games.