Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

From Geekcomix:

The Nintendo Entertainment System was released in America in 1985, after some limited success in Japan as the Famicom. Over the next few years, its user base would grow exponentially until the NES surpassed the Atari VCS/2600 peak set in 1982.6 As of 1990, there were over 19 million NES systems in the United States alone.5
In addition to the tremendous success of the system, its games had a great deal prosperity. For example, Super Mario Bros. 3 released in 1989 grossed over $500 million just in America. In the field of entertainment, only the movie E.T. has made more revenue.3 Super Mario Bros. 3 would sell more than 7 million copies in America and 4 million in Japan, which is more copies than any other game in history. Sheff wrote, "By record-industry standards, 'SMB3' went platinum eleven times. Michael Jackson is one of the few artists to have accomplished this feat."9
By 1990, the money earned from Nintendo's NES and its games allowed Nintendo to usurp Toyota as Japan's most successful company. In the entertainment business, Nintendo netted as much as all of the American movie studios combined, and more than the three television networks had in the previous two years. In the five short years since the system was released, the NES could be found in more than a third of the household in America and Japan. 9
This monopoly gave Nintendo significant control over the market during the Fourth Generation, which they utilized in various malicious schemes. Despite all of this, they are still one of the most popular and well-known companies in the world.
Nintendo's only competitor in the 8-bit market was Sega with their Sega Master System. While the Master System did have many more features than the NES (which is evident in a side-by-side comparison) it lacked the third party support that Nintendo had and was not much competition. The Master System sold a total of 2 million units and at times had a market share of 11%, these were the only reason the system survived as long as it did.

Sega 32X - Quick History and Specs List

The 32x debuted in 1994. It was an add-on for the Genesis. It connects to the Genesis by plugging-in the unit into the Genesis's cartage port. It is said that the 32x increase the speed of the unit by 19x! This increase in performance is possible thanks to its 2 RISC based processors.
The 32X
The Sega 32X added better color (finally), faster performance, and 3D graphics to the Genesis and Sega CD. The whole idea is sort of strange considering that when you get the Genesis and attach a Sega CD and the 32X you now have a huge chunk of hardware worth well over $400 with massive parallel processing power that still pales in comparison to say a Saturn. Still, the whole thing wasn't too bad with some great translations like Virtua Racing Deluxe and Virtua Fighter. The system had a few notable titles released before it's quick demise at the release of the Saturn and Playstation.
The idea of emulating every aspect of the 32X is quite a challenge. You'd have to emulate both the Genesis and the Sega CD first, and then write up your SH-2 core and God knows how the 32X sound processor works. The 32X is another case of someone reverse-engineering the hardware to gain the knowledge to emulate the machine. Even though the 32X, (for the most part) takes over the Genesis unit, it still allows you to play Genesis games by passing through the data from the 32x to the Genesis unit.


Quick Specs List:

Released: 1994

Processor: Dual Hitachi SH2 RISC Processors (one master and one slave)
operating at 23Mhz each

Co-Processor: 68000, Z80, VDP (Genesis) 68000 (Sega CD)

Data Path width: 32-bits within 32X

Color Palette: 32,768

On screen: 32,768

3D Capabilities: 50,000 Texture Mapped Polygons per second

Sound: Stereo PCM plus an extra 2 channels to the Genesis and Sega CD

Ram: extra 512 Kilbytes for the Genesis and Sega CD

Cart Size: 16 - 32 Megabit

Nintendo 64 - Ultra 64 - Brief history (Wikipedia)

The Nintendo 64 (Japanese: ニンテンドウロクジュウヨン Nintendō Rokujūyon), commonly called the N64, is Nintendo's third home video game console for the international market. The N64 was released on June 23, 1996 in Japan; September 29, 1996 in North America; March 1, 1997 in Europe/Australia, September 1, 1997 in France, October 15, 1997 in Brazil (the system also saw a release in Latin America, albeit an unofficial one). It was released with three launch games in Japan (Super Mario 64, Pilotwings 64 and Saikyou Haniu Shogi), and two in North America and PAL region (Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64). The Nintendo 64 cost $199 at launch in the United States.
The N64 was first publicly introduced on November 24, 1995 as the Nintendo Ultra 64 at the 7th Annual Shoshinkai Software Exhibition in Japan (though preview pictures from the Nintendo "Project Reality" console had been published in American magazines as early as June 1993). The first published photos from the event were presented on the web via coverage by Game Zero magazine two days after the event.[2] Official coverage by Nintendo soon followed a few weeks later on the nascent Nintendo Power website, and then in volume #85 of their print magazine.
During the developmental stages the N64 was referred to by its code name, Project Reality. The name Project Reality came from the speculation within Nintendo that this console could produce CGI on par with then-current supercomputers. Once unveiled to the public the name changed to Nintendo Ultra 64. Nintendo dropped "Ultra" from the name on February 1, 1996, just months before its Japanese debut, because the word "Ultra" was trademarked by another company, Konami, for its Ultra Games division.

After first announcing the project, two companies, Rareware (UK) and Midway (USA), created the arcade games Killer Instinct and Cruis'n USA which claimed to use the Ultra 64 hardware. In fact, the hardware had nothing to do with what was finally released; the arcade games used hard drives and TMS processors. Killer Instinct was the most advanced game of its time graphically, featuring pre-rendered movie backgrounds that were streamed off the hard drive and animated as the characters moved horizontally.
Nintendo touted many of the system's more unusual features as groundbreaking and innovative, but many of these features had, in fact, been implemented before by the Atari Jaguar. Regardless, the Nintendo 64 was the first popular system to combine these features and make a significant impact upon gamers.
The system was designed by Silicon Graphics Inc., and features their trademark dithered 32-bit graphics. The early N64 development system was an SGI Indy equipped with an add-on board that contained a full N64 system.

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Nintendo SNES - History

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super NES or SNES) was built by Nintendo in the 1990s. It was the sucessor to the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States and Europe. It was the major rival of Sega Megadrive/Sega Genesis.
Market History 1988 Nintendo executives at first were not interested in making a new system when rival Sega announced that they would release their 16-Bit Sega Megadrive/Sega Genesis in 1988. However, the executives were quick to see the Genesis taking over the market in North America, due to its large library of sports games and arcade ports, as well as its superior technology. The NES did not do well in Europe, and the Megadrive surpassed the SNES there as well.
Hiroshi Yamauchi, the Nintendo CEO at the time, had put Masayuki Uemura in charge of designing the console. They had originally planned for the Famicom/NES to be 16-bit systems, but those components were too expensive at the time, and so they were 8-bit systems. With the components being cheaper at the time, Nintendo did not hesitate to build a more powerful system.
1990 The Super Famicom was released November 21, 1990 in Japan. The United States Version of the Super NES was released September 1, 1991 with a starting price of $200. The first Super NES set was packaged with Super Mario World and two controllers. The PAL version of the SNES was released in the United Kingdom for £150 in April 1992. Its German release came a few weeks later.
A few months later, the Power Set, a bare-bones version of the SNES, would be released in North America, which went for $100. Towards the middle of its life, the North American set was distributed like it was the first time, but the game varied. One set was sold with the Super Game Boy accessory.
Internally, the consoles were only different depending on the TV standard in that country. Many Australian video games came from Europe because both used PAL systems. RPG's can be translated into other languages, because of how important the text is in the game. Yet many action titles and shooters didn't have changes to the languages because the text wasn't too important to the game play.
The U. S. release was not as easy as the Super Famicom had been. The SNES was not backwards compatible with the Nintendo Entertainment System, which was a popular system. There was be hesitation to buy a new console when games from the old one wouldn't work. In addition, Sega had gotten some very popular titles out for their Genesis console, including Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic was vital to the Genesis' marketing, as many people favored Sonic over Mario due to the "coolness" factor. In addition, the Genesis was about $50 cheaper than the SNES.
Thanks to the the marginally superior technical capabilities over its main competitor, Nintendo's family-friendly image, popularity of icon game characters like Super Mario, the Super NES was popular throughout the world through the early to mid-1990s. The SNES played a game of catchup and won, although in the United States the Genesis was more successful. In the end Nintendo had twice as many sales of it's console than Sega.
The number of games for the SNES was larger. It many exclusive titles, some of which were considered to be the best video games at the time. It also had many best-selling (and often still expensive) RPGs, such as Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. Some Super NES games are enhanced remakes of Famicom/NES games. One example is Super Mario All Stars, another is Ninja Gaiden Trilogy.
The European console was similar to the Japanese Super Famicom. Nintendo never got much of a footing in Europe, particularly due to the distribution problems. Ironically, there were converters available that allowed users to play Sega Master System games on the Sega Megadrive. Both consoles were very popular in Europe.
1996 An SNES redesign, which was lighter in weight, came out in October 1997 for $99.99 in the United States to get the last few sales from people still interested in the 16-Bit market. The game was packaged with Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The RF Ports and expansion ports did not come with the version; Hopes of an SNES-CD died, and the resources helped make the Playstation.
The Super NES was superseded by the Nintendo 64. Many of the successful games for the system are being revived in the Game Boy Advance, which has remarkably similar capabilities.
After 1999 The SNES was in popular decline from 1996 to 1999, with the Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 eating away at its marketing share. However, even though the Super NES was discontinued in North America and Europe in 1999, like the NES, it left the mark of many million cartridges and more than the NES did. The second hand market was burgeoning on the SNES as it did on the NES. Around this time, many gamers began to rediscover the SNES. The NES and SNES continued to be in production in Japan until late 2003.
Meanwhile, SNES enthusiasts were programming an emulator called ZSNES. In 1998, ZSNES was released. One year later, ZSNES got its rival, SNES9X. Nintendo had the same stance against SNES emulation as it had on NES emulation.
ROM images of Super NES Game Paks, which have been claimed to be potentially illegal, are actually getting easier to find, since the SNES went out of production in North America in 1999. Nintendo claimed that ROMs are nothing but gratuitous piracy, but the company actually brought it onto itself. Others claim that ROMs are used to preserve the games since the cartridges are more fragile. Like its predecessor the NES, the Super NES has a continued interest among its fans, continuing to thrive on a huge secondhand market and proliferate ROM images. There has been a larger demand for a secondhand market and emulation for the SNES than the NES.
The revival of the SNES is settling back down. The second hand market is declining, and SNES ROMs are getting easier to find. The NES and SNES are likely to command legions of fans in many years to come.
SNES Hardware Specifications
CPU: WDC 65C816 16 bit processor running at 1.79, 2.68 MHz, or 3.58 MHz (Changeable), with 128 KiB of RAM
Sound CPU: 8-bit Sony SPC700 running at 4.1 MHz, with 64 KiB of RAM, PC file name extension: .SPC
Main sound Chip: 8-channel DSP with hardware decompression similar to ADPCM
Memory Cycle Time: 279 Minutes
Cartridge Size Specifications: 2Megabits - 48 Megabits
Audio RAM: 512 KB
Sound Channels: 8, Uses compressed wave samples
Pulse Code Modulator: 16-Bit
Picture Processor Unit: 16-Bit
Palette: 32,768 Colors
Texture and map RAM: 64 KiB
Onscreen colors: 241 in mode 1 or 256 in mode 7, not counting sum-blending
Resolution: Most games used 256x224 pixels; there were tricks to get 512x448 but these were rarely used.
Maximum onscreen sprites: 128 (32 per line)
Maximum number of sprite pixels on one scanline: 256. The picture generator had a bug such that it would drop the frontmost sprites instead of the rearmost sprites if a scanline exceeded the limit.
Most common display modes: Pixel-to-pixel text mode 1 (16 colors per tile; 3 scrolling layers) and affine mapped text mode 7 (256 colors per tile; one rotating/scaling layer)
Power Input: 120V AC, 60 Hz, 17 Watts
Power Output: 10V DC, 850 mA (NTSC), 9V AC (PAL)
Controller Response: 16 Milliseconds
2 seven-pin controller ports in the front of the machine

Note: this Wikipedia article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.

Specifications of Atari Jaguar

A. Physical dimensions:

Size: 9.5" x 10" x 2.5"
Controls: Power on/off
Display: Programmable screen resolution. Horizontal resolution is
dependent on the amount of scanline buffer space given to the
"Tom" graphics processor. Maximum vertical resolution varies
according to the refresh rate (NTSC or PAL). Reportedly, a
stock Jaguar (without additional memory) running NTSC can
display up to 576 rows of pixels.
24-bit "True Color" display with 16,777,216 colors
simultaneously (additional 8 bits of supplimental graphics
data support possible)
Multiple-resolution, multiple-color depth objects (monochrome,
2-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit) can be used
simultaneously
Ports: Cartridge slot/expansion port (32 bits)
RF video output
Video edge connector (video/audio output)
(supports NTSC and PAL; provides S-Video, Composite, RGB
outputs, accessible by optional add-on connector)
Two controller ports
Digital Signal Processor port (includes high-speed synchronous
serial input/output)
Controllers: Eight-directional joypad
Size 6.25" x 5" x 1.6", cord 7 feet
Three fire buttons (A, B, C)
Pause and Option buttons
12-key keypad (accepts game-specific overlays)

The Jaguar has five processors which are contained in three chips. Two of
the chips are proprietary designs, nicknamed "Tom" and "Jerry". The third
chip is a standard Motorola 68000, and used as a coprocessor. Tom and
Jerry are built using an 0.5 micron silicon process. With proper
programming, all five processors can run in parallel.

- "Tom"
- 750,000 transistors, 208 pins
- Graphics Processing Unit (processor #1)
- 32-bit RISC architecture (32/64 processor)
- 64 registers of 32 bits wide
- Has access to all 64 bits of the system bus
- Can read 64 bits of data in one instruction
- Rated at 26.591 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 26.591 MHz
- 4K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- Performs a wide range of high-speed graphic effects
- Programmable
- Object processor (processor #2)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- 64-bit wide registers
- Programmable processor that can act as a variety of different video
architectures, such as a sprite engine, a pixel-mapped display, a
character-mapped system, and others.
- Blitter (processor #3)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- 64-bit wide registers
- Performs high-speed logical operations
- Hardware support for Z-buffering and Gouraud shading
- DRAM memory controller
- 64 bits
- Accesses the DRAM directly

- "Jerry"
- 600,000 transistors, 144 pins
- Digital Signal Processor (processor #4)
- 32 bits (32-bit registers)
- Rated at 26.6 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 26.6 MHz
- Same RISC core as the Graphics Processing Unit
- Not limited to sound generation
- 8K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo)
- Number of sound channels limited by software
- Two DACs (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound signals
- Full stereo capabilities
- Wavetable synthesis, FM synthesis, FM Sample synthesis, and AM
synthesis
- A clock control block, incorporating timers, and a UART
- Joystick control

- Motorola 68000 (processor #5)
- Runs at 13.295MHz
- General purpose control processor

Communication is performed with a high speed 64-bit data bus, rated at
106.364 megabytes/second. The 68000 is only able to access 16 bits of
this bus at a time.

The Jaguar contains two megabytes (16 megabits) of fast page-mode DRAM,
in four chips with 512 K each. Game cartridges can support up to six
megabytes (48 megabits) of information, and can contain an EEPROM
(electrically erasable/programmable read-only memory) chip to save game
information and settings. Up to 100,000 writes can be performed with the
EEPROM; after that, future writes may not be saved (performance varies
widely, but 100,000 is a guaranteed minimum). Depending on use, this
limit should take from 10 to 50 years to reach.

The Jaguar uses 24-bit addressing, and is reportedly capable of accessing
data as follows:

Six megabytes cartridge ROM
Eight megabytes DRAM
Two megabytes miscellaneous/expansion

All of the processors can access the main DRAM memory area directly. The
Digital Signal Processor and the Graphics Processor can execute code out
of either their internal caches, or out of main memory. The only
limitations are that

(1) "jump" instructions in main memory have certain restrictions; the JMP
(unconditional jump) command is longword-aligned, while the JR
(jump-indexed-by-register) command must be either word- or longword-
aligned. And
(2) running out of the cache is much faster (up to four times faster) and
efficient.

Some believe that the inability to jump/branch in main memory makes the
main memory feature useless.

Swapping data between the caches and the main memory is a quick, low
overhead operation, and therefore the main memory is often used as "swap
space" for cache code. The RISC compiler included in the latest Jaguar
developer's kit produced code that transparently swaps code through the
cache. This effectively allowed developers write RISC code without
concern for the cache size limits.

Compressed cartridge data can be uncompressed in real-time, and ratios of
up to 14:1 have been cited. In theory, a Jaguar cartridge can store up to
84 megabytes (672 megabits) of data, though actual results will vary
widely (most often, images are compressed, while sound and code are not).
Compression is performed with BPEG, an enhanced JPEG image decompression
mechanism. BPEG supercedes the former JagPEG algorithm, working up to 10
times faster and with more flexibility.

Other Jaguar features:
- Support for ComLynx I/O for communications with the Atari Lynx hand-held
game system and networked multiconsole games (on DSP port, accessible
by optional add-on connector). Networking of up to 32 Jaguar units
available.
- The two controller ports can be expanded to support "dozens" of
controllers
- Digital and analog interfaces
- Keyboards, mice, and light guns are possible
- Expansion port allows connection to cable TV and other networks
- Digital Signal Processor port allows connection to modems and digital
audio peripherals (such as DAT players)
- One megabyte per second serial interface
- 9600 baud, RS-232 serial port (accessible with optional interface)
- General-purpose I/O bits via the cartridge port
- Can accomodate future expansions of different processor types, I/O
types, video types, and memory types and/or quantities.

Alien Gate- Philips CD-i Review - History

Alien Gate




Released
1992

Genre
Shooter

Publisher
Philips Interactive Media

Developer
SPC Vision

Catalog ID
810 0049

DVC Required
No

Players
1
Description
A terrifying evil is threatening the safety of your planet. Hordes of monsters are advancing through the Alien Gate with one objective in mind - the destruction of your world! Only you can ward off this danger. As a rocket fighter pilot, your coolheadedness will be tested to the utmost. The last battle has begun.

Review
Hasn't been reviewed yet

Game Media
Front - Back - Disc

Tips & Tricks
Cheats