legendary tech: the NES and its inner workings
the NES is one of the best and most influential consoles in the history of computers and electronics. it helped nintendo, and the whole of the gaming industry to get back on its feet after the video game crash of the 1980s, and introduced many groundbreaking features and titles which went on to leave a mark on the gaming industry for decades to come.
the console was released in north america with the name nintendo entertainment system. in japan it was released a bit earlier, with it being named the FAMICOM as in the family computer. these two versions had no major differences other than the difference in colour schemes and the difference in I/O (obviously as they were manufactured for different markets).
the home console introduced to the masses the first platformer game and one of the most influential story driven adventure games with the likes of the first super mario bros installment and also the first the legend of zelda installment.
in terms of hardware: the NES had a Ricoh 2A03 8 bit microprocessor based on the 6502, with the CPU having access to 2kb of RAM (known as work ram); the graphics were managed by a RICOH 2C02 which was known as the system's PPU (picture processing unit) which also had access to 2kb of RAM (known as video ram). the NES outputted video of a screen resolution of 256x240 and was designed for use with contemporary television sets.
to elaborate on the technological aspect of the NES: as mentioned above it housed a Ricoh 2A03 6502-like processor as the CPU, and a similar Ricoh 2C02 processor for the graphics processing unit or it is known in the context of the NES the PPU. The PPU could display composite signals in the 256x240 resolution and speaking in the context of the 1980s the console was quite technologically advanced and, due to the dedicated graphics processing unit along with the cost of the Nintendo namesake, it was relatively expensive for the time.
the controllers of the NES were also groundbreaking: it popularized the dpad, which nintendo had invented earlier on, which was spotted on the likes of the nintendo game and watch in 1982, although the game and watch did not see nearly as much success as the NES did. as a matter of fact the NES is credited as the most important home console which popularized and set down the standards which are recognized, even today. the FAMICOM was quite literally a duplicate of such successes just in the asian markets.
although modern controllers now use joysticks other than using dpads (since games are transitioning more from 2d to 3d) the dpads are almost unanimously voted as the choice of movement input when the games are in 2d or in 2.5d. they provide the snappiness needed in such cases.
now programming games for the NES with all of the space constraints of the cartridges, was quite challenging for the programmer's and there are some instances of ingenuity and also complete repetitiveness. examples of the ingenuity aspects include the use of procedural generation, the use of bank switching (which involved switching from different memory banks as to increase the amount of memory available at a given moment), the integration of mapper chips in the cartridges which provided memory from the cartridge to the console for more gaming capabilities, amongst many others.
since writing 6502 assembly isn't quite as easy a language like Python or even Java since they are both quite high level languages; some developers resorted to creating some level designers as to streamline the game developing process.
so in conclusion we can see that the NES was an incredibly influential and technologically advanced games console which helped both Nintendo and the entire gaming industry dodge bankruptcy and irrelevance.