I love old video games and have been wanting one of these for quite a while now. So here it is, My 'new' NES!
Congrats! Tall 72-pin grey carts, and Super Mario Bros! :Thumb: We get the Famiclone ones like "Micro Genius" and shorter 60-pin carts. Whatever inside those Famiclone consoles are clone hardware (UMC instead of Nintendo's Ricoh). Even as of now, I can get a cheap Famiclone (with a Nintendo-on-a-Chip) set at $8 in Aeon-Big (formerly Carrefour). They are included with a 1,000,000-in-one cart which loops back every 5 selection menus!
Yeah, I thought about buying a clone NES, But the more I researched them I discovered that I wanted the original hardware. Nintendo's Ricoh (6502) and the Nintendo PPU for it's wonderful color pallet.
I heard clone NES in USA and Japan don't exist at all - it only exist in China and Taiwan back then. Plus, there is a protection chip in the NES cart, so many unlicensed games cannot be played on it (though there are some exceptions like piggybacking another licensed cart and defeating the protection chip). The Ricoh 2A03 processor and Ricoh RP2C02 ones are available exclusively for the NES/Famicom in the USA/Japan. The clones are UMC 6527P and UMC 6538. They are reverse engineered from the Ricoh's models and they have a slight difference in terms of sound and graphic quality. I have the clone PPU chips which I bought from Taobao and I managed to drive it through a microcontroller. This 8-bit platform has been also famous in homebrew scenes in the recent decades due to the easier reach of parts like EEPROM programmer and PCB manufacturing. On times I've seen a lot of stuff like Everdrive which you can load all the games into an SD-Card and put into the cart and play them, and people wiring carts to put their games inside.
Games I have so far, Pac-Man Ms' Pac-Man Galaga Demons of Death (my favorite for now) Mega Man 2 (one is crazy expensive for some reason) Super Mario Bro's/Duck hunt And Donkey Kong is still... on the way...
Oh, I meant one of these things. http://www.amazon.com/Retro-Bit-Retro-Video-System-Nintendo-Entertainment/dp/B0012NZK8G What do you think of it?
Heard of those Retro-duo system, but for purists, many insist of buying an actual NES/Famicom as they offer a genuine experience (and compatibility on certain games too). I ported an NES emulator on a STM32F3 microcontroller to a powerful STM32F4 (higher clock speed) before - it could run the Super Mario Bros., but the sound module is absent, and I don't have much of the time to reprogram the sound emulation. Hopefully someone else can write this better than me.
It's a good watch, Trin! I watched this some years back! Very, very inspiring! In other story, I assume you only collect original NES games, in a box? They can get very, very expensive! If I'm not mistaken, Zelda for the NES got a little battery for the save games too. If you have, you need it change it every few years or else it'll leak out and break the cart really fast! Also, are you intending to get games like "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" too?