Curiosity Stream is having its holiday sale until the 28. This is the cheapest way to get into Nebula all year. It accounts for less than $1 a month. curiositystream.com/lowspecgamer If you decided to jump in (THANK YOU) here are some quick links to some of my best exclusive stuff there: The bonus video for this one, “Why is the Famicom Red?”: nebula.app/videos/lowspecgamer-why-is-the-nintendo-famicom-red The bonus video for the Game Boy Color, “The Hidden Tribute of the Game Boy Color design”: nebula.app/videos/lowspecgamer-the-hidden-tribute-of-the-game-boy-color-design The bonus video for the Game Boy Pocket, “The Very Weird story of the Game Boy Camera”: nebula.app/videos/lowspecgamer-the-very-weird-story-of-the-game-boy-camera My Nebula Original, Digital GoldMiners of Venezuela: nebula.app/videos/lowspecgamer-digital-goldminers
The 9918 is not very similar to the NES PPU. the way the tiles work is very different, with the 9918 using only two colors per tile, but each tile having a table of which two colors per 8 of the lines in the tile, while the NES simply use 4 color tiles, and the NES being able to push twice the sprites per scanline with 3 colors on em as well (instead of 1 color or transparency of the 9918), and well the hardware scrolling etc.. But both chips are "drinking from the same fountain" as the arcade galaxian basically invented the 8x8 tilemaps with scrolling and hardware sprites over em etc.. and all arcades copied the galaga hardware, including donkey kong, so everyone specially in japan was rushing to reach the "full galaga clone in a chip" design for a home console, and i'm pretty sure the famicom is the first one to get the full thing.
Great perspective Dan, thank you. I repeated the claim from "I am Error" but understood this was controversial (which is I focused less on that and more on the very proven 6502 weirdness), but happy to see a more informed breakdown of the PPU!
@@LowSpecGamer i been messing around quite a while with one of the evolutions of the 9918 (the 9938 used on the MSX 2) and it's a pretty weird and interesting chip. I can easily make a rainbow tile with all the 16 colors.. if my rainbow is vertical, but horizontal is just a big nope.
A day before this video went live Masayuiki Uemura died, aged 78. A true LowSpec legend, his maneuvering to get the Famicom to work under the tremendous limitations of the project paved the way to modern Gaming and proved how much price accessibility mattered. I hope to be able to tell more stories about him in future videos. Some quick additional info I have seen since this video got written: According to Uemura in one of his last interviews, Yamauchi was tipsy when he originally called him regarding the Famicom project (which makes the entire thing way funnier and I wish I could have included it in the video). Uemura was surprised when, the next day a fully sober Yamauchi insisted on the idea.
This series... You really have a knack for this kind of thing. I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is legit some of my favorite content anywhere on youtube. May the low-spec lore series never die!
'Some days Uemura would find himself with so little to do he would just go home early.' When a Japanese man leaves work early you know something is wrong.
This video was fantastic! I mean sure its a bit different from your older content, but sometimes you gotta adapt. Personally I loved all the art, it really helped to keep track of the many different characters going on. I have seen a few videos on the history of the NES/Famicom but I really liked the deeper dive into how the cpu/ppu design came around. Nintendo skirting copyright protection is pretty damn ironic. I knew they tried to make the console cheap but that price point is crazy. I just wanna say that I applaud trying to turn this channel in a new direction, its not like we've had much new low end hardware to talk about. But seriously if theres nothing to make content about then you dont have the choice, I'm just glad you are still out here making awesome videos! But seriously I really enjoyed this one, hope we can see more like this in the future! RIP Masayuiki Uemura
Nintendo's arcade games were co-developed by another company named Ikegami. Nintendo and Ikegami would later get into a legal fight over who owned the code of those arcade games. This is speculation, but perhaps one of the reasons Nintendo chose the 6502 for the Famicom was to distance itself from Ikegami, whose code was for the Z80 in the arcade games.
Yes! I am doing research for a video on the development of the Donkey Kong arcade game and I go a bit more in depth on that lawsuit. It is is a fascinating topic
Seeing Nintendo make very good use of underpowered hardware to this day reminds me that the late Satoru Iwata: -managed to compress Earthbound to fit consumer SNES cartridge -managed to bring back the region from first gen Pokemon in the second gen All of those done in tight deadline. There is also how the others -Manage to compose high fidelity audio for N64 despite cartridge space and -Manage to make F-Zero series ran without frame drops.
Another good one. Thanks. I remember those days. I used to think the z80 was _THE_ cpu to program but a friend at the time demonstrated to me how fast the MOS 6510 of the Commodore 64 was.
My first and only console was a Nintendo Famicon clone made for the Eastern Europe, called Terminator 2/Ending man. The Nintendo cartridges were compatible with it.
@@LowSpecGamer Yeah, it was the only console to be found back in the 90's in Romania. The bazaars were full of them. Mine didn't had the "original" power adapter, I was using some big ass russian adapter in order to power it, but it did had two gamepads, a pistol and lots of cartridges. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ending-Man_Terminator
I love the history of nintendo too ,BUT, i f!cking hate generic humorism in video’s about it,i also fucking hate if youtubers in their video’s keep saying to cover things up in future video’s wich really drives me insane,ammean why keep saying that to occupy us,damnit👎
10:00 I've heard before that there wasn't much respect of international copyright during Japan's economic miracle and there have been comparisons to modern day China.
Man when you realise all the famous people who got there mainstream recognition probably risen to where there are now buy hard work of others with the same power output
Dear LowSpecGamer, The transition you made to this type of videos is great. I did like your older style of videos at times, but this type is something i see myself watching regularily! This is really a nice work, good pacing, interesting topics, well documented... I hope this works well!
Interestingly, it's only the joycon that doesn't have a d-pad. It's on most of the external pro controllers AND on the Lite. Obviously it's on the joycon so that that left and right can be more or less symmetrical. You can use 4 buttons in place of a d-pad, but the d-pad would restict you from being able to press X & B or A & Y at the same time.
Really enjoying this series so far! i'm hoping you cover the MegaDrive / Genesis someday. I've always thought Sega was super-smart with its design, getting a cheap-but-powerful console by basically just cramming it full of incredibly common components.
I would argue the Master System has the weirder story, as Sega went through a few revisions before it left Japan, and it even has ties to the MSX (which is another obscure bit of computer history)
You can’t put Famicom carts inside cassette cases, but they’re about the same size as the cases, so you absolutely CAN put Famicom games in pretty much any container designed to hold the whole enchilada. Genesis/Mega Drive cartridges are also similar. I use an old Radio Shack cassette caddy that belonged to my grandmother for Famicom games, and another one that was my parents’ for my loose Genesis carts. The cassette thing is fairly common knowledge, but something I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention is how an N64 cart is nearly the exact same width as an NTSC VHS tape. Maybe Nintendo was still thinking along these lines. Whatever the case is, the TV stand that I use for my retro systems has a compartment designed for paperback/loose VHS tapes, and my N64 carts fit perfectly in it.
I personally love these kind of videos, where people talk about the history of these big game industry companies and this video is just perfect. Keep up the good work Alex!
Who would've thought something made with what were considered cheaper parts back then not only breathed new life into gaming, but that we're still using the original hardware all these decades later, whether its the Famicom, or the international version of it, the NES.
The PPU and the TMS9918 are VERY similar when looking at a dieshot. I'm gonna ask some people who have worked on HDL implementations of both about the differences.
This is such a great video presentation. Noticing the shapes of the console and catridges between a famicom and NES, I wonder if there's a fun story behind it. It's the same item, right? Why change the look AND the catridges? If it's quite a fun story, I hope you'll get a video about it in the future. (to be fair, NES looks much better than Famicom. The Famicom's color left a lot to be desired. Doesn't explain why they change the cartridges shapes and size tho)
you really helped me, in games that at the time the pc I had didn't work in a recommended way and then came the handhelds and I was excited watching the videos you made now I see the videos of you playing with the game boy and I still get excited I don't know how to read english how i would like but I can understand the content and what I like most about your videos is to explore the possibilities that a hardware can do and see how the software can be molded to a point can you make a video of a transistor is made I will see with a smile on my face (used google translate)
It's not like i didn't like the original lowspec stuff, but i personally just fell in love with new style and content, it's just so funny and interesting! I literally watch these videos in both english and spanish as soon as they drop
Eh maybe not. Sega could've filled that space. There were plans for a US and eventually EU release of the SG-1000 that were called off due to the success of the Famicom/NES.
It would have taken longer to recover but it would have. Someone would revitalized the marked. It's unrealistic to think that a massive worldwide growing industry would be ignored forever in the USA. Maybe Sega, maybe Atari would actually recovered, maybe the Home computer would have taken the space of of the consoles. Some of the Big Video Game Companies would change. We would have a fight between the Dreamcast 5 and the Atari Leopard while new PCEngineSwitch sidelines the competition. But it still would morph in to a massive Multi Billion Dollar Industry.
RE: Why the switch has 4 separate buttons instead of a d-pad It's because the joycons can be used separately as if they were their own controlled with an analogue stick and 4 face buttons. Making it a d-pad would prevent that. Personally never found anyone who'd rather use a lone joycon instead of a pro controller or third party controller(no drift = best choice IMO).
It’s a bit hard to say that they could not reuse logic or code. I mean the logic is the same and the code is rather similar just port to another instruction set. A port work of course but not a super big one.
Love the vid!, first time suggesting Hey man when will you do splitgate? it's free on steam and my pc is basically running on microsoft basic display adapter type pc
Speaking of Majora's Mask: have you played Outer Wilds? I've deemed it the Spiritual Successor of Majora's Mask, due to being an amazing game, even if it's not made by Nintendo. It shares a bunch of unique themes with MM, the big one being Time. Just trust a stranger and go play it. It's amazing.
3:36 Small correction, the reason many of these ports sucked *except* for the ColecoVision port was because Coleco had the rights for many of these systems to port Donkey Kong to. This resulted in Coleco intentionally gimping every single port of Donkey Kong they made *except* for their console's, to artificially position their console as the superior one. So yes, the home machines and consoles at the time may not have been super capable of running Donkey Kong, but they never saw their full potential on that front either.
14:24 think that switch dpad makes sense since its supposed to be the action buttons of a joycon once it's detached from the console. also, rocker dpads suck.
Ricoh was ATARI's supplier of the single chip ASIC which powers the ATARI 2600jr "unicorn" which contains a 6502 core, the "RIOT" chip ("RAM-I/O-TIMER" MOS6532) and the "TIA" (Television Interface Adapter). So ATARI was the reason why RICOH could make 6502. And because RICOH was tied to ATARI's contract regarding the processor core they neutered the BCD function to avoid being sued.
@@LowSpecGamer Pretty much, yes. The story I heard was that the deal was made in 1981-82 and was supposed to be used in new devices around 1983 but we know what happened to ATARI by that time. That would explain why Ricoh had their factory empty but ready to roll into mass manufacturing of chips. ATARI had been using other Japanese manufacturers to make the TIA chips (OKI of Okidata fame for example)
I'm currently making a NES emulator and I found it quite interesting to find out the exact reason the module for decimal operations was removed in the NES's 6502 chip. Also means one less thing for me to work on lol
Haven't had a lot of experience with Nintendo. One of the first decisions my wife and I made together was to buy a Sega Genesis. The Monopoly game cheated - regardless of the AI personality, if it offered a trade and you said no, it just took the property. If you offered an absurdly high trade and it said no, it did not.
can we get something like this for the Release of the Nintendo 64 since Games coming out for Nintendo 64 was gonna be Difficult for them to Develop them for!
The chocolate chip like buttons on the joycons are actually better. The D-pad being combined like that, made it so sometimes you’d make inputs you didn’t actually make when positioned wrongly. Plus sometimes it was more clunky. So singular buttons for each side is better.
Typically sneaky, cheating, thieving, b__t__ds! It's no coincidence that Zilog deliberately designed the Z80 at the fab level to be as hard to rip-off as possible. It didn't stop Nintendo subsequently ripping them off over the Game Boy. I didn't realise the Famicom PPU was likely, um, 'inspired' by the Ti9918a. Thinking about it NES games do have a very Ti-ish look about them.
I swear, your side videos are going to make me get Nebula / CS. Is there a way to turn down the resolution on it? I have very low data caps, so I have to watch RUclips in 240p/144p.
@@LowSpecGamer Oh, now I am definitely getting it! Thank you so much for your quality work over the years. The new direction is amazing, and I am learning so much more about the stuff I love Thanks for the fast reply, too. (I went to sleep after my comment and just now checked RUclips again)
This actually an idea by “tales foundry” on RUclips after I showed him this video and asked his opinion. Then my artists (maiku) executed his idea spectacularly. I am glad you appreciate it. It is super fun
i love watching these videos and finding out like: "yeah, this giant company that dominates this one industry and everyone knows?" "yeah they owe their existence to a printer company =)"
hi lowspecgamer sorry for bothering you but could you upload a video of naruto ultimate ninja storm or dragon ball xenoverse 2? and please can you also try the tales of zestiria?
'finding developers that knew what to do with a 6502' would be 'hard' ? lol. ya know. i think pretty much any developer around knows what to do with either an 8080, 8051, 6809, 650x, 8086 or z80. :P and then probably that weird signetics stuff too :P there wasn't that much around in terms of 'smaller computers' (as in non-pdp stuff ;) and as 'game developers' usually 'use computers' they'd probably have bought all of them ay :P and as such be familliar with the cpus used in all of them. (and by the time nintendo got this idea pretty much half of them out there had some sort of 6502 in them for like almost a decade already ;) so it's not like they would never have seen or programmed their tools to for one. consoles and arcade boards lacking a keyboard, you have to enter your code on something and burn the roms on something :P pretty damn sure the nes developer kit was simply an apple II witih a ppu board :P lol.
(@4:51) - This is - for all intents and purposes - an OkiData ML320/321 printer. I know, because the company I work for has sh*tloads of these things. I suppose the earliest models may have been made by Ricoh, but I can only guess they got bought out by OkiData, or sold the IP to OkiData, as I never saw any of these printers with “Ricoh” labeling on them. Fairly reliable, but they gave a NASTY tendency to suck the paper back into the tractor-feed mechanism if you don’t fold the paper over the front, and out of the way!
why no one speaks about the 1000 built in games on the original one. BTW its famicon in Japanese ファミコン and NOT famicom because in japanese there is no M sound
What would happen if the Binary Coded Decimal operations module were *reconnected* in an NES and _then_ someone played a game on it? How would this affect the performance?
Gunpei Yokoi and Shigeru Miyamoto saved Nintendo and they are like the first iMac and the first iPod :-) aka Steve Jobs' "Second Coming". God bless, Rev. 21:4
Since you asked: The quality of the Lore videos is high, but the topic is just less interesting to me. That doesn't mean you shouldn't make them, of course.
Curiosity Stream is having its holiday sale until the 28. This is the cheapest way to get into Nebula all year. It accounts for less than $1 a month. curiositystream.com/lowspecgamer
If you decided to jump in (THANK YOU) here are some quick links to some of my best exclusive stuff there:
The bonus video for this one, “Why is the Famicom Red?”: nebula.app/videos/lowspecgamer-why-is-the-nintendo-famicom-red
The bonus video for the Game Boy Color, “The Hidden Tribute of the Game Boy Color design”: nebula.app/videos/lowspecgamer-the-hidden-tribute-of-the-game-boy-color-design
The bonus video for the Game Boy Pocket, “The Very Weird story of the Game Boy Camera”: nebula.app/videos/lowspecgamer-the-very-weird-story-of-the-game-boy-camera
My Nebula Original, Digital GoldMiners of Venezuela: nebula.app/videos/lowspecgamer-digital-goldminers
I dont know why. But i used to watch u as soon as the vid came out but it has been a while since youtube showed me your vids. Fukin youtube
The 9918 is not very similar to the NES PPU. the way the tiles work is very different, with the 9918 using only two colors per tile, but each tile having a table of which two colors per 8 of the lines in the tile, while the NES simply use 4 color tiles, and the NES being able to push twice the sprites per scanline with 3 colors on em as well (instead of 1 color or transparency of the 9918), and well the hardware scrolling etc..
But both chips are "drinking from the same fountain" as the arcade galaxian basically invented the 8x8 tilemaps with scrolling and hardware sprites over em etc.. and all arcades copied the galaga hardware, including donkey kong, so everyone specially in japan was rushing to reach the "full galaga clone in a chip" design for a home console, and i'm pretty sure the famicom is the first one to get the full thing.
Great perspective Dan, thank you. I repeated the claim from "I am Error" but understood this was controversial (which is I focused less on that and more on the very proven 6502 weirdness), but happy to see a more informed breakdown of the PPU!
@@LowSpecGamer i been messing around quite a while with one of the evolutions of the 9918 (the 9938 used on the MSX 2) and it's a pretty weird and interesting chip.
I can easily make a rainbow tile with all the 16 colors.. if my rainbow is vertical, but horizontal is just a big nope.
Curiosity Stream user experience still sucks.
A day before this video went live Masayuiki Uemura died, aged 78. A true LowSpec legend, his maneuvering to get the Famicom to work under the tremendous limitations of the project paved the way to modern Gaming and proved how much price accessibility mattered. I hope to be able to tell more stories about him in future videos.
Some quick additional info I have seen since this video got written:
According to Uemura in one of his last interviews, Yamauchi was tipsy when he originally called him regarding the Famicom project (which makes the entire thing way funnier and I wish I could have included it in the video). Uemura was surprised when, the next day a fully sober Yamauchi insisted on the idea.
The timing... Rest in peace.
This series... You really have a knack for this kind of thing. I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is legit some of my favorite content anywhere on youtube. May the low-spec lore series never die!
playstation next pls
And of course the comment that will make you money is pinned, not the comment about the death of a good person
'Some days Uemura would find himself with so little to do he would just go home early.'
When a Japanese man leaves work early you know something is wrong.
Okay, you're keeping the Yamauchi-kicking-the-door-open gag, which makes me happy.
Also, I just realized that he's knocking the opening notes to Super Mario Bros.
I am curious to see if you will catch the knocking sound Easter egg on January´s LSL video.
@@ViridianGames as soon as I picked up on that I couldn't help but laugh, that was great
Waaiit, so you're the LowSpecHistorian now? Not complaining, I just wasn't expecting these videos. Keep up the good work! :)
This is my thing now
Love his presentation with these, more Low Spec content for the win!
@@LowSpecGamer did you delete your old videos?
Granted, these machines are low-spec relative to the machines of today, but OK.
@@diegoaugusto1561 no
The amount of attention to detail and just raw effort put into these histroy dives are great, love the work Alex.
I appreciate it very much. Thanks.
He also makes translated spanish versions of all his videos on his other channel. Alot of hard work.
@@subaru6026 but he speaks spanish
@@piposanchez1379 haha yes, but he still has to write and read the script twice and re edit it. So yeah, a lot of work.
This video was fantastic! I mean sure its a bit different from your older content, but sometimes you gotta adapt. Personally I loved all the art, it really helped to keep track of the many different characters going on. I have seen a few videos on the history of the NES/Famicom but I really liked the deeper dive into how the cpu/ppu design came around. Nintendo skirting copyright protection is pretty damn ironic. I knew they tried to make the console cheap but that price point is crazy.
I just wanna say that I applaud trying to turn this channel in a new direction, its not like we've had much new low end hardware to talk about. But seriously if theres nothing to make content about then you dont have the choice, I'm just glad you are still out here making awesome videos!
But seriously I really enjoyed this one, hope we can see more like this in the future!
RIP Masayuiki Uemura
Holy crap, thank you so much for your comment
@@LowSpecGamer you really deserved every bit of it man. I like your videos in general but these kind of video essay likes are very nice to watch!
@@LowSpecGamer yeah, it's the particular style and format of these deep dives, along with the illustrations that really make this whole thing amazing.
Nintendo's arcade games were co-developed by another company named Ikegami. Nintendo and Ikegami would later get into a legal fight over who owned the code of those arcade games. This is speculation, but perhaps one of the reasons Nintendo chose the 6502 for the Famicom was to distance itself from Ikegami, whose code was for the Z80 in the arcade games.
Yes! I am doing research for a video on the development of the Donkey Kong arcade game and I go a bit more in depth on that lawsuit. It is is a fascinating topic
Seeing Nintendo make very good use of underpowered hardware to this day reminds me that the late Satoru Iwata:
-managed to compress Earthbound to fit consumer SNES cartridge
-managed to bring back the region from first gen Pokemon in the second gen
All of those done in tight deadline.
There is also how the others
-Manage to compose high fidelity audio for N64 despite cartridge space
and
-Manage to make F-Zero series ran without frame drops.
I wouldn't call a lot of Switch games using the hardware well...
@@vyor8837 Well, gamefreak bungled up twice but Nintendo's main dev team didn't....
@@meyers0781 Tell me again about Ultimate's online?
@@vyor8837thats nintendos servers and the smash community being wifi warriors nothing to do with the switch hardware
Another good one. Thanks.
I remember those days. I used to think the z80 was _THE_ cpu to program but a friend at the time demonstrated to me how fast the MOS 6510 of the Commodore 64 was.
I know; the C64 port of "Donkey Kong" is more than capable of proving that...
My first and only console was a Nintendo Famicon clone made for the Eastern Europe, called Terminator 2/Ending man. The Nintendo cartridges were compatible with it.
Really want to tackle the story of some Famiclones eventually
@@LowSpecGamer Yeah, it was the only console to be found back in the 90's in Romania. The bazaars were full of them. Mine didn't had the "original" power adapter, I was using some big ass russian adapter in order to power it, but it did had two gamepads, a pistol and lots of cartridges. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ending-Man_Terminator
my family first game console was clone ps one that using cartridge it had 40000 game and most of them are the same title but with mod ingame
@@viewstar89 nici nu ma uit bine la youtube ca am gasit romani
I have one at home, some friend gave it to me!
Absolutely love these "History of Nintendo" videos :)
I love the history of nintendo too ,BUT, i f!cking hate generic humorism in video’s about it,i also fucking hate if youtubers in their video’s keep saying to cover things up in future video’s wich really drives me insane,ammean why keep saying that to occupy us,damnit👎
10:00 I've heard before that there wasn't much respect of international copyright during Japan's economic miracle and there have been comparisons to modern day China.
YES. The documentary I recommend at the end is great for exploring this, and one of my main sources of inspiration
Man when you realise all the famous people who got there mainstream recognition probably risen to where there are now buy hard work of others with the same power output
Dear LowSpecGamer,
The transition you made to this type of videos is great. I did like your older style of videos at times, but this type is something i see myself watching regularily!
This is really a nice work, good pacing, interesting topics, well documented... I hope this works well!
Interestingly, it's only the joycon that doesn't have a d-pad. It's on most of the external pro controllers AND on the Lite. Obviously it's on the joycon so that that left and right can be more or less symmetrical. You can use 4 buttons in place of a d-pad, but the d-pad would restict you from being able to press X & B or A & Y at the same time.
who is drawing the linearts? They are amazing!
Really enjoying this series so far! i'm hoping you cover the MegaDrive / Genesis someday. I've always thought Sega was super-smart with its design, getting a cheap-but-powerful console by basically just cramming it full of incredibly common components.
I plan to, I am currently doing research for that. It is a HUGE story so it takes me time and I want to do it right
@@LowSpecGamer Awesome! Looking forward to it.
I would argue the Master System has the weirder story, as Sega went through a few revisions before it left Japan, and it even has ties to the MSX (which is another obscure bit of computer history)
You can’t put Famicom carts inside cassette cases, but they’re about the same size as the cases, so you absolutely CAN put Famicom games in pretty much any container designed to hold the whole enchilada. Genesis/Mega Drive cartridges are also similar. I use an old Radio Shack cassette caddy that belonged to my grandmother for Famicom games, and another one that was my parents’ for my loose Genesis carts.
The cassette thing is fairly common knowledge, but something I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention is how an N64 cart is nearly the exact same width as an NTSC VHS tape. Maybe Nintendo was still thinking along these lines. Whatever the case is, the TV stand that I use for my retro systems has a compartment designed for paperback/loose VHS tapes, and my N64 carts fit perfectly in it.
nintendo: we need to get away from these sketchy arcade parlor
konami: we need to get in these sketchy arcade parlor
I have to point out that the Amstrad CPC version of Donkey Kong was amazing, unlike most of the other 8-bit computer ports.
Ok fair point. Not sure why the colecovision became the basis Nintendo worked from!
@@LowSpecGamer Um..probably because the Amstrad version didn't come out until 1986 :)
I personally love these kind of videos, where people talk about the history of these big game industry companies and this video is just perfect. Keep up the good work Alex!
loved that mario theme reference with the knocking. Perfectly represents Hiroshi Yamauchi; absolute BOSS.
Who would've thought something made with what were considered cheaper parts back then not only breathed new life into gaming, but that we're still using the original hardware all these decades later, whether its the Famicom, or the international version of it, the NES.
Nintendo totally outsmarted those Commodore engineers. Stole their design, but still stayed within the law.
I am not sure if to condemn them or celebrate them. Definitely shrewd
Tired: exploiting a legal loophole to build a flagship system on other company's IP. Wired: Hyper-aggressively defending your own company's IP.
The PPU and the TMS9918 are VERY similar when looking at a dieshot. I'm gonna ask some people who have worked on HDL implementations of both about the differences.
wait only 40k views?! i thought it was like at least 4x that amount with this quality
You can help me by sharing it to friends or in places like Reddit!
I like the art in this video.who draws them?
instagram.com/maiku_no_koe/?hl=en
This is such a great video presentation. Noticing the shapes of the console and catridges between a famicom and NES, I wonder if there's a fun story behind it. It's the same item, right? Why change the look AND the catridges? If it's quite a fun story, I hope you'll get a video about it in the future.
(to be fair, NES looks much better than Famicom. The Famicom's color left a lot to be desired. Doesn't explain why they change the cartridges shapes and size tho)
If I ever get to cover the transition from Japan to US I will talk about that
you really helped me, in games that at the time the pc I had didn't work in a recommended way
and then came the handhelds and I was excited watching the videos you made
now I see the videos of you playing with the game boy
and I still get excited
I don't know how to read english
how i would like
but I can understand the content
and what I like most about your videos is to explore the possibilities that a hardware can do and see how the software can be molded to a point
can you make a video of a transistor is made
I will see with a smile on my face
(used google translate)
I'm glad you included the reference to _A Match In Space_ by George McFly. One of the stalwarts of Eighties Sci-Tech, along with Brin and Crichton! 😉
That knock on the door at 2:00 - I nearly spat my coffee out! Thanks for that 🤣🤣
That's some real nice storytelling right there, I love em. Hey btw can ya make a video about upcoming BUDGET apus (emphasize on BUDGET)
There are none at the moment though! Because of the shortage all the released one are expensive.
@@LowSpecGamer even the old athlon climed prices like crazy
@@suppar8066 even the FXdozer ones like in my aging Toshiba?
Chika fujiwara panic face reference is became a norm with lowspecgamer’s documentaries lol
Great video, there were some bits in there I had not heard before. I am greatly enjoying the style of video you've pivoted to!
Glad you enjoyed it! I am trying really hard to explore this stories in ways people are not familiar with.
It's not like i didn't like the original lowspec stuff, but i personally just fell in love with new style and content, it's just so funny and interesting!
I literally watch these videos in both english and spanish as soon as they drop
Did you quit making low-end configurations videos? :(
Games stopped having rich configuration files
@@LowSpecGamer rip
config files were fun to use..
4:30 nintendo - *Leave Luck to Heaven*
任 Responsible
天 Heaven
堂 Hall
If the Famicom didn't perform as it did, the US video game market would be fucked to this day.
oh and by the way, COINCIDENTALLY, the "inventor" of the Famicom just passed away.
Eh maybe not. Sega could've filled that space. There were plans for a US and eventually EU release of the SG-1000 that were called off due to the success of the Famicom/NES.
It would have taken longer to recover but it would have.
Someone would revitalized the marked.
It's unrealistic to think that a massive worldwide growing industry would be ignored forever in the USA.
Maybe Sega, maybe Atari would actually recovered, maybe the Home computer would have taken the space of of the consoles.
Some of the Big Video Game Companies would change. We would have a fight between the Dreamcast 5 and the Atari Leopard while new PCEngineSwitch sidelines the competition. But it still would morph in to a massive Multi Billion Dollar Industry.
pc gaming was fine
This is only affects the consoles but not PC.
So he was the og low spec gamer
RE: Why the switch has 4 separate buttons instead of a d-pad
It's because the joycons can be used separately as if they were their own controlled with an analogue stick and 4 face buttons. Making it a d-pad would prevent that.
Personally never found anyone who'd rather use a lone joycon instead of a pro controller or third party controller(no drift = best choice IMO).
Aleeeeeeeeex!! Missed you buddy, excited to watch the new content🥳
Lol, love the Easter egg, from 'Back to the Future' (the book by Marty's dad [ @2:31 ]) :) Great vid!!
It’s a bit hard to say that they could not reuse logic or code. I mean the logic is the same and the code is rather similar just port to another instruction set. A port work of course but not a super big one.
Love the vid!, first time suggesting Hey man when will you do splitgate? it's free on steam and my pc is basically running on microsoft basic display adapter type pc
Speaking of Majora's Mask: have you played Outer Wilds? I've deemed it the Spiritual Successor of Majora's Mask, due to being an amazing game, even if it's not made by Nintendo. It shares a bunch of unique themes with MM, the big one being Time. Just trust a stranger and go play it. It's amazing.
Huh. Never heard of that game being related in that way. Will check
Nintendo also has some coder familiarity with 6502 before making the Famicom,
My only (tiny) issue about this video is the mention about the Amstrad and Spectrum Donkey Kong ports - they wouldn't have been released until 1986.
… I will double check. You are the first person to point that out
3:36 Small correction, the reason many of these ports sucked *except* for the ColecoVision port was because Coleco had the rights for many of these systems to port Donkey Kong to. This resulted in Coleco intentionally gimping every single port of Donkey Kong they made *except* for their console's, to artificially position their console as the superior one. So yes, the home machines and consoles at the time may not have been super capable of running Donkey Kong, but they never saw their full potential on that front either.
That’s sounds interesting. Do you have the source do I can read more?
Hoping to see that more general NES history video some day.
Hey LowSpec, can you post your sources? I am interested in reading some of these books and learn more about this history
I mention it on the video! It is volume 3 of the history of Nintendo by Florent Gorges
1:54 Imagine going home early in Japan.
Yeah, I personally refer to the left JoyCon's D Pad as its _C Buttons._
14:24 think that switch dpad makes sense since its supposed to be the action buttons of a joycon once it's detached from the console. also, rocker dpads suck.
12:38
The confusing part is that the controllers are actually attached to the front of the console. They just wrap around internally.
Ricoh was ATARI's supplier of the single chip ASIC which powers the ATARI 2600jr "unicorn" which contains a 6502 core, the "RIOT" chip ("RAM-I/O-TIMER" MOS6532) and the "TIA" (Television Interface Adapter). So ATARI was the reason why RICOH could make 6502. And because RICOH was tied to ATARI's contract regarding the processor core they neutered the BCD function to avoid being sued.
Fascinating!!! I had never heard of this. I am going to look into it with detail. So you say they had a license for the 6502 but only for Atari??
Do you have any source for this? I need to go into research mode
@@LowSpecGamer Pretty much, yes. The story I heard was that the deal was made in 1981-82 and was supposed to be used in new devices around 1983 but we know what happened to ATARI by that time. That would explain why Ricoh had their factory empty but ready to roll into mass manufacturing of chips. ATARI had been using other Japanese manufacturers to make the TIA chips (OKI of Okidata fame for example)
That would match the timing. I am going to see if I can find any primary source on it. This would solve one of my biggest questions.
Love these videos. Really incredible high quality content! I do wish they would keep the language clean so I could share with younger audiences.
I am trying to censor it more on newer ones
I'm currently making a NES emulator and I found it quite interesting to find out the exact reason the module for decimal operations was removed in the NES's 6502 chip. Also means one less thing for me to work on lol
For complete accuracy, emulate the chip but don’t expose its functionality to the rest of the system :P
Everytime you post i just stop what I'm doing to watch
famicom users were the og low spec gamers
Haven't had a lot of experience with Nintendo. One of the first decisions my wife and I made together was to buy a Sega Genesis. The Monopoly game cheated - regardless of the AI personality, if it offered a trade and you said no, it just took the property. If you offered an absurdly high trade and it said no, it did not.
Love your video’s. How did you create the animation for this video?
Many layers of photoshop and Davinci Resolve Fusion
Great video. I love these documentaty style videos. Pi's are great. But I prefer these videos.
can we get something like this for the Release of the Nintendo 64 since Games coming out for Nintendo 64 was gonna be Difficult for them to Develop them for!
The chocolate chip like buttons on the joycons are actually better. The D-pad being combined like that, made it so sometimes you’d make inputs you didn’t actually make when positioned wrongly.
Plus sometimes it was more clunky. So singular buttons for each side is better.
They're not better, they only did it so that the joycons can be used individually for two player games. The pro controller still has dpad.
This illustrations are fantastic!
Please do a low spec Halo Infinite.
Loved this one and since I know you read the comments. Are you exited for the rtx 3050?
I will be when I see one in stores at MSRP
Interesting topic you found here!
Typically sneaky, cheating, thieving, b__t__ds!
It's no coincidence that Zilog deliberately designed the Z80 at the fab level to be as hard to rip-off as possible. It didn't stop Nintendo subsequently ripping them off over the Game Boy.
I didn't realise the Famicom PPU was likely, um, 'inspired' by the Ti9918a. Thinking about it NES games do have a very Ti-ish look about them.
Wow, Nintendo is always in trouble it seems
Love your content mate!
3:33 - Hey, the Commodore 64 port was perfect, too... |:/
I swear, your side videos are going to make me get Nebula / CS. Is there a way to turn down the resolution on it? I have very low data caps, so I have to watch RUclips in 240p/144p.
I just checked and you can drop stuff in Nebula down to 240p.
@@LowSpecGamer Oh, now I am definitely getting it! Thank you so much for your quality work over the years. The new direction is amazing, and I am learning so much more about the stuff I love Thanks for the fast reply, too. (I went to sleep after my comment and just now checked RUclips again)
I came back after watching because I wanted to say the "Mario holding an ace" thumbnail for this video is fantastic.
This actually an idea by “tales foundry” on RUclips after I showed him this video and asked his opinion. Then my artists (maiku) executed his idea spectacularly. I am glad you appreciate it. It is super fun
@@LowSpecGamer Maiku killed it, I love Majin Mario with the glowing eyes!
-Benji
i love watching these videos and finding out like:
"yeah, this giant company that dominates this one industry and everyone knows?"
"yeah they owe their existence to a printer company =)"
Fun fact: the Famicom wasn't even Nintendo's first console. That honor goes to 1977's Color TV Game 6, just over 6 years before the famicom
"Be able to run Donkey Kong" proceeded to a cut a whole stage from the console's port.
Run, but not on its entirety!
Ooof imagine getting an Atari joystick through the foot while walking around in the dark...
that book....
you are latinamerican!!!
Truly a lowspecgamer i see
hi lowspecgamer sorry for bothering you but could you upload a video of naruto ultimate ninja storm or dragon ball xenoverse 2?
and please can you also try the tales of zestiria?
'finding developers that knew what to do with a 6502' would be 'hard' ? lol. ya know. i think pretty much any developer around knows what to do with either an 8080, 8051, 6809, 650x, 8086 or z80. :P and then probably that weird signetics stuff too :P there wasn't that much around in terms of 'smaller computers' (as in non-pdp stuff ;) and as 'game developers' usually 'use computers' they'd probably have bought all of them ay :P and as such be familliar with the cpus used in all of them. (and by the time nintendo got this idea pretty much half of them out there had some sort of 6502 in them for like almost a decade already ;) so it's not like they would never have seen or programmed their tools to for one. consoles and arcade boards lacking a keyboard, you have to enter your code on something and burn the roms on something :P pretty damn sure the nes developer kit was simply an apple II witih a ppu board :P lol.
(@4:51) - This is - for all intents and purposes - an OkiData ML320/321 printer. I know, because the company I work for has sh*tloads of these things. I suppose the earliest models may have been made by Ricoh, but I can only guess they got bought out by OkiData, or sold the IP to OkiData, as I never saw any of these printers with “Ricoh” labeling on them. Fairly reliable, but they gave a NASTY tendency to suck the paper back into the tractor-feed mechanism if you don’t fold the paper over the front, and out of the way!
It was the one printer with stock footage available
@14:24 The omission of the D-pad allows each half of the Switch controller to work independently allowing 2-player gameplay with a single controller.
I know what they did it but I still hate it
2:01 - 2:05 well that's Different!
why no one speaks about the 1000 built in games on the original one. BTW its famicon in Japanese ファミコン and NOT famicom because in japanese there is no M sound
This is good I can say I am happy if you continue with this
Genesis/MD carts fit perfectly into tape cassette caddies btw🥱
Whaaaaaat
I heard GLaDOS, at 4:00 .WTFrick
Can you a Low Spec Video with the new FNAF?
Love this man history videos and lore vidoes are some of my favorite infinite support
What would happen if the Binary Coded Decimal operations module were *reconnected* in an NES and _then_ someone played a game on it? How would this affect the performance?
It would not change anything, since a game would need to be recorded to use it in some way
Wouldn't it be better to order the playlist chronologically ?
It is. Kinda. At least in the order these stories happened.
Wait a minute. The GPU was invented to make the NES cheaper?
Gunpei Yokoi and Shigeru Miyamoto saved Nintendo and they are like the first iMac and the first iPod :-) aka Steve Jobs' "Second Coming".
God bless, Rev. 21:4
damn, this video never showed up in my feed, only watching now 😕
can't wait til 90% of the video is only available on nebula
Nope, separate video. Main video with the full narrative is always here and then nebula SideQuest is its own mini story with the same characters
there is always unsung heroes in everything we have today.
14:24, oh dear lord... Why doesn't anyone just accept the Joycon for what it actually is?
A Mini-Controller!
Since you asked: The quality of the Lore videos is high, but the topic is just less interesting to me. That doesn't mean you shouldn't make them, of course.
"Famicon" sounds like a h_ntei tag