@@paxhumana2015 The Famicom Titler does not have Famicom Disk System compatibility, it only plays Cartridges. Sharp also made the Famicom Twin, which takes the Disks. If the DVD or video file device has a composite or S-Video out, then for sure you can connect it to the Titler, which should be all of them.
You should see the unlicenced adapters that let you plug games from various sega consoles into a Super Nintendo. I mean, it's a cheap trick ( the adapter cartridges have their own video output) but still... Just seems so... Wrong.
@@KuraIthys I am fully aware of the Retro-Bit RetroGen and the like. The fact that they have their own video out means it's all of a cheat really, just using the SNES for power and joypad inputs. As you say, a cheap trick. Not a fan.
@Asobi tech - it's all tricks in the end though. The Super Gameboy is pretty much a full gameboy in a cartridge; Though it does have a bunch of (rarely used) functionality that combines SNES features with gameboy ones. Fundamentally the reason these systems have their own video output comes down to a combination of how the PPU works and DMA limitations. The maximum throughput of an external device providing graphics data to a SNES is limited by that 2.68 mb/sec DMA system; A further limitation is caused by PPU video RAM limits, and by the fact that aside from mode 7, the SNES uses Bitplane based graphics, while most devices that create custom graphics would produce output as packed pixels. (this is why the SuperFX has specialised bitplane optimised pixel plotting routines, and the SA-1 has a packed pixel to bitplane conversion subsystem) This limits the total resolution and framerate quite substantially. The RAM limit means that if you're doing double-buffering you are restricted to 32 kilobytes at most. (less in fact, owing to the fact that there are no graphics modes where you can get away with not having a tilemap - this would cut it to 30 kilobytes) If we assume the use of mode 3 (8 bits per pixel), this limits you to 256x120, or some other variation of a similar resolution with the same total number of pixels though there are a number of scaling tricks you can pull with this. You could of course use one of the 4 bit per pixel modes if you can figure out how. But then you're either limited to 16 colours, or you have to deal with manipulating the tilemaps. If you're really ambitious, and the input graphics would allow for it (say, a video stream) you could try for some kind of block based image compression system, exploiting the tilemap to only update parts of the image at a time... And of course, you could try to use mode 7 to make use of the scaling features. But mode 7 is limited to 256 tiles worth of unique 8 bit data, which works out to just 16,384 pixels, which could be a resolution of 256x64, or 128x128 - though to do this you lose access to any kind of method that would allow double buffering. As to DMA... Well, 2.68 megabytes a second at 60 fps, is just over 45 kilobytes a frame. (at 50 fps for a PAL machine it would be just under 55 kb a frame) If you can do double-buffering, you can do your updates over multiple frames, meaning you can draw larger images at lower framerates. But as noted, at that point you're limited by VRAM, which is a lower limit than the DMA system. (the PPU does support 128 kilobytes of VRAM, which would change things, but no real-world system has this amount of RAM.) If you've chosen a method that does not allow double-buffering (image larger than 30 kilobytes with standard 64 kb VRAM, or something like mode 7), then this DMA limit is a hard cap on drawing an image (or you'd get tearing or flickering I suppose) But it gets worse than this limit; See, you cannot DMA into VRAM while the system is actively drawing graphics, because VRAM access is too slow. This means you basically can only update during V-blank. Now, you can manipulate the length of V-Blank, but using forced blanking. But this loses you vertical resolution. Part of the motivation for using say 256x120 instead of something like 200x150 is that the first gives you 30 lines of extra blanking time. So... What does this mean? Well, on an NTSC system, DMA is about 178 bytes per line, while on a PAL one it's about 180. But, the effective number of lines (including blanking) is 262 on an NTSC machine and 312 on a PAL machine. The highest possible vertical resolution of the system is 240 lines (unless you use high resolution mode, but this is interlaced, so that's still 240 lines per field) This means the NTSC system has 22 lines to spare per frame (but in practice an NTSC television won't display more than 224 lines anyway) While the PAL system has 72 lines spare per frame. But let's say we use that 256x120 pixel display that our VRAM limit dictates for double-buffering The NTSC system then gets 142 lines of blanking at 178 bytes per line or 25,276 bytes per frame. As you can see, this is less than the 30 kilobytes that composes the image by about 1/6th. Since the image is double-buffered, and you can't swap buffers at arbitrary moments (or you'd get tearing), this means you've got a 30 fps cap. Each line you reduce the vertical resolution by though gains you 178+256 extra bytes. (178 more than can be transferred, 256 that you no longer need to transfer) So the maximum resolution at full framerate balances at about 256x107 PAL systems have things considerably better, since they have way more blanking lines by default - thus PAL systems are just innately better for 'external rendering' than NTSC machines (it's a gain of about 80% under default conditions) This is rarely taken advantage of in practice, but it's very relevant for devices such as the ones we're examining here. with our 256x120 resolution dictated by VRAM limits, our PAL machine has a full 192 lines of blanking time each frame. which at 180 bytes per line is 34,560 bytes per frame. Easily exceeding what's required to draw the frame at a full 50 fps with some room to spare (to say, update a tilemap for more advanced uses) Due to the pixel aspect ratio of a PAL system, it's also interesting to note that a 16:9 image would have a resolution of 256x200 pixels - though on a 16:9 television this would cause severe letterboxing unless your TV can correctly crop the image, and on a 4:3 television this produces the typical effect of displaying 16:9 images on a 4:3 display. Even so, at 256x200 the system gets 112 blanking lines per frame, which is 20,160 bytes. This is a lot for say, sprite data, background data updates, etc. But in this context... It's also more than enough to transfer that 256x64 or 128x128 mode 7 image at a full 50 fps AND have the active display time available to scale it up to 'fullscreen' (or at least, fullscreen on a 16:9 display) In fact, there is enough DMA time every frame to transfer the largest possible unique mode 7 image every frame at active resolutions of up to 256x220 (with mode 7 handling the scaling) And, if you somehow had a PAL machine with 128 kilobytes of VRAM, meaning you had enough VRAM to double-buffer a full 256x240 image in 256 colours, a PAL system would be able to update this from an external source at about 10 fps... And that pretty much shows why you can't run a full resolution console through the SNES hardware even theoretically. Plus, consoles like the Sega systems that use 320 pixels per line pose a rather obvious secondary problem; 320 pixels is more than 256. There IS a 512 pixel mode on the SNES, but now you've made all your problems even worse. Plus that's going to look really weird. And rather obviously you could use a mode 7 display for any of this, but then any image drawn would be scaled down to 128x128 or 256x64 (you could probably choose that by user preference) I mean, it'd work, (I used to have a pocket television with an effective resolution lower than that), but it'd look hideous. Although, it does leave another problem; if you have a source that uses frequent palette effects, you're going to have to update the SNES palette most frames to keep up. This is possible, but tricky. And if your source image is > 256 colours per frame, you're going to have serious complications. (technically a SNES can output 15 bit colour, but in practice this is only possible to do for a single frame using very convoluted and restrictive workarounds that wouldn't be useful for displaying arbitrary 15 bit images) We get in the ballpark of being able to do GBA games with this, but not quite. The DMA time is about 2/3 of that required. VRAM is about 3/4 of what we'd need (except for hacked 128 kb systems), gba 15 bit modes would break... But it does explain why gameboy games work. 160x144 is only 23,040 bytes if it were an 8 bit image. But real gameboy games are 2 bits per pixel. which makes a whole frame just 5,760 bytes, which even an NTSC machine can do at full framerate with active display of 256x224. It's worth noting though that this 23,040 bytes and vertical resolution of just 144 pixels would mean a PAL snes could trivially implement a GBC version of this device, and an NTSC machine could implement it with a few tricks. (notably GBC is 56/64 colour device, and still only has 3/4 colours per 8x8 tile, so if you actively manipulated a SNES tilemap and palette the data per frame is 720 bytes to update a tilemap, 5760 bytes to update the pixel data for a frame, and up to 256 bytes to update the palette, which is well within the bounds of what both the NTSC and PAL machines could update at full framerate for an image that's only 144 lines...) So, a GBC adapted could easily work. A GBA adapter would be doable but it would work badly, and anything else would be largely impossible to do cleanly. (though an NES adapter might work with some effort using the same tricks a GBC adapter would resort to, even though it's more challenging to implement, and borderline in terms of functionality) Yeah. the SNES is simply too slow to do this kind of stuff 'properly'. But then again, so is a Mega Drive, for the same reasons. (notice how the 32x also uses it's own video output - eg, it's the exact same kind of 'trick', only with the added trick that the 32x has a video INPUT as well, and combines the images together.)
When you mentioned Friday Market quality video, I immediately thought of that "Pirate Videos: Daylight Robbery" public information film that used to play at the beginning of UK VHS tapes in the 90's.
Nintendo was a big customer of Sharp during the 70s and 80s as their manufacturing partner and in particular Sharp produced the LCD technology used in their Game N Watch line of toys. That's why Sharp was able to integrate the Famicom into all these different products, they had a pretty cozy relationship from before.
Oooh. I could get into some trouble with this if I had the time to learn it. My mind is a glow with transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention!
@Lassi Kinnunen This thing was cheaper than just an A500. Add to that the price of a genlock interface and video titling software and this is a very competitive option. Probably especially to the Japanese market. Also smaller (thus more portable) and arguably has easier operation (no booting from disk, no foreign language computer interface). This leads me to believe that this was intended for consumers and small business. Japanese consumers were home video crazy gadget freaks with buying power. Electronics-wise, mostly focused on the domestic market. A video titler that doubles as a Famicom is probably a good buy for a consumer looking to title some home videos.
I guess the cartridge port was intended to be used not with games, but with some other software to be plugged into the system for this exact purpose - video overlaying and editing - and using Famicom hardware was simpler as engineers already knew it enough from previous amalgamates they did at SHARP. You know, they might have had plans, or actual releases, of other cartridges specifically for Famicom Titler! They might have had other imagery, effects, different functionality, or whatever else that could be of use in such a device in terms of video manipulation.
I wondered that myself. Of course, it has the regular Famicom functionality as well, so they must have assumed you'd want to play games too, I would think.
@@natgrant1364 I've seen some suggestions that it was Nintendo's idea, as a tool for making commercials. And that they went to SHARP because they've worked with them before.
@@BradPitBrasileiro I could see some speedrunners preferring this, given that it's the only unmodded and official way to get S-video. Theoretically, original hardware is 100% guaranteed to perform as intended with every frame of every game, while mods could have side effects. Most wouldn't care, but a speedrunner might.
CURRENCY EXCHANGE RATES AREN'T STATIC. 43,000 yen at the *1989* average exchange rate of roughly 140JPY/USD makes it $307 in *1989* USD, which is the equivalent of $635 in *2019* USD. Every single video I've seen on vintage Japanese hardware makes this same mistake, using today's exchange rate instead of the going rate at the time of release.
While you're right, it's almost impossible to totally account for inflation, especially across currencies and going back so far. It's not an exact science. Yours is closer, but not exact.
The exchange rates in the late 80s were INSANE. We used to import stuff at the rate of one US cent per yen -and that was the marked up price. The actual rate was something like 250 yen to the dollar. The bottom line was stuff from Japan was dirt cheap and VERY profitable to resell. Kind of like how you can import cheap stuff from China right now and resell it for more and make a nice profit. Except anybody can just get it cheap from China themselves. Anyway, the golden age of cheap stuff from Japan ended when the bubble popped, the bottom fell out in 1989-90 and the exchange rate advantage evaporated.
DUUUUDE. Considering this is basically NES with additional buttons and a modified analog output, this means you most likely can access the little stylus area or the additional buttons through some memory address from your cartridge!
It could be used to fill in blank backgrounds in older games with pre-made video loops as an underlay. Sort of like an alternative to when color overlays were used for old monochrome video games from the 70's/early 80's.
I don't know how powerful Video Edit machines back in 1989 were, but I could see Sharp making cards for it with new graphics, so you could "update" your expensive video editing machine with NES cards. Maybe this was their plan behind this device.
Thanks Quang, this has to be in the top 10 of obscurest gaming devices Ah, I now understand. There was a time in Japan when it was thing to send video messages on a vhs tape. For adults that want that might as well throw in a famicom! Not a kids toy, this Bragging time I still have the ultimate Famicom. Red Twin Famicom Turbo -RGB mod done by Blaasvis -Stereo mod (with dial that goes from mono to full stereo seperation) done by Blaasvis -Famicom everdrive Thanks to Blaasvis, still enjoying this beast!
Perhaps they used it as the character closest to "@" as if they wanted to put the name of a Twitter user.Apparently the machine did not have the ability to make special characters and the “character at (@)” was not popular until the email era.
I was alive back then and can easily tell you that the reason they combined this was that both things were for tv use, and back then, using your tv for other than tv and vcr was a niche thing.
Japan is a more intimate market than the west. Rather than a "rich kid plaything", it was probably often used in department stores, small game centers, and store fronts, allowing brand flashing on the screen, deals, holidays, labeling high scores and names of local customers/clients, tournaments, ghosting of races/shmups, etc. Also, while stroke order isn't a big deal for the Latin alphabet, it is for kanji/kana. Most natives would find it pretty intuitive without instructions.
This thing is awesome! I'm sure there's some youtuber somewhere in the world that really wants one of these (or has one!) so they can get S-Video out of a Famicom, lol
You may not know this, but it is only difficult to us to remember how to write a letter with specific strokes patterns, Chinese and Japanese people (I'm not sure about other Asian countries) must learn to write all their character using only one specific order for each stroke, my wife is from Taiwan (they use traditional Chinese) and my daughter has to write every single character using a specific pattern. This device is programmed to recognize those patterns and understand which character you are trying to write, this same principle is used even today for Windows users that write Asian characters using a stylus, this is very useful because you do not need to make a perfect letter when you write, you do not need to land each stroke in the perfect place, you just need to make each line in the correct order and orientation, sorry if I'm not clear enough, my English is a little limited.
It is not so much a specific stroke pattern, but a way of writing in a small pad for a text recognition system to interpret it as a character as well as some old PALM models that used stylus.
Saw retro electronics. Heard soothing bossa nova style jazz playing. Immediately thought I was watching LGR and had to confirm I was watching the right channel
so many quirky machines from japan were using genlocks. pioneer even had an msx model with one built in. I had a basic titler built into my sharp VCR too.
(5:23) It's nice seeing the Japanese people of the 1980s. Hi there, thanks for making the 80s a great decade. Japanese women look pretty, and the men look professional.
so genlocking is only part of how this works, generator locking only allows the builtin famicom to be synced to an external video source, the function that allows video to be imposed on top of video is actually luminance keying. It works by a transistor array that switches between 2 sources depending on a set luma point (black in this case).
Reason for specific input order probably has to do with the Japanese language having a specific stroke order for each character (e.g. you can just write the character for 'mouth' by drawing a box, it has to be top to bottom, left to right).
Titler? What were they thinking? ACHTUNG! I wonder if there existed something similar from SEGA called Tommel or a model for American and European markets called Töring. Thanks NN for this episode. Back in the 1980s. I enjoy stuff from there more than from any other decade.
Pretty much the Famicom TV was actually quite useful at the time as it could be used as a cheap gameplay demo unit at retail outlets selling Famacom consoles and games! :)
people find me odd for liking retro tech even though i haven't been alive long enough to have experienced it at its time but i can't help it, old technology is so interesting especially in how it evolved to what it is today. i'm 17 and i love the hum of an old computer it just soothes the soul now ik this has nothing to do with the video but i just had to say it to someone, anyone!
This reminds me of a Panasonic video editing system brought out in the midd 1990s. The Panasonic system was more complex and expensive as it comprised of a mixing desk, an edit controller and a titling unit ; so three boxes instead of one. It could cope with PAL Video as well. I still have one in my back bedroom somewhere.
Actually it makes quite some sense as the video processing was the most expensive part of both video titlers and computer game consoles was the graphics generation and the CPU, so 90% of both devices is going to be identical anyhow. A resistive touch pad is also somewhat less expensive than an actual keyboard. BTW there is actually a professional use for this and that is when you want to have Famicom games on Television. With a non-genlockable Famicon you'd need a full frame TBC which, even in the early 1990s wasn't a common thing to have in your TV studio. So if you can genlock your Famicon to your studio you can just integrate it like any other device.
Every time I look up something on the famicom it always gains another addition. "I wonder what it's going to be this time? A video editor? Makes sense"
this reminds me of some early video game shows where the player was superimposed into the video game he/she was playing. (but unless it's a famicom game, another mixer would be needed)
Wow,,i didn’t know that i did had a builtin touch pad, this device was very ahead of it’s time,eventrough that touch pad was weird & combersum to use , yeah, i first tout that the famicom titler was made for nintendo just to better commercialize their games,but now it turns out you could aside from the famicon ,mix different video source with eachother and then add text to it,, but you brought me on a wonderful idea, now you can indeed mix video sources as a background on top of nes games to make them looks more like a 16bit games,haha
A lot of these seemingly strange combinations from Japan came about because the small size of the average Japanese home. Companies though people would want to conserve space and outlets.
The Atari 400 box is sick, especially in such shape. I love my 800, 600 XL, and 800XL, but it’s the fully-upgraded 800, with the monitor port that _allows for S-Video and even Component cables to be made, because of the 5th socket, which 800 XLs don’t have, in their monitor out port. I’d love to have an 800 box, like that, y’all. Totally sick. 👍
Back in the day a friend of mine owned a MSX2 System from Philips, I guess, which he used for video editing and for the time it was very cool. This is a nice greeting from the past though ... :-)
Honestly, this does make sense in theory. With this design a developer could easily have developed cartridges for use with the titler so you could get a very expandable machine
Young whippersnapper doesn't realize that a Titler was an isolated task in TV production studios, and that Japanese didn't exactly use Amigas for their video editing due to an intense case of Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
I think it was made for families. The idea is that sometimes you may want to use it for birthdays, Christmas, weddings etc, but otherwise its pointless, so by integrating all the features of the famicom as well - you can kill two birds with one stone, and it makes it more useful. So video editing for mum and dad, and famicom for the kids.
I'm not entirely sure why I say "Epic Pinball". It's clearly "Psycho Pinball". I guess I just love DOS games.
Oof hello Pete
I guess it's just fun
I really prefer Epic Pinball Since this was Awesome. ✌🏻
@@andresbravo2003 not awesome, epic!
You got me all excited for a MD port of Epic Pinball! I wanted to hear a YM2612 rendition of those awesome Robert A. Allen tunes!
It would be a heck of a fun to get like 8 of those machines, daisy chain em and run gradius on all the machines at once.
I have run double Donkey Kong on Famicoms, which is just bonkers.
It must be quite fun to guess what's the "real" barrels
you'd need to like shift the hue on each one
@@Asobitech , I wonder if you could also hook up a DVD or video file device to this special version of the Famicom Disk System?
@@paxhumana2015 The Famicom Titler does not have Famicom Disk System compatibility, it only plays Cartridges. Sharp also made the Famicom Twin, which takes the Disks.
If the DVD or video file device has a composite or S-Video out, then for sure you can connect it to the Titler, which should be all of them.
4:52 “SHARP looking Famicom games” 😄
Where are the compliments for redrawing the Nostalgia Nerd Logo with a D-pad? Great Job!
Thank you, it really wasn't the easiest thing to do.
You know what, that's actually the first good use of the Famicom controller 2 microphone I've seen.
What about Swearing at Zelda Enemies to kill them?
Plugging a Sega into a Nintendo seems vaguely perverted...
Just how we like it.
You should see the unlicenced adapters that let you plug games from various sega consoles into a Super Nintendo.
I mean, it's a cheap trick ( the adapter cartridges have their own video output) but still...
Just seems so... Wrong.
@@KuraIthys I am fully aware of the Retro-Bit RetroGen and the like. The fact that they have their own video out means it's all of a cheat really, just using the SNES for power and joypad inputs. As you say, a cheap trick. Not a fan.
Lmao
@Asobi tech - it's all tricks in the end though. The Super Gameboy is pretty much a full gameboy in a cartridge;
Though it does have a bunch of (rarely used) functionality that combines SNES features with gameboy ones.
Fundamentally the reason these systems have their own video output comes down to a combination of how the PPU works and DMA limitations.
The maximum throughput of an external device providing graphics data to a SNES is limited by that 2.68 mb/sec DMA system;
A further limitation is caused by PPU video RAM limits, and by the fact that aside from mode 7, the SNES uses Bitplane based graphics, while most devices that create custom graphics would produce output as packed pixels.
(this is why the SuperFX has specialised bitplane optimised pixel plotting routines, and the SA-1 has a packed pixel to bitplane conversion subsystem)
This limits the total resolution and framerate quite substantially.
The RAM limit means that if you're doing double-buffering you are restricted to 32 kilobytes at most. (less in fact, owing to the fact that there are no graphics modes where you can get away with not having a tilemap - this would cut it to 30 kilobytes)
If we assume the use of mode 3 (8 bits per pixel), this limits you to 256x120, or some other variation of a similar resolution with the same total number of pixels
though there are a number of scaling tricks you can pull with this.
You could of course use one of the 4 bit per pixel modes if you can figure out how. But then you're either limited to 16 colours, or you have to deal with manipulating the tilemaps.
If you're really ambitious, and the input graphics would allow for it (say, a video stream) you could try for some kind of block based image compression system, exploiting the tilemap to only update parts of the image at a time...
And of course, you could try to use mode 7 to make use of the scaling features. But mode 7 is limited to 256 tiles worth of unique 8 bit data, which works out to just 16,384 pixels, which could be a resolution of 256x64, or 128x128 - though to do this you lose access to any kind of method that would allow double buffering.
As to DMA... Well, 2.68 megabytes a second at 60 fps, is just over 45 kilobytes a frame. (at 50 fps for a PAL machine it would be just under 55 kb a frame)
If you can do double-buffering, you can do your updates over multiple frames, meaning you can draw larger images at lower framerates.
But as noted, at that point you're limited by VRAM, which is a lower limit than the DMA system. (the PPU does support 128 kilobytes of VRAM, which would change things, but no real-world system has this amount of RAM.)
If you've chosen a method that does not allow double-buffering (image larger than 30 kilobytes with standard 64 kb VRAM, or something like mode 7), then this DMA limit is a hard cap on drawing an image (or you'd get tearing or flickering I suppose)
But it gets worse than this limit; See, you cannot DMA into VRAM while the system is actively drawing graphics, because VRAM access is too slow.
This means you basically can only update during V-blank.
Now, you can manipulate the length of V-Blank, but using forced blanking.
But this loses you vertical resolution.
Part of the motivation for using say 256x120 instead of something like 200x150 is that the first gives you 30 lines of extra blanking time.
So... What does this mean? Well, on an NTSC system, DMA is about 178 bytes per line, while on a PAL one it's about 180.
But, the effective number of lines (including blanking) is 262 on an NTSC machine and 312 on a PAL machine.
The highest possible vertical resolution of the system is 240 lines (unless you use high resolution mode, but this is interlaced, so that's still 240 lines per field)
This means the NTSC system has 22 lines to spare per frame (but in practice an NTSC television won't display more than 224 lines anyway)
While the PAL system has 72 lines spare per frame.
But let's say we use that 256x120 pixel display that our VRAM limit dictates for double-buffering
The NTSC system then gets 142 lines of blanking at 178 bytes per line or 25,276 bytes per frame.
As you can see, this is less than the 30 kilobytes that composes the image by about 1/6th.
Since the image is double-buffered, and you can't swap buffers at arbitrary moments (or you'd get tearing), this means you've got a 30 fps cap.
Each line you reduce the vertical resolution by though gains you 178+256 extra bytes. (178 more than can be transferred, 256 that you no longer need to transfer)
So the maximum resolution at full framerate balances at about 256x107
PAL systems have things considerably better, since they have way more blanking lines by default - thus PAL systems are just innately better for 'external rendering' than NTSC machines (it's a gain of about 80% under default conditions)
This is rarely taken advantage of in practice, but it's very relevant for devices such as the ones we're examining here.
with our 256x120 resolution dictated by VRAM limits, our PAL machine has a full 192 lines of blanking time each frame. which at 180 bytes per line is 34,560 bytes per frame.
Easily exceeding what's required to draw the frame at a full 50 fps with some room to spare (to say, update a tilemap for more advanced uses)
Due to the pixel aspect ratio of a PAL system, it's also interesting to note that a 16:9 image would have a resolution of 256x200 pixels - though on a 16:9 television this would cause severe letterboxing unless your TV can correctly crop the image, and on a 4:3 television this produces the typical effect of displaying 16:9 images on a 4:3 display.
Even so, at 256x200 the system gets 112 blanking lines per frame, which is 20,160 bytes.
This is a lot for say, sprite data, background data updates, etc.
But in this context...
It's also more than enough to transfer that 256x64 or 128x128 mode 7 image at a full 50 fps AND have the active display time available to scale it up to 'fullscreen' (or at least, fullscreen on a 16:9 display)
In fact, there is enough DMA time every frame to transfer the largest possible unique mode 7 image every frame at active resolutions of up to 256x220 (with mode 7 handling the scaling)
And, if you somehow had a PAL machine with 128 kilobytes of VRAM, meaning you had enough VRAM to double-buffer a full 256x240 image in 256 colours, a PAL system would be able to update this from an external source at about 10 fps...
And that pretty much shows why you can't run a full resolution console through the SNES hardware even theoretically.
Plus, consoles like the Sega systems that use 320 pixels per line pose a rather obvious secondary problem; 320 pixels is more than 256. There IS a 512 pixel mode on the SNES, but now you've made all your problems even worse. Plus that's going to look really weird.
And rather obviously you could use a mode 7 display for any of this, but then any image drawn would be scaled down to 128x128 or 256x64 (you could probably choose that by user preference)
I mean, it'd work, (I used to have a pocket television with an effective resolution lower than that), but it'd look hideous.
Although, it does leave another problem; if you have a source that uses frequent palette effects, you're going to have to update the SNES palette most frames to keep up. This is possible, but tricky.
And if your source image is > 256 colours per frame, you're going to have serious complications. (technically a SNES can output 15 bit colour, but in practice this is only possible to do for a single frame using very convoluted and restrictive workarounds that wouldn't be useful for displaying arbitrary 15 bit images)
We get in the ballpark of being able to do GBA games with this, but not quite.
The DMA time is about 2/3 of that required. VRAM is about 3/4 of what we'd need (except for hacked 128 kb systems), gba 15 bit modes would break...
But it does explain why gameboy games work.
160x144 is only 23,040 bytes if it were an 8 bit image.
But real gameboy games are 2 bits per pixel. which makes a whole frame just 5,760 bytes, which even an NTSC machine can do at full framerate with active display of 256x224.
It's worth noting though that this 23,040 bytes and vertical resolution of just 144 pixels would mean a PAL snes could trivially implement a GBC version of this device, and an NTSC machine could implement it with a few tricks. (notably GBC is 56/64 colour device, and still only has 3/4 colours per 8x8 tile, so if you actively manipulated a SNES tilemap and palette the data per frame is 720 bytes to update a tilemap, 5760 bytes to update the pixel data for a frame, and up to 256 bytes to update the palette, which is well within the bounds of what both the NTSC and PAL machines could update at full framerate for an image that's only 144 lines...)
So, a GBC adapted could easily work. A GBA adapter would be doable but it would work badly, and anything else would be largely impossible to do cleanly.
(though an NES adapter might work with some effort using the same tricks a GBC adapter would resort to, even though it's more challenging to implement, and borderline in terms of functionality)
Yeah. the SNES is simply too slow to do this kind of stuff 'properly'.
But then again, so is a Mega Drive, for the same reasons. (notice how the 32x also uses it's own video output - eg, it's the exact same kind of 'trick', only with the added trick that the 32x has a video INPUT as well, and combines the images together.)
I’m kind of amazed there was no VHS/famicom hybrid game that ran on a timer system.
GodsBurden Let’s be grateful they didn’t. Every VCR console systems I’ve seen were utter garbage.
When you mentioned Friday Market quality video, I immediately thought of that "Pirate Videos: Daylight Robbery" public information film that used to play at the beginning of UK VHS tapes in the 90's.
The device is so strange I am left unable to render a coherent comment
just use the provided touchpad
But this comment was coherent... Or am I just high?
@@naranciaisbestboi125 Just because his computer is having issues rendering text doesn't mean you won't be able to read it on yours.
@@Sparkette It isn't about his computer, look at the video then read OP's comment again.
Then it won
Sharp made a lot of interesting Famicom hardware. The red version of the Sharp TwinFami is still my favorite incarnation of the Famicom.
Sharp was really in love with Nintendo back in the 80s.
So does that make this device their love child 👍👍
Nintendo was a big customer of Sharp during the 70s and 80s as their manufacturing partner and in particular Sharp produced the LCD technology used in their Game N Watch line of toys.
That's why Sharp was able to integrate the Famicom into all these different products, they had a pretty cozy relationship from before.
Sharp is making the LCD's for the new model of Switch. Nintendo and Sharp still have a decent relationship.
Perhaps the NES hardware was used to control the genlock hardware and they figured. “why not stick cart slot on”
Forget the PS2 with its DVD player; this is a real home media convenience package.
A loud one. Though.
They asked Alan Sugar if he had any more bizarre tech mashup ideas.
I know - whu' if we combine a Famicom wif a toastuh?
Dildo Famicon Controlers
@@Bassotronics en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rez#Trance_Vibrator They made those for the PS2!
Oooh. I could get into some trouble with this if I had the time to learn it. My mind is a glow with transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention!
@No Comment Yes but that's hardly relevant. Copy the second sentence and search it. It's a reference. =)
This is something like Alan Sugar would want to make.....
But only if the power supply is IN the monitor/TV and the connector is not a standard one :D
I think it could've been used in trade shows to point things out and to put text and animations while demoing a game.
@Lassi Kinnunen This thing was cheaper than just an A500. Add to that the price of a genlock interface and video titling software and this is a very competitive option. Probably especially to the Japanese market. Also smaller (thus more portable) and arguably has easier operation (no booting from disk, no foreign language computer interface). This leads me to believe that this was intended for consumers and small business. Japanese consumers were home video crazy gadget freaks with buying power. Electronics-wise, mostly focused on the domestic market.
A video titler that doubles as a Famicom is probably a good buy for a consumer looking to title some home videos.
It's for the person in the extended family that edits wedding videos I'd assume.
I want one.
I would literally never use it, but for some reason I want it.
Perhaps they were planning additional cartridges for different purposes? That would have been great for producing eg company videos.
I can't wait to see the next episode, where our friends at Sharp combine a Famicom with a toaster.
Nintoaster official edition
I guess the cartridge port was intended to be used not with games, but with some other software to be plugged into the system for this exact purpose - video overlaying and editing - and using Famicom hardware was simpler as engineers already knew it enough from previous amalgamates they did at SHARP.
You know, they might have had plans, or actual releases, of other cartridges specifically for Famicom Titler! They might have had other imagery, effects, different functionality, or whatever else that could be of use in such a device in terms of video manipulation.
I wondered that myself. Of course, it has the regular Famicom functionality as well, so they must have assumed you'd want to play games too, I would think.
@@natgrant1364 I've seen some suggestions that it was Nintendo's idea, as a tool for making commercials. And that they went to SHARP because they've worked with them before.
They made it for future speed runners, so they can play the game and record it and high-quality.
use nes mod its very worth for the price
Made me start up my old computer with a TV card and composite in.
@@BradPitBrasileiro I could see some speedrunners preferring this, given that it's the only unmodded and official way to get S-video. Theoretically, original hardware is 100% guaranteed to perform as intended with every frame of every game, while mods could have side effects. Most wouldn't care, but a speedrunner might.
Thunder Force IV and Gradius in the exact same screen was hilarious af ngl
Japanese writing has a defined stroke order, so the stylus input probably wasn't a problem for Japanese users.
It still doesn’t seem to be very accurate.
CURRENCY EXCHANGE RATES AREN'T STATIC. 43,000 yen at the *1989* average exchange rate of roughly 140JPY/USD makes it $307 in *1989* USD, which is the equivalent of $635 in *2019* USD. Every single video I've seen on vintage Japanese hardware makes this same mistake, using today's exchange rate instead of the going rate at the time of release.
Then, even more expensive? This makes this device even more useless in relation to price…
Great comment appreciate the clarity
That is way more expensive...
While you're right, it's almost impossible to totally account for inflation, especially across currencies and going back so far. It's not an exact science. Yours is closer, but not exact.
The exchange rates in the late 80s were INSANE. We used to import stuff at the rate of one US cent per yen -and that was the marked up price. The actual rate was something like 250 yen to the dollar. The bottom line was stuff from Japan was dirt cheap and VERY profitable to resell. Kind of like how you can import cheap stuff from China right now and resell it for more and make a nice profit. Except anybody can just get it cheap from China themselves. Anyway, the golden age of cheap stuff from Japan ended when the bubble popped, the bottom fell out in 1989-90 and the exchange rate advantage evaporated.
DUUUUDE. Considering this is basically NES with additional buttons and a modified analog output, this means you most likely can access the little stylus area or the additional buttons through some memory address from your cartridge!
Get Octavius Kitten to touch the console whilst shouting "MINE!"... Legally it can't leave your house after that...
No touchy touchy.
It could be used to fill in blank backgrounds in older games with pre-made video loops as an underlay. Sort of like an alternative to when color overlays were used for old monochrome video games from the 70's/early 80's.
If it wasn't for Nostalgia Nerd I'd never know about these obscure consoles.
3:36 Reminds me of PalmOS "Graffiti" input… more specifically, the 1.x version.
I don't know how powerful Video Edit machines back in 1989 were, but I could see Sharp making cards for it with new graphics, so you could "update" your expensive video editing machine with NES cards. Maybe this was their plan behind this device.
Thanks Quang, this has to be in the top 10 of obscurest gaming devices
Ah, I now understand. There was a time in Japan when it was thing to send video messages on a vhs tape. For adults that want that might as well throw in a famicom!
Not a kids toy, this
Bragging time
I still have the ultimate Famicom.
Red Twin Famicom Turbo
-RGB mod done by Blaasvis
-Stereo mod (with dial that goes from mono to full stereo seperation) done by Blaasvis
-Famicom everdrive
Thanks to Blaasvis, still enjoying this beast!
Yeah, but does it have genlocking and titling capabilities, hmmm?
6:07 as an STG fan, *this is blowing my mind*
It totally is insane.
9:18 isn't just "BUZZ" it's "のBUZZ" or "no BUZZ" (as in the Japanese particle "no", not the English opposite of "yes")
Yes, we can see.
"OF BUZZ" "BUZZ'es"
日本語上手ですねぇえぇえぇええええ〜
Perhaps they used it as the character closest to "@" as if they wanted to put the name of a Twitter user.Apparently the machine did not have the ability to make special characters and the “character at (@)” was not popular until the email era.
I think it would be more like "...'s BUZZ" since the particles are postpositive.
That's pretty much the only thing I know about Japanese grammar.
I thought I knew all the NES variations!!!!! Never heard of this.
every day is a chance to learn something new
I was alive back then and can easily tell you that the reason they combined this was that both things were for tv use, and back then, using your tv for other than tv and vcr was a niche thing.
Who would want to combine both systems? Lol, James rolfe.
Intra needs a break. Why don't you go lie down for a while ok buddy?
To think I've seen everything there is to see in regards to nes/famicom clone consoles. This shows up, amazing.
I never knew that there was a Famicom titler! Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
This would be great for adding joke annotations over my little sister's wedding video
Japan is a more intimate market than the west. Rather than a "rich kid plaything", it was probably often used in department stores, small game centers, and store fronts, allowing brand flashing on the screen, deals, holidays, labeling high scores and names of local customers/clients, tournaments, ghosting of races/shmups, etc. Also, while stroke order isn't a big deal for the Latin alphabet, it is for kanji/kana. Most natives would find it pretty intuitive without instructions.
This thing is awesome!
I'm sure there's some youtuber somewhere in the world that really wants one of these (or has one!) so they can get S-Video out of a Famicom, lol
James Rolfe would have loved this thing.
It's like it was made for him.
He would make an ASS or FUCK overlay xD
Just so he could destroy it? "This thing is AAAAAAASSSS"
You may not know this, but it is only difficult to us to remember how to write a letter with specific strokes patterns, Chinese and Japanese people (I'm not sure about other Asian countries) must learn to write all their character using only one specific order for each stroke, my wife is from Taiwan (they use traditional Chinese) and my daughter has to write every single character using a specific pattern. This device is programmed to recognize those patterns and understand which character you are trying to write, this same principle is used even today for Windows users that write Asian characters using a stylus, this is very useful because you do not need to make a perfect letter when you write, you do not need to land each stroke in the perfect place, you just need to make each line in the correct order and orientation, sorry if I'm not clear enough, my English is a little limited.
It is not so much a specific stroke pattern, but a way of writing in a small pad for a text recognition system to interpret it as a character as well as some old PALM models that used stylus.
Saw retro electronics. Heard soothing bossa nova style jazz playing. Immediately thought I was watching LGR and had to confirm I was watching the right channel
Perfect device to make some authentic looking vaporwave videos
Oh man, character entry on that thing reminds of the early Palm Pilots.
so many quirky machines from japan were using genlocks. pioneer even had an msx model with one built in. I had a basic titler built into my sharp VCR too.
(5:23) It's nice seeing the Japanese people of the 1980s. Hi there, thanks for making the 80s a great decade. Japanese women look pretty, and the men look professional.
This is the epitome of “Throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks!”
Brilliant. I had a super famicom, with a disk drive to play knock off games..... Years of fun.
Excellent video!
This is an example of "Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should do it"
clickbait, your intro title wasn't done by the Famicom Titled, 0/10
jk this is very cool never knew this existed
This, is where things get interesting.
(you can hear "sega" from the distance)
Oh, I need this! I could play Pac Man while my wife watches Chicago Fire in the background.
so genlocking is only part of how this works, generator locking only allows the builtin famicom to be synced to an external video source, the function that allows video to be imposed on top of video is actually luminance keying. It works by a transistor array that switches between 2 sources depending on a set luma point (black in this case).
It reminds me of the superimposed text and sprites on my 1980s Nintendo wall calendar.
Reason for specific input order probably has to do with the Japanese language having a specific stroke order for each character (e.g. you can just write the character for 'mouth' by drawing a box, it has to be top to bottom, left to right).
The Titler could also be used for video game tournaments, with the player's name or handle overlayed at a corner of their screen.
Titler? What were they thinking? ACHTUNG! I wonder if there existed something similar from SEGA called Tommel or a model for American and European markets called Töring.
Thanks NN for this episode. Back in the 1980s. I enjoy stuff from there more than from any other decade.
i love how perverted it gets at the cartridge eject mechanism part :)
Possibly the best bit.
Pretty much the Famicom TV was actually quite useful at the time as it could be used as a cheap gameplay demo unit at retail outlets selling Famacom consoles and games! :)
people find me odd for liking retro tech even though i haven't been alive long enough to have experienced it at its time but i can't help it, old technology is so interesting especially in how it evolved to what it is today.
i'm 17 and i love the hum of an old computer it just soothes the soul
now ik this has nothing to do with the video but i just had to say it to someone, anyone!
This reminds me of a Panasonic video editing system brought out in the midd 1990s. The Panasonic system was more complex and expensive as it comprised of a mixing desk, an edit controller and a titling unit ; so three boxes instead of one. It could cope with PAL Video as well. I still have one in my back bedroom somewhere.
Thanks Quang
My pleasure.
Actually it makes quite some sense as the video processing was the most expensive part of both video titlers and computer game consoles was the graphics generation and the CPU, so 90% of both devices is going to be identical anyhow. A resistive touch pad is also somewhat less expensive than an actual keyboard.
BTW there is actually a professional use for this and that is when you want to have Famicom games on Television. With a non-genlockable Famicon you'd need a full frame TBC which, even in the early 1990s wasn't a common thing to have in your TV studio. So if you can genlock your Famicon to your studio you can just integrate it like any other device.
Every time I look up something on the famicom it always gains another addition. "I wonder what it's going to be this time? A video editor? Makes sense"
This is actually so cool and if 10 year old me had this at the time omfg if be messing with all our vhs tapes lol
oh, love for crazy combi systems, please japan, never change
Good to see more famiclones keep it these videos please 👍👍
this reminds me of some early video game shows where the player was superimposed into the video game he/she was playing. (but unless it's a famicom game, another mixer would be needed)
Nick Arcade comes to mind.
Well that was fascinating. Love all this neat stuff you find.
Wow,,i didn’t know that i did had a builtin touch pad, this device was very ahead of it’s time,eventrough that touch pad was weird & combersum to use , yeah, i first tout that the famicom titler was made for nintendo just to better commercialize their games,but now it turns out you could aside from the famicon ,mix different video source with eachother and then add text to it,, but you brought me on a wonderful idea, now you can indeed mix video sources as a background on top of nes games to make them looks more like a 16bit games,haha
T I T L E R
I need this
A lot of these seemingly strange combinations from Japan came about because the small size of the average Japanese home. Companies though people would want to conserve space and outlets.
The Atari 400 box is sick, especially in such shape. I love my 800, 600 XL, and 800XL, but it’s the fully-upgraded 800, with the monitor port that _allows for S-Video and even Component cables to be made, because of the 5th socket, which 800 XLs don’t have, in their monitor out port. I’d love to have an 800 box, like that, y’all. Totally sick. 👍
6:06 looks like a side-scrolling, co-op version of Ikaruga.
That thing is nuts!
Makes me wonder... Was there tapes of japanese erotica edited using a Nintendo?
I'm pretty sure the big N would never let it surface...
Any school would have loved one of those. And compared to other options at the time, it was pretty inexpensive.
Back in the day a friend of mine owned a MSX2 System from Philips, I guess, which he used for video editing and for the time it was very cool. This is a nice greeting from the past though ... :-)
Honestly, this does make sense in theory. With this design a developer could easily have developed cartridges for use with the titler so you could get a very expandable machine
Young whippersnapper doesn't realize that a Titler was an isolated task in TV production studios, and that Japanese didn't exactly use Amigas for their video editing due to an intense case of Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
Love the vibe and content of your videos mr nostalgia nerd 👍🏼
It might be a neat idea to go back into old Japanese game promos and identify which used the Famicom Titler for editing.
Shame they didn’t do a famicom/talking toaster combo 👍
did you say that the ppu is RGB OUT but also RGB IN?
What an oddball device ... thanks for showing it.
woah, I read Famicom Hitler, after 3 seconds I was "WHAT?" and then read it propperly
Famicom Hitler is in Bionic Commando lol
I thought this was a Technology Connections video by the title
I think it was made for families. The idea is that sometimes you may want to use it for birthdays, Christmas, weddings etc, but otherwise its pointless, so by integrating all the features of the famicom as well - you can kill two birds with one stone, and it makes it more useful. So video editing for mum and dad, and famicom for the kids.
Bit of a bizarre famicom combination
Famicorder missed marketing opportunity
Sounds ahead of its time! Interesting indeed!
"It's mine, my precious!"
with Asobi Games amazing consoles collection and your video-making capability, i think we can hope for a good hardware review coming soon
Early bootleg VHS anime fansubs used this to overlay subtitles because it was far cheaper to acquire than similar professional hardware.
I doubt they used a Titler, it would take way too long. It only has a memory of 5 screens.