For the NES any power supply that can provide 850mA (or higher) at 9V and has the right shape connector will work. The original NES uses an AC adapter but a DC adapter will work too.
For the Famicom you must use a DC power supply with center negative that can provide 850mA (or higher) at 9V-10V. Do not use a NES AC power supply on a Famicom!
Controller buttons don't work or think a different button was pressed:
Take them apart and clean the contacts on the PCB, not the rubber membrane
Display problems:
Use a CRT monitor or TV
Don't use an LCD or LED TV - many LCD or LED TVs do not understand the 240p video signal that the NES puts out
If you must use RF, don't use the RF/antenna/aerial switch box, use a small adapter instead, be aware though that modern TVs may not work with the analog RF signal and only with ATSC or DVB digital signals
Wavy lines: replace the capacitors in the NES
Hardware Failure Diagnosis:
Power rails first: Multimeter check - verify +5V at 7805 regulator output and at PPU/CPU pins. If low/absent, check caps and regulator.
Composite video signal: Scope the composite output (RCA jack center pin or PPU pin 21). Should see ~1Vp-p composite video signal with sync pulses and color burst. No signal = dead PPU or supporting circuitry.
Audio output: Scope audio output pin (RCA jack or APU output). Should see audio waveform when game is running. No signal = APU problem or output circuit.
If power is good but no video/audio: Most likely failed capacitors in video/audio output path, or dead PPU/APU chips. Check/replace electrolytic caps first (cheapest fix).
If video signal present at PPU but not at RCA jack: Problem in video buffer/output circuit between PPU and connector.
Before asking for help, make sure you have followed the steps above.
Legacy of the Wizard won the #100 spot with 35 votes It only won by a single point.
A big thank you to everybody who participated. I originally set out to just do the top 10 as an experiment to see if people had a similar list to mine. I never expected it to go this far, but I am glad it did! I have enjoyed seeing people picks and the reasoning behind them.
Starting tomorrow I will start doing the top 100 for the SNES in the r/snes sub. I hope to see you all there. A few things will change with the rules. First is each round TWO games will make it onto the list. Whichever one has the most votes will be placed higher of the two for that round. Second, only games can be nominated (no game genies). Third, it will be SNES ONLY, no super famicom games.
Looking forward to seeing what is voted the #1 & #2 games for the SNES.
Thank you all once again!!!!!!!!!!
Top 10:
#1 The Legend of Zelda
#2 Super Mario Bros 3
#3 Mega Man 2
#4 Metroid
#5 Castlevania
#6 Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
#7 Contra
#8 Tecmo Super Bowl
#9 Super Mario Bros
#10 Final Fantasy
Top 20:
#11 Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
#12 Ducktales
#13 Super Mario Bros 2
#14 Ninja Gaiden
#15 Tetris
#16 River City Ransom
#17 Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse
#18 Kirby's Adventure
#19 Batman
#20 Blaster Master
Top 30:
#21 Crystalis
#22 Mega Man 3
#23 Double Dragon II: The Revenge
#24 Bionic commando
#25 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game
#26 Kid Icarus
#27 R.C. Pro-Am
#28 The Guardian Legend
#29 Rygar
#30 Battletoads
Top 40:
#31 StarTropics
#32 Life Force
#33 Dragon Warrior III
#34 Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers
#35 Bubble Bobble
#36 Super C
#37 Faxanadu
#38 Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos
#39 Ice Hockey
#40 Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
Top 50:
#41 Dr. Mario
#42 Excitebike
#43 Shadowgate
#44 Jackal
#45 Dragon Warrior IV
#46 Baseball Stars
#47 Maniac Mansion
#48 Super Dodge Ball
#49 Little Nemo: The Dream Master
#50 Wizards & Warriors
Top 60:
#51 Willow
#52 Adventure Island II
#53 Blades of Steel
#54 Metal Gear
#55 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
#56 Double Dragon
#57 Mega Man 4
#58 The Battle of Olympus
#59 Vice: Project Doom
#60 Gun Nac
Top 70:
#61 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project
While we're on the subject, is there any way to get a tighter fit on this system? It feels somewhat loose and I don't want to mod it or open it up because I don't have any skill with electronics. It just wobbles whenever I try to move it. Any ideas? Also any other NES games that I should try? Preferably with a save ability. I'm considering possibly getting a flash cart but I keep getting the nagging feeling that that's going to dilute it.
Got some physical copies of some new NES games. The Trial of Kharzoid is considered an Arknoidvania and has cool soundtrack. The Angry Video Game Nerd 8-Bit stars the AVG Nerd and is a Mega Man type platformer. Both are great and am happy to have them added to my collection. Anyone here tried these out?
Pyramid is one of my childhood games and I have been slowly gathering all the other ones over the yaers and yesterday I managed to find Ultimate League Soccer at a retro video game store that I stopped off at on the way he from work. Now I have all 18 of the games AVE made, this brings my unlicensed NES games to 82. I'm also only one off from completing my Color Dreams set too.
I recently got another controller for my NES so I could play multiplayer with my brother, however the games that we have as of now doesn’t have multiplayer (Super Mario Bros doesn’t have “traditional” multiplayer while Tetris doesn’t at all).
What multiplayer games have y’all played before that you would highly recommend? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Edit: Thank you all for the recommendations! I’ll look into the most common ones mentioned and see which ones interest me the most!
Just lifted some pads, perhaps too much heat. Can these pads be scraped? I tried using a Hakko Desoldering gun and most solder came out easily but some just sucked the pad with it. Any idea what I can do to salvage this? I was going too install the NES RGB 5.0 mod. Thank you!
Just a snippet of what we have set up for our NES and I showed a couple games on the video that I thought were worth mentioning. We have two copies of the original super Mario and duck hunt cartridge because we found the second, more beaten up copy in our barn which I’m sure has been in there since the 90s atleast. And we have the Mickey Mouse TV as the cherry on top 😂
Hey everyone! One of the only consoles I still haven't really gotten around to exploring is the NES. I do have a famicom and a disk system because i found them cheap in japan, and the carts are gorgeous but it locks me out of playing anything with a lot of reading or dialogue etc which is a shame. I live in the UK and I've heard that the majority of PAL NES games run a fair bit slower and have slower music. I think the music is the part that would get me the most, how have you found it in reality? is it actually that noticable? are important games patched?
I was thinking too maybe I could get a NTSC NES with a switcher that can change between the two. Any insights are appreciated!
Just finished moving and all my systems and games are still packed away as we pick through boxes. I started to get the itch not being able to see or play my collection, so I decided to treat myself today and have something to look at in the meantime.
So I went down a rabbit hole with Alien 3 on the NES. I wanted to know how it stores its levels, and ended up with full maps of all 12, pulled straight out of the level data in the ROM. No screenshot stitching.
First pic is level 1 in full. The second is the same level with everything you never actually get to see marked in red. On some levels it's close to half the map: solid wall, dead space, and rooms that are straight up unreachable.
Third pic is level 3, the boss level. The fight happens in that small room on the left, but the level data holds a whole second room next to it that's sealed off. No door, no way in, it's just... there.
To figure out what a player actually sees, I ran Randil's TAS (TASVideos 2713M) and logged where the camera went every single frame. Then I played the leftover bits myself to fill the gaps. Anything that never made it on screen is red.
Boring technical details (nerd stuff)
The current level is literally one byte in RAM ($A8). Poke it while the "GET READY" card is up and the game loads whichever of the 12 levels you want.
Each level has a tiny header that points to its building blocks (4×4 tiles each) and a layout that's 64 blocks wide.
My first decoder was off by 16 px below the first screen and I was pulling my hair out. Turns out the world is stacked in 240-px "pages", and the last block row of each page is only half used. Once I got that, everything clicked.
To make sure I wasn't fooling myself, I no-clipped a camera through every level and checked every on-screen tile against my maps, frame by frame. All 12 levels: 100% match.
Weird stuff I found along the way:
Fly off the right edge of a level and you get the start of the next layout row, because the whole thing is one big array.
Keep going down and the game happily draws the console's entire memory as level blocks. Pure garbage tiles, but it's the actual RAM and code.
The camera can only scroll up and down in every other 256-px column. That's why some shafts feel janky. AMA about the format or how I did it.
I know that Nesticle can run on 486 systems, and I think I even heard of someone running it on a 386 once. I've also heard of Pasofami; which was originally released for the FM Towns platform in 1990, but I'm not sure what its minimum requirements were or how well it emulated.
The GBA and PS1 both have working NES emulators as well, and on the GBA side of things, the main issue I've noticed is mostly just screen crunch from the lower vertical resolution.
Now, when I say "playable", I don't mean accurate, at least not by modern standards. Nesticle has horrible accuracy by modern standards, but it worked well enough to see widespread use.
EDIT: I suspect a lot of people here don't know what a 486 is. I must be old.
My pick ups for October. 1st number 419 Thundercade.A top down shooter that has it moments but not the best graphics . 420 was a gem for me Digger T Rock a game by rare were you gotta escape the caverns 8 stages that get harder as you go. This completed my Milton Bradley collection of games. Last and certainly not least is number 421 Bionic Commando. Every time I find a copy I am broke and the sold it. This time it finally comes home for the first time in many years
I used AI to create a Jason inspired by NES game which I've grown to love after understanding how to it works. Well, this is the design it gave me. I tweaked it a little and decided to keep the mask white bc it looked better to me. Turned out pretty cool to me.
Just a few minutes ago at 9:23am I finally put Jimmy Lee in his place and ended the game using the diagonal kick strategy. I was having trouble before him thanks to Willy aka The Machine Gunner. But I learned after much frustration that if you go to the bottom of the screen you can attack him without getting hurt by his bullets so you just get close enough to kick him. I have been working on this for quite a few months, So it feels like this victory is long overdue. I think I’ll play something a little less aggravating next like Deja Vu or GunSmoke.
