Last week I shared a bit of a musing about the Nintendo Famicom and the fact that, in an era of Zilog Z80 based arcade machines, it was a bit of an oddball for a dedicated game system to be MOS 6502 based.
A friend in the phone phreak community shared with me the below linked video (Thanks Seraphina!) by YouTuber LowSpecGamer regarding the origins of the Famicom. I had avoided searching on YouTube for anything relating to the origins of the Famicom due to it being, at this stage, a hellscape of clickbait, and I didn’t want to waste time watching videos by random RetroBros™ which never actually got to the topic at hand.
In an irony this video, titled “Nintendo’s Cheating Console” gets to the heart of the issue — the program which lead to the Famicom (and thus the Nintendo Entertainment System here in the west) was started with a key goal being a low overall price — basically, the Famicom had to be as cheap as possible and while in the end it wouldn’t quite meet the goal, it was good enough to make it into production.
A key cost savings technique? The choice to go with a processor produced by Ricoh which just so happened to be based on the very cost effective MOS 6502 architecture, with a few key changes. To compliment this, they also produced the PPU (Picture Processing Unit) for the Famicom which, I didn’t know until this video had some striking similarities to the video processing chip in the Colecovision — the Z80 based console that just so happened to have the best home version of Donkey Kong up to that time.
I have to say this wasn’t a bad video — I may consider checking out more of this content creators work but, as you may well know if you follow me on social media, I’m very much growing to loathe most of gaming culture as it has become, and tend to stay away from most user created content unless I feel a need to digest such, as I did here since my friend had shared it as an answer to my previous question.
That being said, here’s the video. Enjoy.