NES/famicom on a chip

[SelfishJam79498]

How did those knock off console fit the whole nes/famicom on a chip it is ether through emulation or recreating an nes

[Average Nerd]

By todays standards the NES is by no means a powerful device, and technological advancements allowed for all the different chips, controllers and whatnot to be integrated into a single piece of silicon.

[Needfuldoer]

52 minutes ago, SelfishJam79498 said:

How did those knock off console fit the whole nes/famicom on a chip it is ether through emulation or recreating an nes

The Famicom/NES was reverse-engineered and packaged into a tiny ASIC many, many years ago. Those "Super Joy III" knockoff Famicom/Nintendo things and their sketchy 1,000,000,000-in-1 cartridges have been around for almost as long. They were designed to be as cheap as possible for developing markets, and an ARM core powerful enough to emulate Famicom/NES games would've been far more expensive at the time. Even today they're still cheaper, since the engineering work has long since been paid off, so the same factories continue to crap those things out en masse.

 

They're "real hardware", but they don't have perfect compatibility. Sound and color accuracy can usually be described as "close enough".

 

They became a lot easier to acquire in the west after the NES hardware patents expired.

 

I remember back in the pre-smartphone days, there was a lively modding scene making handheld Gameboy-like consoles out of these things because they were much smaller than real NES motherboards, and they sipped power. 

[BrandonLatzig]

On 1/16/2024 at 4:31 AM, Needfuldoer said:

The Famicom/NES was reverse-engineered and packaged into a tiny ASIC many, many years ago. Those "Super Joy III" knockoff Famicom/Nintendo things and their sketchy 1,000,000,000-in-1 cartridges have been around for almost as long. They were designed to be as cheap as possible for developing markets, and an ARM core powerful enough to emulate Famicom/NES games would've been far more expensive at the time. Even today they're still cheaper, since the engineering work has long since been paid off, so the same factories continue to crap those things out en masse.

this makes me wonder if you can then just fit gameboy hardware onto a single cartridge nowadays

[thrasher_565]

34 minutes ago, BrandonLatzig said:

this makes me wonder if you can then just fit gameboy hardware onto a single cartridge nowadays

there computers the size of a thumbdrive so...

have some one taking a gameboy pcb and cut it down to fit in something smaller ya.

is there a chip that can emulate gb ya.

 

Edited January 21 by thrasher_565