Fun fact: The expansion sound on NES cartridges is still there; it's just there's no pin on the cartridge that connects to the speakers.  There are ten unused pins on the cartridge that go to a port on the bottom of the console, and the expansion audio in such games is usually connected to pin number 5.  There's a gadget you can plug in underneath the console to bridge the expansion audio into the NES's sound output.

I designed the development cartridge for Sega Genesis.  It was called the RamCart and used static memory to hold the cartridge image.  Data was written to it by access to a couple of phantom registers.  Once the final image was confirmed, that image was used in the ROMs for production.  I worked on a lot of the early 8 bit and 16 bit games platforms.

Japanese Castlevania III sounds freaking cool!!


Chiptune bliss, really well composed

I did similar experiments as a kid with my Playstation, but I remember removing a disk would not cause the game to stop unless you navigated a new menu or performed an action that required new content to be read from the disk. Helps explain a lot about how data from physical storage "lives" in computer memory (volatile memory)

Licensed NES cartridges all looked the same because Nintendo wouldn't let other companies manufacture them - they made the carts themselves, and shipped them in limited quantity to companies that ordered them. This was done to keep them from flooding the market with crappy games, which is what killed Atari in 1983. This is why some bigger game companies made games under multiple brand names (i.e. Konami and Ultra) - to get around the order size limitation and make more money selling more games by pretending to be separate companies.

The second cartridge port was actually intended for the "Monkey Wrench" cartridge, which was made to significantly expand the capabilities of BASIC.

For anyone who wonder why the Famicom that showed up in this video is different from the usual one we've seen, It's because THAT wasn't the original Famicom. It was a Twin Famicom which only released in Japan and can play both Famicom and Famicom Disk System games in one system.

Also another point out is that only the Famicom Disk System have an additional sound chip. Since Twin Famicom contain both system you can hear an additional sound. However, I don't think any cartridge games used an additional sound chip because if you don't own a Twin Famicom, You can't use a cartridge games while using Disk System anyway. Only the Disk System games used an additional sound chip.

Update : There are some Famicom games that had an additional sound chip! like Castlevania III for example.

That famicom castlevania soundtrack was pretty lit, not gonna lie.

I was this old when I learned the speak and spell had ROMs that my parents were too cheap to buy....

I just fixed an old saga game after watching this video, I never would have thought vinegar would be safe to use but it worked!

Dude yes. I may have a softer spot for floppies, but cartridges are still magical.
Especially those like on the TI-99/4A, where they called them Solid State Command Modules. I mean, that still sounds straight from the future, I love it.

"All Nintendo cartridges look more or less exactly the same"

Except them weirdo Tengen or Color Dreams ones.

Bank switching on the NES was ridiculously effective.  Games that employed that could switch banks so rapidly without error that said games could bank-switch in the middle of drawing a frame to extend the game's graphics.  A simple example is the status bar in Super Mario Bros 3, which runs on a completely different set of tiles than the rest of the level.  The animated tiles in that game were also animated via bank switching.

And the way the NES enabled extending its capability through hardware on the cartridge was much different from other gaming consoles.  As I understand it, part of the system's PPU was directly connected to the cartridge, and so instead of simply plugging in an array of memory, the cartridge is actually part of the rendering hardware.  This allowed the system to have games that expand the capabilities far beyond the original specs than any of the later and more advanced consoles could.

There was a cart for the Atari 800 called Monkey Wrench, and it was made to be plugged in the right cartridge slot of the atari 800 with basic in the left slot. It would add all sorts of features and function to atari basic.

Cheers!

You actually enhance and augment my childhood. You fill in the blanks I had as a child and that enhances my memories of my time with the Atari 2600, C64, NES and so on.

Most US NES licensed cartridges were the same because, while other companies made the games, they had to buy the cartridges from Nintendo per Nintendo's licensing agreement. Some unlicensed NES carts were different but most were still very similar because they had to fit into and be removed from the front-loading NES.

This is the hardest thing to convince people on, the cartridges were a circuit board meaning the creativity of what goes on that circuit board is almost unlimited, it's limit is only that of the budget and the creativity of the developers. People seem to only think of cartridges as a dump of rom code, I've even had people argue with me on this, "a cartridge is just a dump of rom code on a chip" but it could be so much more and many companies took advantage of that when releasing certain games.

A pencil eraser works well for cleaning cartridge edge contacts also.

Whenever I don't know what to watch, I always find myself coming back to your videos

Wow! I remember my father bringing home a PCB loaded with 32 EEPROM's that plugged into our Atari 2600. You would have to flip DIP switches with the power off to select the game you wanted. (The first version was a single flip socket that you had to insert the different EEPROM's into but as you can imagine with children, the pins got bent)