Nintendo 8 Bit Manual

 
 
 
Nintendo Entertainment 
System Documentation 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Version 1.0 
August 2004 
Patrick Diskin  

 
 
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Preface 
 
Abstract 
 
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was the world’s most widely used videogames 
console during the 1980s. From its initial release in 1983 until it was discontinued in 1995 the 
console brought gaming into more homes than ever before and paved the way for the 
videogame industry as it stands today. 
 
Although technology has improved dramatically since the NES, many excellent games were 
only released on that format and so are unplayable on more modern systems. However...

 
 
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1 - Introduction 
 
1.1 Nintendo Entertainment System History 
 
In 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai and began manufacturing Japanese 
playing cards, hanafuda, in Kyoto [10]. By 1950, when Hiroshi Yamauchi became president, 
Nintendo was a successful manufacturer of both western and Japanese playing cards. In 
1963, after several name changes, the company settled on Nintendo Co. Ltd. (NCL). By 
1970, the company was producing electronic games and in 1973 they introduced a laser clay...

 
 
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The Famicom (Family Computer) became an enormous success in Japan and in 1983, 
Minoru Arakawa offered Atari the chance to produce the system in America. When it became 
clear that Atari did not have the resources to proceed the deal fell through. Atari was divided 
up and sold by Warner while Nintendo decided to produce and market the Famicom in 
America themselves under the name Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The console 
was also redesigned to appeal to western children as shown in figure...

 
 
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have a NES, preventing many people from using the software. In addition, all hardware has a 
limited lifespan and eventually there will be no working NES consoles to still play the games 
on. The games themselves often featured battery backed RAM to enable progress to be 
saved and Nintendo only predicted the battery life as five years. There are multiple options 
which allow the continued use of NES games and these are described here. 
 
1.2 Conversion 
 
Although the exact implementations of...

 
 
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•  Static translation involves reading in the whole of the source program and translating it 
for the target system, producing a program that is executable on that system. However it 
is not always possible to determine how a program will execute from a static analysis of 
it. Branch instructions, for example, often depend on the contents of memory locations 
which can only be determined at run-time [20]. 
 
•  Dynamic translation works in much the same way as static translation but occurs while...

 
 
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This only applies to games which were originally made for the NES itself. Many developers 
have produced games since which have been released freely on the Internet. Downloading 
these is acceptable. As for original NES games, using them will remain illegal until either the 
developers grant permission for their use or the copyright expires, which is 75 years after 
they were made. 
 
Nintendo are very much against emulation. The company acted against the developers of 
UltraHLE [24], an emulator...

 
 
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can be transferred to a device via a write to a specific location in memory. Input devices are 
discussed in Part 5, the function of the memory mapped I/O is discussed throughout the 
document and specifically in Appendix B. 
 
 
 
  

 
 
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2 - Central Processing Unit 
 
2.1 2A03 Overview 
 
Ricoh produced an NMOS processor based on the 6502, the 2A03. The chip differed from a 
standard 6502 in that it had the ability to handle sound, serving as pAPU (pseudo-Audio 
Processing Unit) as well as CPU, and that it lacked a Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) mode 
which allowed representing each digit using 4 bits. For the purposes of programming, the 
2A03 uses the same instruction set as the standard 6502 which is shown in figure 2-1. The 
6502...

 
 
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The 2A03 had a 16-bit address bus and as such could support 64 KB of memory with 
addresses from $0000-$FFFF. Figure 2-5 is the CPU memory map used by the NES, 
showing the layout of memory. The left hand map is a simplified version showing the major 
sections, while the map to the right divides these sections further. 
 
Zero Page refers to addresses in the range $0000-$00FF, that is the first page in memory 
and is used by certain addressing modes to allow quicker execution [4]. Memory locations...