NES/Hardware information

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< NES
Revision as of 23:46, 12 November 2005 by 69.136.7.34 (talk) (minor clock speed and sound channel corrections)
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The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES for short) consists of:

  • 2A03 Central Processing Unit
    • A 6502 8-bit (using a custom MOS Technology 6502 class) Processor running at 1.789Mhz
    • On-die PSG sound supporting 5 channels:
      • 2 pulse wave
      • 1 triangle wave
      • 1 noise
      • 1 DPCM
    • 16 Kbit (2kb) of RAM
  • 2C02 Picture Processing Unit
    • 16 Kbit (2kb) of VRAM
    • Screen Resolution of 256x240
    • 52 Colours Available (four levels of gray, and four levels of each of 12 hues)
    • Up to 25 colours on screen
    • Maximum of 64 sprites
    • Maximum of 8 sprites per scanline
    • 8x8 or 8x16 sprite size
    • Two picture scrolls, Horizontal and Verical
  • Game Pak
    • Min/Max attested cart size: 192 Kbit - 4 Mbit
    • More than 320 Kbit requires bankswitching hardware
    • Some games contain extra RAM for the CPU and/or PPU

More NES hardware information can be found at http://nesdev.parodius.com/wiki/