Pushing the Humble NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) to its Absolute Limit

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Recently I covered scene demos and envelope-pushing games for the SNES. But how could I ignore its predecessor? The NES (known in Japan as the Famicom, aka Family Computer) was an outright cultural phenomenon.

Finally games had actual depth to them. Not simple arcade ports like on Atari consoles but platformers with many worlds, RPGs, strategy games...it's easy to see why the NES rescued home gaming. The step up in graphics was much less important than the step up in the complexity of the games themselves.

But what could this 8 bit, 1.79mhz machine really do? What progress has been made since 1983 in working out how to squeeze the most out of the NES that possibly can be? "High Hopes" by Aspekt offers some insight:

As you can see, very similar capabilities to the Commodore 64, which I covered here. Similar clock speed, similar color depth, similar sound capabilities.

"Quantum Disco Brothers" by Wamma (seen below) could easily pass for a C64 demo. The NES was, to American kids, what the C64 was to European kids. They were the dominant game machines in their respective markets during the 8-bit era.

Unusually, in the modern day there's not just been new games made for the NES, but music albums as well. Some of them, like 8-bit Music Power, are collections of chiptunes that play on the NES music chip as seen below:

However others somehow manage to compress full vocal tracks onto an NES cartridge and play them at a comprehensible level of audio quality using compression algorithms developed for cell phones:

How in the hell, right? Remember the NES and SNES both allowed on-cart chips to improve their capabilities. It is not unheard of to pack digital audio into cartridge format. Remember the vocals to the intro music on Tales of Phantasia?

Some of the new indie games can be seen below:

Some oddball stuff in there. Since the value indie devs see in making new NES games is to capitalize on nostalgia, there's surprisingly little effort put into maximizing the graphical quality. Understandable perhaps.

When it comes to the games that came out back in the day with the best graphics, these are hands down the best from a technical standpoint (in my opinion):

Stay tuned for more of these! I'm fixing to do one on the Amiga soon, still figuring out how to manage that. Keep your eyes peeled for it!