There is probably nothing in this article that you didn’t know already! Except maybe the boobies in Golgo-13 (thanks for that revelation, Rey). It’s just one of those pieces that aggregates a bunch of stuff everyone knows in a single place. It probably worked better in print, though — that way it was a series of entries, one per page. This way it’s a list feature which oh mah gawd is like the worstest thing that ever happened to the English language and the Internet like rilly I am so never visiting this site again fer sure.
Minor correction: Gradius II was powered by the VRC4 chip.
I read the main reason why Konami and other companies couldn’t use their special mappers for the overseas releases of their games was due to hardware differences between the Family Computer and the Nintendo Entertainment System. The Famicom had an expansion port which developers used to create their mappers. In the NES, the expansion port was replaced by a lockout chip.
That screenshot really makes me want to play Whomp ‘Em.
That post title really makes me want to listen to New Adventures in Hi-Fi.
@johnny2x4, I don’t think that’s the case. Practically any Famicom game works fine an American NES with a converter, and all that does is change pin configurations. It doesn’t support the extra sound channels for the Namco/Konami/whatever else games, though. In the Famicom that capability existed for the extra FM channels from the disk system, but was seen as an unnecessary addition to the NES, so that was chucked. At least, that’s how my understanding goes.
Anyway, this article taught me about the Atari 2800, which I had no idea about. Cheers to that!
I guess you’re both kind of right — some of the advanced mappers do work on NES, but Konami’s generally added extra audio as well as boosting the video output (extra channels in the VRC6, FM synthesis in the VRC7, etc.). My suspicion is that NOA accounted for that difference by forbidding any mapper chips but their own. All we can do is speculate, I guess.