Punch-Out for the 7800

[Jinks]

Punch out 7800 is cool.. Ever play the Nes game called punch out?? Yeah the 7800 has this demo called punch out as well. Except it looks like the arcade not a cartoon.

This was a fun game that was dual screen.

You think we could hook up two 7800s and have them play the real arcade game communicating with the 7800 to 7800 adapter that was going to be made back in 85ish but they decided not too because they crashed hard real hard. This Punch out game sure is fun tho. I am gunna solder two joystick cables together and plug them into two 7800's and put fight night in both consoles. Then hook them up to two 100" 4k tvs and with the contrast control turned to 11 and enough drugs will be playing arcade punch out with no coding involved. I bet that would be better than playing a Nes or would a mapper chip next to my old dutch chips cause interference and create a rolling screen? Probably just a PAL issue? The colours would really saturate on ntsc mode enough to blind my cat. Punch out is fun dont you think?

[DracIsBack]

 

The software that was released on NES was head and shoulders better in multiple facets than the released software on the 7800. That's a fairly well accepted statement. There was far more of it on NES, in greater variety, and over a longer stretch of time. It was a dominant system. The 7800 was a barebones effort, a highly incomplete effort. It suffered from lack of resources, lack of quality 3rd party support, etc.

 

So often you will have NES fans criticize 7800 and SMS for that matter, as though the hardware is inferior, when in fact it is not. The software on those systems were greatly inferior to the NES. Those critics are short sighted, and unfair to 7800 and SMS.

 

 

Speaking as someone who owned the 7800 (as well as the SMS II) back in the day, you've pretty well nailed my view on it. The frustrating part of it at the time for me is that you'd see "hints" it could be competitive. I'd have friends come over and scoff "You have an Atari still" before it was even turned on, assuming it was just a 2600. Then they'd see stuff like Karateka and Joust and Food Fight and assume it was lame.

 

But then they'd also see hints it was capable of more than what they thought. Ballblazer in particular made a number of my friends eyes' pop out of their heads. Likewise, it didn't have Super Mario, but Scrapyard Dog showed a game like that could be played on the system. The graphics with Alien Brigade were good, Commando was a good conversion etc.

 

NES games were usually quickly identified relative to previous generations of games. Solid graphics, catchy background music, sharp title screens, password saves and sometimes cut scenes. You had 7800 games with those things, but usually not all of them together.

 

I always wondered, even then: What would happen if the A developers, brought their A game ideas with their A budgets to the 7800 and put them on bigger cartridges with extra hardware like the NES and SMS had? What would the library be like?

 

This is why I find this era of the 7800 much more exciting. Homebrewers who grew up with it are now doing the types of games I wanted as a kid. And it's awesome.

 

The NES is a classic system with many great titles and I've been collecting for it also.

Edited January 10, 2015 by DracIsBack

[malducci]

 

Would be nice if it were easy but I doubt it. This guy has converted many NES to TG-16, and that's with the extra HP the PCE/TG has.

 

I was looking over the 7800 graphic modes and such, and yeah - it would be quite a feat. On the 7800 side of things, you're gonna end up with less cpu resource due to Maria and managing the display lists, and coupling that with usually unoptimized code for the average NES game - you're gonna run into some speed issues. If an NES game doesn't use a whole lot of cpu resource relative to a frame, then that part would be less of an issue. But other problems arise; the resolution don't match between the two, so coordinates of sprites and BG offsets would have to be recalculated on the fly (via LUT). I would think nes Punch Out could be a decent candidate for this. It would still be some serious hacking. From personal experience though, I think the issue of the 7800 have registers mapped into ZP address space - would be the bigger issue. But there is a nifty tool out there that can help; emulators CDL capability. You basically playthrough the game with the code/data logger enabled. It logs every byte access from the game, and uses an 8bit mask to tell what that access was (including multiple different accesses). Most importantly, it can tell you if the access was the first byte of an opcode. That one important piece of info allows you a clean dissassembly of the game code.

[Shawn]

 

I was looking over the 7800 graphic modes and such, and yeah - it would be quite a feat. On the 7800 side of things, you're gonna end up with less cpu resource due to Maria and managing the display lists, and coupling that with usually unoptimized code for the average NES game - you're gonna run into some speed issues. If an NES game doesn't use a whole lot of cpu resource relative to a frame, then that part would be less of an issue. But other problems arise; the resolution don't match between the two, so coordinates of sprites and BG offsets would have to be recalculated on the fly (via LUT). I would think nes Punch Out could be a decent candidate for this. It would still be some serious hacking. From personal experience though, I think the issue of the 7800 have registers mapped into ZP address space - would be the bigger issue. But there is a nifty tool out there that can help; emulators CDL capability. You basically playthrough the game with the code/data logger enabled. It logs every byte access from the game, and uses an 8bit mask to tell what that access was (including multiple different accesses). Most importantly, it can tell you if the access was the first byte of an opcode. That one important piece of info allows you a clean dissassembly of the game code.

 

It sounds kinda like YOU could\should make a 7800 port of the NES version of punch out? I'll be your BFF if you do

[Greg2600]

 

Would they need to cut back on the action on screen? No, actually - they wouldn't. The primary and most important function of that mapper is memory. If you remove that mapper, you loose the ability to access large amounts of memory. SMB3 uses single tilemap mirroring, it simply zeros out X/Y regs and switches which tilemap to read from (you don't need a mapper for this). Could the status bar still be at the bottom? Sure. Is it more convient with an interrupt? Sure. Are any of those games mentioned possible without the interrupt? Most definitely. Hell, all but two Megaman games use char-ram. Ever looked at Battletoads?

That's one of the simplest mappers and the game uses chr-ram (not vrom mapped memory). No external interrupts. I'd argue they could be just as good, because I understand what's happening under the hood. Because none of those games use the external interrupt for excessive h-sync scrolls. Those games would be the exception, but I would just say "see below". Because it's like saying, if a game didn't have chr-ram or chr-rom then it wouldn't look the same. Actually, you wouldn't see anything at all. The same can be applied for external ram (a minimal of 2k work ram is on the system, and there's open bus in the address range for a reason: more memory via cart).

 

That's true. And I'll take it one step further and say any h-sync scroll divides are impossible on a practical level without it. I.e. Ninja Gaiden 3 for example. But in reality, it's actually no different than they idea that the PPU isn't complete and actually requires functionality from the cart even to operate. That was my point. It's part of the design scope of the system, it's part of the ppu functionality, and its delivery mechanism *is* the cart and all the options it entails. The only real mapper outside the scope of this, is MMC5. The idea you were proposing, is that it's common place for NES to have 'upgrades', and the library by examples proves the rule and validation for the XM module. I personally think MMC5 is the exception to the rule, not the rule. And that these aren't upgrades so much, as they are development options within the scope of the original design. There's this point of view that the NES needed these "upgrades" because the 'base' system couldn't handle it, when the reality is that these are development extensions of the original system. This is the way the system was design; it's both extremely flexible and quite unique IMO. The SNES followed a similar development path, but not nearly as flexible as the NES' design.

 

So that's the problem; people are defining the NES architecture by the design and measurements of other systems. When in fact, the NES is a fairly unique design. If you consider that an unfair advange on behalf of the NES, then that's fine. But that was always part of the system's design. There's a difference between being part of a system's functionality, and an unforseen exploit of a system's functionality, and something that goes above and beyond the scope of a system's functionality. 99% of mappers fall into the first category, with MMC5 falling into the second category. Nothing so far that I know of that fits the third. I mean, we're not talking about the 32x here ;>_>

 

That said, was the 7800 designed with XM type capabilities in mind? Or does that fall under the second category? (I would say the 2151 falls closer to the third category, but I'm sure that's horse is long dead by now)

 

That would be me (see my sig). Which is I brought it up. Yeah, I wrote emulation code for the PPU and APU in realtime thanks to the extra processing spead, but it can be done the other was as well: replace the apu and ppu drawing routines with custom ones. More work, for sure, but still doable. Well, that, and I'm partial to the NES one over the arcade game

 

Great explanation, and ha ha, I didn't realize you were one and the same. Hope you get more free time to do more conversions.

 

I was looking over the 7800 graphic modes and such, and yeah - it would be quite a feat. On the 7800 side of things, you're gonna end up with less cpu resource due to Maria and managing the display lists, and coupling that with usually unoptimized code for the average NES game - you're gonna run into some speed issues. If an NES game doesn't use a whole lot of cpu resource relative to a frame, then that part would be less of an issue. But other problems arise; the resolution don't match between the two, so coordinates of sprites and BG offsets would have to be recalculated on the fly (via LUT). I would think nes Punch Out could be a decent candidate for this. It would still be some serious hacking. From personal experience though, I think the issue of the 7800 have registers mapped into ZP address space - would be the bigger issue. But there is a nifty tool out there that can help; emulators CDL capability. You basically playthrough the game with the code/data logger enabled. It logs every byte access from the game, and uses an 8bit mask to tell what that access was (including multiple different accesses). Most importantly, it can tell you if the access was the first byte of an opcode. That one important piece of info allows you a clean dissassembly of the game code.

 

That's too bad, but not unexpected. I think there are plenty of mid/late-80's arcade ports that could be done though aside from the "big" NES titles.

[malducci]

 

It sounds kinda like YOU could\should make a 7800 port of the NES version of punch out? I'll be your BFF if you do

 

Hah, there's plenty of other talented people out there that could do this too. There's a guy right now in the Jag subforum here, that's getting ST games to run on the Jag. He has it easier like the nes2pce stuff, but the principle in the end is the same. Others that I can't remember off the top of my head. I honestly don't have the time.

 

 

Great explanation, and ha ha, I didn't realize you were one and the same. Hope you get more free time to do more conversions.

 

 

School has completely monopolized my time, so things on the homebrew/hack side are slow :/ Though Punch Out, with slightly upgrades graphics on the PC-Engine, would be cool and a fairly small project.

 

That's too bad, but not unexpected. I think there are plenty of mid/late-80's arcade ports that could be done though aside from the "big" NES titles.

Yeah, it's more difficult - but not completely undoable for the right dedicated hacker/coder. Have you ever seen the Donkey Kong arcade rom disassembled and reassembled to run on the CoCo 3? If you end up going the CDL route, then why stop with NES games? Why not actual arcade games like with what sockmaster (coco3 guy) did? The only down side is learning the arcade hardware to make the necessary conversion routines, but mame source code is a great help for figuring that out.

[Shawn]

Punch-Out?

[Mord]

Sorry, the thread was K.O.ed months ago.

[Shawn]

Sorry, the thread was K.O.ed months ago.

 

[AtariKid81]

Personally I think it should be how Tramiel would do it. It would be on the cheap so it would be something like "Gerry Cooney's Punch-Out".

[AtariKid81]

Thank you!! Your comment made me laugh til I cried! My first therapeutic laugh in a long, long time.

[MaximRecoil]

The arcade version of Punch-Out is meh while the NES version is sublime.

 

Let's see. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out has:

 

- Severely downgraded graphics

 

- Severely downgraded audio

 

- Severely downgraded animation

 

- 100% patterned opponents (thus 100% predictable, thus memorization is the only "skill" required to beat the game)

 

- Nonsensical "hearts" system (as if throwing a punch that gets blocked makes you more tired than throwing a punch that connects)

 

- Single use "stars" for KO punches, complete with end-of-round expiration dates

 

- Potential for tediously long multi-round fights requiring you to knock the opponent down up to 7 times before he stays down

 

- Only one or two versions of each opponent

 

- Farcically tiny 2' 6", 25 lb. midget as your playable character

 

- TV commercial-length intermission scenes that you are forced to sit though every time (watching 30 seconds' worth of a fat guy on a bike and a jogging midget in a pink sweat suit gets old fast)

 

I can't wrap my head around this statement. The arcade version was way ahead of it's time, the graphics and sound are top notch, and the (re)playability is off the charts.

 

The NES version is a low rent, corny-looking, midget player character-vs.-poorly drawn boxer graphics slopfest.

 

Exactly.

 

looks nice but I'd much rather have a solid boxer as the player myself.

 

There have been five video games in the Punch-Out!! series:

 

Punch-Out!! (Arcade,1984)

Super Punch-Out!! (Arcade, 1984)

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (NES, 1987)

Super Punch-Out!! (SNES, 1994)

Punch-Out!! (Wii, 2009)

 

And all of them have used a see-through playable character, except for the NES version. So why is the NES version the exception? Because of its weak hardware:

 

 

 

Genyo Takeda, who produced the Punch-Out!! arcade games, directed the NES versions. Because the NES was not as powerful as the arcade hardware, Takeda and his crew realized that it would be impossible for the NES port to faithfully emulate the arcade graphics. Instead of making the playable boxer wire-framed or transparent to see an opponent, they decided to shorten the playable boxer, so that players could easily see opponents over the large head room of the playable boxer.

 

It would be awesome to have the green wireframe boxer in a 7800 version of Punch-Out!!, which is something Nintendo would have done with the NES version if they hadn't found themselves in the unenviable position of trying to port a game from perhaps the most powerful arcade hardware of 1984 (not counting things like mainframes and super computers, the Punch-Out hardware was also perhaps the most powerful computer platform commonly available in 1984) to run-of-the-mill console hardware from 1983. The Punch-Out hardware used an NES CPU (2A03) just for one of its two sound chips; it had a 4 MHz Z80A as its main CPU. The 3-PCB boardset is bigger than an entire NES console:

 

 

The point is: an arcade Punch-Out!! port on the 7800 would be much more impressive than aiming for the lowly NES version ... and why not just play the NES version? On the other hand, there has never been an option to play a port of the arcade version on a home console, so that's a slot that's been waiting to be filled for a long time. It wouldn't benefit me, because I own a Super Punch-Out!! arcade machine (which is an improvement to the already excellent Punch-Out!!), and I also have two Punch-Out!! boardsets that I can swap into it whenever I want. However, I would still love to see a console port of arcade Punch-Out!! happen (one which attempts to be as faithful as possible); it would have been a dream come true when I was a kid. I had high hopes for the NES version when I first played it in '87, already being an arcade Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! veteran at the time, but it turned out to be a huge disappointment.

[Greg2600]

And yet the NES game was one of the most popular of that era. As kids we loved that game, although must of us had missed the arcade version. The arcade PO and Super PO are fantastic games, albeit far too difficult (eat them quarters!) to be translated to console as is. It's the Pac-Man syndrome, as unfaithful as the VCS version was to the arcade, it was still very playable and people enjoyed it. Anyway, I would agree the goal should be an arcade recreation not NES port. Frankly the 7800's large sprites make more sense for the arcade version.

[MaximRecoil]

And yet the NES game was one of the most popular of that era. As kids we loved that game, although must of us had missed the arcade version. The arcade PO and Super PO are fantastic games, albeit far too difficult (eat them quarters!) to be translated to console as is. It's the Pac-Man syndrome, as unfaithful as the VCS version was to the arcade, it was still very playable and people enjoyed it. Anyway, I would agree the goal should be an arcade recreation not NES port. Frankly the 7800's large sprites make more sense for the arcade version.

 

I like MTPO alright now. I own it, and have beaten it once just to get it out of the way (unlike arcade PO and SPO, if you don't play it for a while you have to rememorize the patterns to beat Mr. Sandman, Super Macho Man, and especially Mike Tyson). It is one of the better NES games, but from my perspective it doesn't hold a candle to arcade PO or SPO. When I was a kid, one of my biggest wishes was to be able to play arcade games at home, and in '87, my two favorite arcade games were SPO and PO, in that order. Prior to the NES, no arcade-to-console port was particularly accurate.

 

My cousin got an NES within a week of its US release in 1986 (we were 11 years old), and one of the games he bought with it was Excitebike. For the past year, I'd been playing VS. Excitebike at the arcade, so I was anxious to try it out on Mike's newfangled NES. When I saw that it was the exact same game; graphics, sound, gameplay, everything (aside from minor differences which you'd expect from a home version, such as no "insert coin" screen and whatnot), I was just blown away. At the time I had no idea that Nintendo's VS. UniSystem arcade hardware was simply repurposed NES/Famicom hardware in the first place, so based on Excitebike, I figured that the NES was the console which could finally bring perfect arcade ports home.

 

In '87, my friend Ryan, who knew I was good at PO and SPO at the arcade (I was the best SPO player in town; once I beat Lawton's high score, no one ever beat my score), told me he got a game called "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out" for his "Nintendo" (no one called it an "NES" back then), and invited me over after school to try it out. Well, when I saw and played that game, that certainly shattered the illusion of the all-powerful NES. The NES Double Dragon port was the next big disappointment (which was another game I played a lot of in the arcade).

 

I think the main reason that MTPO people don't like arcade PO and/or SPO when they finally try it, is because they expect to be automatically good at it, due to their MTPO skills, and when they find that their MTPO skills don't transfer well to the arcade versions, making them not much better at them than a total beginner, they don't like it.

Edited September 8, 2015 by MaximRecoil

[78001987]

And yet the NES game was one of the most popular of that era. As kids we loved that game, although must of us had missed the arcade version. The arcade PO and Super PO are fantastic games, albeit far too difficult (eat them quarters!) to be translated to console as is. It's the Pac-Man syndrome, as unfaithful as the VCS version was to the arcade, it was still very playable and people enjoyed it. Anyway, I would agree the goal should be an arcade recreation not NES port. Frankly the 7800's large sprites make more sense for the arcade version.

Britney Spears was incredibly popular for about a decade. Doesn't make her music any good though.

[spiffyone]

Britney Spears was incredibly popular for about a decade. Doesn't make her music any good though.

 

True. But then again Punch Out NES was a good game in and of itself. In comparison to the arcade original it may be lacking, but taken on its own it's a good game that is fondly remembered by many (will the same be said about Ms. Spears in a number of years? Considering she's not looked back fondly right now, I'd say no).