C64 Vs. NES

the Commodore 64 versus the NES how do they compare as games machines you might already have an idea which system you think is best and I'm probably not going to change your mind or even try to but I might be able to tell you something about how both machines are different and their strengths and weaknesses so in the brown Corner the Commodore 64 the absolute biggest 8bit computer undoubtedly possibly the biggest selling sing s LE model of computer ever launched in August 1982 and yes it's not a console it's a computer most versions of it anyway but games were at least 11 12ths of this machine's reasons to be popular no one was buying this for word processing were they okay well some people did but it is very games heavy and in the originally sort of cream and burgundy Corner than the mostly gray Corner appearing less than a year later later the NES or family computer as it was in Japan an actual console through and through on apologetically so the biggest 8bit console well maybe not actually if we're going to include handheld the Game Boy could take that Crown in legitimate sales anyway but definitely the biggest console of its day and starting out by comparing some big iconic games on the two side by side well the NES seems to come out on top taking strictly like for like almost every time this probably won't be a big surprise for many people watching this video but yes the NES version of Contra looks and plays so much better than what was released as graor on the c64 gradius AKA Nemesis another game with a different name in Europe is the same story the NES comes out on top it's more colorful it's more detailed it's just much more like the arcade game it was based on we were never going to see official ports of some big Nintendo games but staying with Konami we do get Castlevania virtually NES royalty but the Commodore 64 version is just not as good that's the only way I can describe it it just doesn't look sound or play as well as the original and part of this has to be about budget most c64 games not all but most c64 games were made by smaller teams working on tighter deadlines aiming for a smaller lower value market big names on the NES like Konami Capcom and Nintendo themselves of course were Global industry Giants but a lot of c64 software was more of a Sho string thing but that doesn't always mean lower quality of course and the Commodore 64 has some tricks up its SL leave I'm sure hardcore fans of the system will already be complaining that I've stacked the deck with my game choices but this isn't going to be a purely subjective thing anyway which system has the best games we need to get more into the technology one of the first things you might notice about the c64 versus the NES is the huge border that every c64 game seems to have around the screen this is just as true on the real Hardware even running on a CRT NES games fill the whole screen c64 games don't why is that is the c64 lower resolution just less detailed well not necessarily the c64's high resolution mode actually has more pixels on screen than the NES okay most c64 games do use its low resolution mode but even that has more detail than the Game Boy and Game Boy Color it just doesn't fill the screen and the pixels are quite wide adding to the blocky look there are some complex technical reasons that lie behind this but ultimately to boil it down it was cheaper and simpler to have big borders and chunky pixels and commodore didn't prioritize doing it any other way to be fair this border isn't always totally dead space but most of the time there's not much happening color is the other thing you might notice and yes the c64 has less of it 16 colors in total and Earth Tones feature prominently apparently commodore's Engineers had some free choice over the specific colors that they could use and they just picked Shades they liked murky ornal Hues really did it for them clearly but all of these can be on screen at once the NES on the other hand has 54 colors roughly some shades are very close and it can display 25 of them on screen at once NES tones are a bit less agricultural though many are quite pale but still NES games just look more colorful for some purposes the c64's pallette might be better you might like it more even but most of the time there's just less to work with so the screen size the resolution the color these three facts are probably what swing it for most people if you came to this thinking c64 games don't look as good this is probably why there is more to this story though and there are some ways that the c64 can shine a bit brighter than the NES so let's talk about how the graphics are actually created by the machine's Graphics chips like all moving images video game Graphics are made up of a series of static frames played at high speed to give the impression of motion on more modern systems each of these frames is constructed in a frame buffer an area of dedicated memory where every element of the graphics can be put together only being it cent off to be displayed once it's complete right now we're looking at the frame buffer of the PlayStation Portable Running Ridge Racer in super slow motion and you can see each part of every frame being drawn it just so happens that the PSP emulator ppssppp has a feature that lets you look into the frame buffer very easily but all modern game systems work in basically the same way it doesn't matter whether the game is 3D like Ridge Racer or 2D like ultimate Ghosts and Goblins the scene is constructed first in any order and then sent off to the LCD screen or TV or monitor or whatever when it's done but both the NES and the c64 don't work like that you see when these machines were built memory was much more expensive and it was just too complex and too costly to do it that way instead the graphics are made from a sort of recipe a list of instructions and the Graphics chip in both these machines creates the graphics line by line just in time for them to be displayed this requires less memory and less costly silicon to achieve with the NES all the graphics are made up out of a relatively small set of tiles or characters or patterns of dots 8 by8 blocks of pixels stored in their own memory chip in the cartridge these come in two layers the background and the sprad rights objects that move independently of the background the NES is recipe for each frame is really just a list of what Graphics tile is where on the screen and what colors it uses this is small enough to fit into the NES 2 and a bit kilobytes of video RAM and when the frame is drawn the graphics chip goes through every line checking what tile blocks are there and sending out the appropriate pattern of pixels the way these tail based Graphics work make it really really good at two-dimensional Sprite based games scrolling shootter Ms top- down RPGs and most of all Platformers the meat of 1980s gaming better than any home system that came before it really computer or console and quite a lot that came after its design is also relatively straightforward it was pretty easy for developers to get good results in these types of games but the downside is the any s isn't very flexible outside of its Graphics chips fixed functions it struggles it's hard to do anything that doesn't fit neatly into a fixed number of character blocks the c64 though is a bit different its recipe to construct Graphics Isn't So rigid you can absolutely do tail based or character based Graphics similar to the NES but it also has a bit map mode too this is closer to the frame buffer model where you don't need to fit everything into a set of Tails but allows each pixel on the screen to be controlled individually with Sprites as well if you like there's some restrictions on color but you aren't nearly so limited in what you can draw on the screen and that's only the beginning there are many different Graphics modes or recipes some created intentionally by those brown loving Commodore Engineers but many more discovered or invented by Pro programmers over the years the Commodore 64 has much more RAM than the NES and the way that the CPU and the video chip the Vic 2 interact with that Ram allows for a lot of possibilities a game like Elite is a great example of why bitmap mode Graphics can be so useful it allows for simple but still quite effective 3D Graphics to be drawn something basically impossible with tile based Graphics but hold on there is an NES version of elite doesn't that show that the NES is just as capable of a game like this could there be any better proof well this is one of those cases where the exception proves the rule because this required an extra 8 kiloby of ram built into the cartridge and some very tricky programming to make it work even then the difficulty of doing this is probably a big part of why this was only ever attempted once it is the only game of its type on the NES but the c64 has many many games with 3D Graphics stunt car racer is one of the absolute best incredible that it runs so smoothly but far from the only one set in a 3D environment actually there's lots of games with experimental graphics on the c64 not just polygonal 3D and most of them would be very hard to recreate on the NES if possible at all but this flexibility can also apply to 2D games as well the kind of thing that the NES really excels at but the c64 can do too and this is why I'm sure many c64 fans were grumbling at the games I compared side by side at the start so let's look at some games that do better even if there's no direct equivalent on both machines Batman Return of the Joker is particularly admiring on the NES partly because of its backgrounds that simulate true two layer parallx scrolling with the clouds seeming to move behind the buildings in this opening level this is something the NES with its single background layer shouldn't be able to do this and the few other games that do this sort of effect on the NES use extra circuitry in the cartridge to help pull it off and even then it uses up a lot of expensive rum space but on the Commodore 64 there is quite a lot of games that do do extremely sophisticated Parallax effects phobia here is a great example again this is a simulated two- layer background the Commodore 64 doesn't have that capability built in but it's not just limited to a couple of spots like it is in Batman but the effect appears all over the game enforcer by c64 Legend Manfred Trends goes hard with this too maybe even more impressive than phobia and it's not easy to pull these effects off on the Commodore 64 but it is much easier than on the NES the c64's makeup has much more room for software rendering where you can right code to simulate two background layers like this without relying on extra circuitry Metal Storm is another NES game with some neat Parallax effects this time what appears to be quite a complex background texture beneath the the foreground it looks great almost like what you'd see on a 16bit system that has the capabilities for multiple backgrounds built in the c64 can top this though gry storm manages not just a texture but a whole background scene a different one in every level you might be able to do the same thing on the NES but no one has yet it would certainly be more difficult to pull off and require a lot more tradeoffs Metal Storm also manages a par background on a four-way scrolling section going not just left or right but up and down too though movement is kind of restricted and the scenery isn't very complex the c64 can't up that though definitely Terin 2 has this huge sprawling level with full freedom of movement lots of different scenery and even some destructible elements this level ends with something else the NES would be hard pressed to match to this huge bigger than the screen boss Sweeping in in fact one great big Sprite the NES just can't handle a Sprite this big it certainly can't draw such a large object and have the player Sprite and all the missiles as well it would be extremely difficult bordering on impossible to recreate this scene on the NES you might have seen big bosses in some games but they always appear against a blank background or they're completely static they can't do it quite like this the exact details are pretty thorny but in some key ways the c64 has better Sprite capabilities than the NES it can cover a larger area of the screen with moving objects very telling that the NES game super turken programmed by the same Manfred trends that did turkin 2 on the c64 is missing many of the effects that the original version has there's a some Parallax backgrounds not nearly as many and the bosses are much smaller and very flickery the side effect of trying to overcome the lack of Sprites on the NES but one thing that Turin 2 on the c64 is missing but most other games have is music Monty On The Run came out just two months before Super Mario Brothers and maybe it's not had quite the same pan Global impact but the music my God the music by Rob hubber is a killer to my is so much better subjectively but also may be more sophisticated technically too the NES soundship does have more channels five in total you can play more things at once but the c64's Sid chips three channels have far broader capabilities it's got more complex waveforms with analog filters volume envelopes ring modulators stuff that puts it closer to a synthesizer than a home computer sound chip with some clever programming you can even let it have more channels and Playback samples in very high quality Brad Racer 2 on the NES is a fine game that looks really great for an 8 bit arcade racer but the soundtrack is well it's nothing compared to outrun Europa on the c64 not remotely a better game in any other way but a really stunning tune this time from Dutch composer your own tell there's inevitably some subjectivity in determining which system has the best sound but it's hard to ignore the fact that the c64 has more available in its sound toolkit okay some Japanese NES games had extra sound capabilities through extra sound chips in the cartridge but even then there's not many NES games that can match the Toral variety of the c64 a platform where sampled sound of various kinds seems to be much more common and I'm sure the main reason for that is storage space was always at a premium on NES games the more ROM your game takes the more expensive the cartridges meaning developers were Keen to keep games small the biggest Western release was Kirby's Adventure at 768 kiloby but most games were way less than this although the c64 briefly flirted with cartridges that was not the main storage medium for most of its life yes cassette or disc was the medium of choice both of which were relatively cheap for larger amounts of data and you can save on them too this could mean more room for frivolities like sampled sound title screens and animated intros but it could also mean larger games as well the NES did have some in-depth Adventure titles and strategy games but they are way more common on the c64 and it's simple economics that dick that even if your game requires multiple discs it's going to be cheaper than a cartridge to make encouraging more Publishers to take a risk on storage heavy games with all this said though there's some facts you just can't get around there's nothing on the c64 quite like Super Mario Brothers 3 for example there may be games you personally enjoy more of course but there's no old school platform game with quite the same package there is Mayhem in Monsterland absolutely a work of art with graphical touches you won't see in the ness's Mushroom Kingdom but it is unavoidably a bit less vibrant than the best games on the NES Sam's journey is a modern Homebrew game in the same vein again it looks amazing but maybe not quite as amazing as something like Kirby's Adventure though the c64 sound maybe wins here again not that this is a bad game at all it's great but again it's less colorful the pixels are chunkier the screen is smaller those c64 characteristics that we've already talked about another comparison that is especially apt is this unsurprisingly unofficial Super Mario Brothers conversion brilliantly executed but you can still see it's a bit of a downgrade Super Mario Brothers on the NES doesn't use any sort of mappa or enhancement chip either as they're sometimes called nearly every game released on the NES after about 1985 used something like this in part to increase storage capabilities but also to add some other features to how these actually worked is a complex topic but as you can see even without any extra help the NES base specs make for nicer looking games all three of these games are exceptional to Mayhem and Monsterland is the oldest of them and that came out in 1992 one of the very last commercial games for the c64 to get Graphics even this close to the NES requires complex and tricky techniques using knowledge hard one over years of coders pushing the limits the NES does this stuff better with much less of a fight and many of its greatest moments have never been quite matched on the 664 on the other hand though if you like let the c64 be the c64 and play to its strength there are many many games that you're unlikely to see on the NES things that were created especially for the system rather than just being ports of popular games from elsewhere shine particularly well so here is the uncontroversial equivocal conclusion you can't beat the NES at its own game but the c64 is more flexible architect can do NES stuff pretty decently in the right hands and can cook up some moments the NES would be hard pressed to match as well all you needed to start making Commodore 64 games was a Commodore 64 anyone could do it you could program the machine on the machine contrast this with the NES where Nintendo kept things locked down tightly and development was technically much more difficult there were around, 100 games released for the NES but well no one knows how many c64 games there are in total 10,000 easily maybe more maybe many more it had much much lower barriers to entry the c64 has loads of games that would just never make it to any console let alone the NES offbeat attempts to do something different sometimes but also games that just work way better on a computer the NES though had by the standards of the time big budget Productions by the biggest players in the industry giving us epics like the ninja guidance series or the Mega Man games so which is best depends on what you like both machines came out at about the same time both machines were designed to have consumer friendly prices but they made at different tradeoffs and got different results so this is the end thank you once again to my wonderful patreons and hey if you want to join them that would be smashing there is a link below it does help me out a lot and I will say goodbye thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 59,063

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Id: Lu3WEftsbqk

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023