NES/Hardware information

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 Colors Available (four levels of gray, and four levels of each of 12 hues)
- 8 color emphasis modes
- Up to 25 colors on screen through normal means, though with special tricks, several hundred colors can be 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

See Also