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

More NES hardware information can be found at http://nesdevwiki.ath.cx/index.php/Main_Page