Man so the Famicom I got from ebay a year or two ago was modded to have regular A/V cables which I really loved but Quincy chewed off the end of one of them (which I will eventually repair but I don't have the stuff I need and am lazy) and so I was forced to use the RF adapter from my old NES and it makes the games SO MUCH COOLER to play because it's a lot fuzzier and the quality sometimes shifts if the cable jiggles a little and it just adds this whole other dimension that was seriously lacking due to me playing on a newschool HDTV.
the original NES was really weird because certain games did all this bizarre stuff like they had to time the game to 60 hz, and since the NES didn't draw the last 16 lines of resolution or so all code was executed during those last 16 lines of the TV screen being drawn. Except for special code/well-programmed games that could take advantage of the time between drawing each scanline. And this is how you got special effects like wavy/ripply effect because the game would literally scroll the screen inbetween lines of resolution on the TV. Also in games like Double Dragon where the level moves but your lifebar/etc. on the bottom stays still, there is actually a scanline trick they had to do even just to make the bottom of the screen stand still. And on a real NES I think there were problems and you'd get this rainbow gunk/jerky movement right before the status window?
Edit: It might've been not ALL CODE needs to be done at that time, but all graphic changes like moving sprites around had to be done during those last 16 lines or the game would glitch up. I think this is why games like Double Dragon just have slowdown/skipped frames all the time because they decided to skip frames so they could do more complicated game engine/AI/graphic stuff. I was kind of hoping people would overclock certain games/do a ROM hack for popular games that had horrible slowdown that was built-in to the game itself (like Goldeneye etc. would've been nice too)
I remember Castlevania III had to do some ridiculous coding just to make that fog effect in level 2/3? Because it was a ripple effect but while the game was actually running too. Supposedly Castlevania III was the most hardcore NES game that ever got released, the Japanese version had an FM synthesis chip and crap (5 channels of sound instead of just 3 zomg)
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