Analogue Nt Mini Noir NES and Vs. System Composite Output Comparison
7The Analogue Nt Mini Noir simulates the NES and Famicom. As a hardware FPGA console it can simulate, via jailbreak firmware, add-on hardware like the Famicom Disk System and variant hardware like the Nintendo Vs. System. The Nintendo Vs. System was a series of arcade machines which had the hardware of an NES with games converted to accept coin input. Usually the arcade versions would be more difficult than the home versions. Because the Vs. System games' ROM sizes were often larger than their cartridge equivalents, these arcade versions would have extra features like high score tables, extra music and graphics.
The NES's hardware generates NTSC composite video directly on its Picture Processing Unit (PPU). The Vs. System used a series of PPUs which generated analog RGB video. In order to prevent games from being easily interchangeable, Nintendo had different Vs. System PPU chips output different colors, have rearranged registers or tweak the inputs. The coin input is not present on a NES or Famicom (but the service button is and often can be used in place of the coin input). These protection features make it much more difficult to play these games as intended on a Nintendo home console, even with a flash cart. Without non-trivial hacking, most Vs. System games will show extremely wrong colors if they start at all. The Nt Mini Noir can play any known dumped Vs. System game that uses only one monitor and supports dip switches (see the jailbreak readme.txt for more details).
The Nt Mini Noir supports almost all the protection features of the Vs. System. It can handle palettes with scrambled colors, swapped/special PPU registers unusual input methods and mapper variants. It also supports all video types the Nt Mini Noir supports, HDMI, RGB, Component, S-Video, Composite. The Nt Mini Noir supports custom palettes for HDMI, RGB and Component video and all three derive their palette colors from a matrix of RGB triplet values. With Composite and S-Video, the Nt Mini Noir generates NTSC video directly like a NES' PPU does (Composite) or would have (S-Video if Nintendo did not combine chroma and luma in the PPU). The Dejitter box in Video - Extra Features should always be unchecked when using Composite video on the Nt Mini and the NES core.
Custom palettes do not work with the Nt Mini Noir's NES Core with composite or s-video in gameplay (except that the selected custom palette will display when the menu is on-screen) with one exception, Vs. System. With Vs. System games, the Nt Mini Noir converts the RGB-based color values of the PPU to composite or s-video. (The jailbreak readme is not correct on this point.) So when you view these games on a composite display, they will look a little different compared to a regular NES' display even once you account for the different palette colors. The games used here, while from a very limited of games, should be equivalent to the composite video output exhibited from a Famicom Titler, which also uses an RGB-based PPU.
In this video I will demonstrate this difference by playing the normal cartridge versions of Super Mario Bros., Castlevania and Urban Champion next to their Vs. System counterparts, all captured via the Nt Mini Noir's composite video output (built-in, not DAC). Here are the timestamps:
00:00 - Super Mario Bros.
01:01 - Vs. Super Mario Bros.
02:03 - Castlevania
03:35 - Vs. Castlevania
05:24 - Urban Champion
07:49 - Vs. Urban Champion
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