Micro Machines NES - Every Pixel as Intended
0Micro Machines is practically unique in the NES library because it uses a feature not found in all NES and Famicom PPUs. That feature is called $2004 OAMDATA Read, and it was added in 2C02 Revision G PPUs. If you have a system with a 2C02G or 2C02H PPU, then this is how Micro Machines will display. If you have a system with a 2C02E or earlier PPU, it will display like this : https://youtu.be/NWilHs5gcfE
On each side of the graphics, you will see border colors and graphical garbage that would be almost completely be hidden by the bezel of a CRT display. Almost no emulator will show it and these horizontal border colors are only visible with an NTSC PPU. My capture card captures whatever color it can detect and I decided not to crop this border out. Any top and bottom borders are present because the programmer decided not to draw tiles on those lines, some of them but not all would be hidden by the CRT bezel.
For many years, emulators did not display the menus in Micro Machines correctly, and even now some of them cheat to get them to appear correctly. Proper emulation requires proper timing for the $2004 OAM Data read and other tricks Micro Machines pulls off. I captured this video with an AV Famicom. Note the color of the first vertical column of pixels. This is the pulse signal, which is the beginning of the color display on the NTSC NES.
Other Videos By Nerdly Pleasures
Other Statistics
Micro Machines Statistics For Nerdly Pleasures
At present, Nerdly Pleasures has 592 views spread across 2 videos for Micro Machines, and less than an hour worth of Micro Machines videos were uploaded to his channel. This makes up less than 0.15% of the total overall content on Nerdly Pleasures's YouTube channel.