Jeremy Parish Looks At Joy Van’s Metal Fighter

Jeremy Parish’s NES Works is currently grinding through infamous unlicensed NES publisher Color Dreams, and his most recent video (17 minutes)looks at Metal Fighter, which originally came from Taiwan. As such it isn’t really great, but it’s still better, more technically polished at least, than Color Dreams’ in-house developed products. I am left to muse on why unlicensed, and even some licensed Western-made NES titles, are so badly implemented. I refuse to chalk it up merely to lol baddevs. The NES is harder to develop for than the home computer systems that many programmers started with. Many personal microcomputers had a design that mapped the video chip’s graphics into the CPU’s address space to make it easy to manipulate, but on the Famicom/NES, unless (I think) the mapper had some special magic in it, the PPU had its own memory that the CPU could only adjust during a certain time each frame. How would programmers figure out this method of coding for the NES if they didn’t have…

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