Does the rumor that said that MMC means Multi Memory Controller is true ?
I don't think so, because the appelation "Multi Memory" doesn't seems much professional, and is ridiculous for people with knownledge in electronics, and the second reason that makes me think it's wrong is the fact that there was similar chip series in Game Boy cartridges called MBC. Multi Beer Controller, yeah ?
Also MMC comes from the inscription on theese chips, and it is written nothing else than "MMC".
MBC (GameBoy) stands for Memory Bank Controller.
MMC stands for Multiple Memory Controller (as far as I know).
Some acronyms from those days seem kind of odd. PPU instead of GPU? EOR instead of XOR? How about the "Picture Address Register" (PAR), the official name for the register to hold the tile number fetched from name tables during rendering (according to one doc I read, anyway).
Bregalad wrote:
Does the rumor that said that MMC means Multi Memory Controller is true ?
I don't think so, because the appelation "Multi Memory" doesn't seems much professional, and is ridiculous for people with knownledge in electronics, and the second reason that makes me think it's wrong is the fact that there was similar chip series in Game Boy cartridges called MBC. Multi Beer Controller, yeah ?
Also MMC comes from the inscription on theese chips, and it is written nothing else than "MMC".
If someone has old copies of nintendo power they wrote an article about MMC's before the SNES came out, I think it was around the time of a big gaming convention like E3 or a competition. The Acronym MMC should be expanded there.
I always assumed that the "MM" part stood for "Memory Mapper", as we call this stuff mappers. But I don't really know anything about this kind of thing!
I guess Nintendo had very different names for their stuff than the names we use today... Has any official Nintendo document ever reached the hands of hobbist programmers? I never heard of such a thing...
I have the issue of Nintendo Power. It's vol 20, and the article begins on pg. 28. MMC is expanded as "Memory Management Controller."
oh wow i didn't think it was that early in Nintendo Power history that they did it.
cool
Thanks for clearings things out, Memory Management Controller sounds much less stupid than "Multi Memory Controller".
Yeah, effectively, pretty much each name assigned to reverse enginered stuff has be asigned differently as their real Nintendo name, or am I wrong ?
Bregalad wrote:
effectively, pretty much each name assigned to reverse enginered stuff has be asigned differently as their real Nintendo name, or am I wrong ?
Trade secret: Only if the name isn't publicly known. For instance, using names of I/O registers taken from the official trade-secreted header file might be a bad idea because it contributes to damages against Nintendo, but once it's public (in this case as part of "Why Your Game Paks Never Forget" in
NP #20), it's no longer subject to trade secret law.
Trademark: Unless you're using a protected mark as part of the name of your product or service, you can disclaim sponsorship and endorsement and then claim
nominative use as a defense.
Bregalad wrote:
Does the rumor that said that MMC means Multi Memory Controller is true ?
I don't think so, because the appelation "Multi Memory" doesn't seems much professional, and is ridiculous for people with knownledge in electronics, and the second reason that makes me think it's wrong is the fact that there was similar chip series in Game Boy cartridges called MBC. Multi Beer Controller, yeah ?
Also MMC comes from the inscription on theese chips, and it is written nothing else than "MMC".
Nintendo magazine (@199X) published a story that revealed some of the MMC5s cababilities, it was referred as "Multi Memory Chip"
Well, that's pretty confusing. Are you sure that multi-memory-chip doesn mean that a MMC5 game can have multiple SRAM chips ?
Anyone else think perhaps that memory management controller is the official name (this is what I always thought it was) whereas multi memory controller is what some game journalist recalled MMC stood for? I'd go with the patent name if someone can find it.
Bregalad wrote:
Well, that's pretty confusing. Are you sure that multi-memory-chip doesn mean that a MMC5 game can have multiple SRAM chips ?
Uhh, CHR ROM and PRG ROM don't count as "multi memory"?
I always understood MMC to mean "multi memory mapper"... multi 'cause it controls both PRG ROM and CHR ROM at the same time generally. Every MMC controls both at once. Other mappers like UNROM and such aren't MMC's technically, using this definition, since they only control either PRG or CHR.
I found a transcription of "Why Your Game Paks Never Forget"
here, but it was in MS Works format. I used frhed, Windows 2000 Notepad, and MS-DOS Editor to get it into a format that anyone on the internets can read.
Why Your Game Paks Never Forget -- for best results use Times New Roman
Quote:
As you've seen, Game Paks are not all created equal. Some have special built-in features that allow greater variety in game design. But the measure of any great game is not memory size of whether it uses a MMC1 or MMC5. The real test is whether or not it's fun to play. Dr.Mario, a 256 K x 256 K game, requires less memory than many other new games. But once you start playing, it's almost impossible to stop. Remember, it's the stuff that memory is made of that counts.
Never were truer words spoken, after all Heroes of the Lance was blessed with battery backed S-RAM over many games far more deserving, but which would you rather play?