All are from the same seller. Perhaps these contain some still "unknown" information yet. The seller also has various service stations (but at a much higher price of course.)
NES:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0071027294
SNES:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0071027301
GB:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0071027310
Someone buy it and I will be your slave!
Seriously! We must get our hands on a copy of one of those. Is it
the official manual that developers were sent? Does it include cycle accuracy for things like PPU fetches?
If you buy it (I may) then we must turn it into a bunch of PDF's!
Or are they already on the web anyway?
damn it. why does these things allways turn up when I'm out of money.
dXtr wrote:
damn it. why does these things allways turn up when I'm out of money.
You've hit the nail on the head there. I do have the idea that if I don't purchase it, then maybe someone else on the forum would, and put it on the web. The only reservation that I have is, is the manual any better than what we've got already?
"Service manual" is probably just for repair techs, who would treat each IC as a black box.
tepples wrote:
"Service manual" is probably just for repair techs, who would treat each IC as a black box.
So it's nothing more than a manual to fix your NES?
Yup, exactly. It's not the official development manual, doesn't come close to it really. It does contain schematics of the consoles and peripherals and does reveal trade names however which I thought might be interesting/useful to some.
WedNESday wrote:
tepples wrote:
"Service manual" is probably just for repair techs, who would treat each IC as a black box.
So it's nothing more than a manual to fix your NES?
yupp. but still interesting I think
would love to get my hands on the snes version.
1) Even if these were official developer documentation, they would not accurately cover every detail of hardware, both because it's irrelevant to most developers and because it will contain errors even if included. Yes, the only truely accurate reference is a NES itself; everything else is rumor.
2) Regardless of their content, they could not be legally put on the web without permission of the copyright holder (most likely, Nintendo).
3) Reading these kinds of things can increase your legal exposure, in case you read proprietary information and names of things and leak this into your code and descriptions. It's best to do clean-room reverse-engineering.
Well, I'm dissapointed. However, I don't agree with what blargg has said, not that I'm saying it isn't true, I just don't care about all that legal stuff about not being able to buy it. Btw what's to stop Nintendo from buying it on ebay to stop us from seeing it?
- I wonder if a detailed
low-level PPU operation document would make sense for the game companies, or programmers... as explaining the tedious tile fetching sequence.
Fx3 wrote:
- I wonder if a detailed
low-level PPU operation document would make sense for the game companies, or programmers... as explaining the tedious tile fetching sequence.
Tedious? It's 4 fetches repeated 32 times.
The official hardware documentation will not even approach the level of detail that some of the more recent (and past) reverse-engineering efforts have yielded. As blargg says, this kind of information would not be necessary for the NES engineer.
baisoku wrote:
The official hardware documentation will not even approach the level of detail that some of the more recent (and past) reverse-engineering efforts have yielded. As blargg says, this kind of information would not be necessary for the NES engineer.
Are you sure about that? You wouldn't know until you actually read the document. Plus it would be nice to have anyway.
I am not sure, as i haven't seen it, but i can make an educated guess based on what i have seen. 8 years ago, the information would have been valuable. Not so much today.
WedNESday wrote:
Fx3 wrote:
- I wonder if a detailed
low-level PPU operation document would make sense for the game companies, or programmers... as explaining the tedious tile fetching sequence.
Tedious? It's 4 fetches repeated 32 times.
- I said
low-level, or did you forget
this?
Fx3 wrote:
WedNESday wrote:
Fx3 wrote:
- I wonder if a detailed
low-level PPU operation document would make sense for the game companies, or programmers... as explaining the tedious tile fetching sequence.
Tedious? It's 4 fetches repeated 32 times.
- I said
low-level, or did you forget
this?
Oh dear. Now if I started to act like that, people would be rioting in the streets. I wasn't having a go at you or anything, and I believe that the questions asked in that post are fair and not newbie.
You're misunderstanding the things... just read the quotes, needless to say anything else...
Disch wrote:
I don't think anyone knows for sure as it's extremely difficult to test this (the PPU is just clocked too fast for the CPU to reliably land between those fetches). This is one of those trifling things that I wouldn't worry about too much (or even at all) -- as a PPU address change mid-scanline will cause a bit of distortion anyway -- failing to emulate this 100% accurately will result in no worse than 8 pixels of miscoloration that won't be humanly noticable.
blargg wrote:
This is getting into emulation accuracy areas that are absurd to emulate, but it really might matter if you're turning rendering on and off at various points in a scanline. Good luck motivating anyone to run tests on a NES to determine and verify this kind of detail.
- In case you still didn't get: I
dunno there's an official doc that would cover such thing (low-level description) to a game developer. A couple of NES games have problems... because they didn't read "d4 m4nu4l5"?
I wouldn't be surprised if there were no documentation of all the NES PPU quirks and fine points, not in Nintendo's possession nor otherwise. Maybe a few engineers who made the PPU were aware of some of them as they designed it, but then forgot later as they were so obscure. Many aspects just occur based on the design they chose in order to meet the explicit requirements, and programmers try to avoid straying outside the well-defined aspects.
I always thought it was interesting how Star Tropics 2 uses the $4011 reg to control the triangle volume. I just wonder if there's obscure details like that in the programmer docs, or just in some kind of notes we'll never see.
But yeah, I think all of us here collectively know more about the NES chips than probably the individuals who designed the things, heh.
But for the service manual, there should be plenty more of those around. Nintendo Service Centers used to be everywhere, in big department stores and stuff.