Very little is wrong in that article. Perhaps what you feel is similar to what one feels when reading a different translation of a familiar work, such as having memorized a beloved scripture in Thomas Nelson's
New King James Version and then looking it up in Watch Tower's
New World Translation. "'And the Word was
a god?'
Seriously?"
References to "K" and "megs" in
Nintendo Power are to kilobits and megabits, the "4" in 29F040. The "256 x 64 K" notation appears to refer to 256 Kbit PRG and 64 Kbit CHR, as seen on NROM-256.
NP wrote:
The program ROM's maximum memory size was 256 K and Character ROM's max memory was 64 K
NP wrote:
one K equals 1024 bits, so 256K is a bit larger than 256,000 bits.
So yes, the MMC5's maximum PRG size is 8 Mbit, which matches the 1024 KiB figure from
the wiki.
NP wrote:
the MMC3 allows some great innovations like the split screen scrolling in Super Mario Bros. 3 The scoreboard at the bottom of the picture is actually a second screen which stay put, even as Mario sprints from left to right. It's made possible by a timer function that was specially built into the MMC3.
This refers to what we call the "scanline counter", which allows placing a status bar at the bottom without worrying about making sure something on that line of the playfield is solid for sprite 0 to hit, without having to manually count the cycles that various routines use (like Gradius does), and without making the DMC unavailable for sampled sound effects (like Time Lord does). Incidentally, this and the $C000-$DFFF bank of the MMC3 may be part of why some news reports claimed that SMB3 had a "special chip" for sampled drums.
NP wrote:
Scrolling at an angle is also possible as seen in NES Play Action Football.
This is BS. True, T*SROM was the first board to support diagonal mirroring, but I've read that all it was ever used for was the single-screen mirroring that the NES has had since the days of A*ROM and MMC1.
NP wrote:
To see how color definition is improved in games like Castlevania III, Study the color area illustration above.
In the original, this was an illustration of 16x16 pixel "color areas" (what we call attribute areas) for most mappers and 8x8 pixel "color areas" (what we call ExGrafix) for MMC5. But unlike Koei games, CV3 doesn't really use ExGrafix; instead, it uses MMC5 because it was cheaper for Konami than getting a VRC series mapper certified by NOA. The graphical detail of CV3 was due to Konami artists having cut their teeth on the limitations of the TI VDPs in the MSX and MSX2 computers.
I seem to remember that the "Compression" graphic was a bunch of tetrominoes arranged with a nice
rectum ready for an I tetromino to complete several lines (captioned "Compressed"), next to what appears to be NovaYoshi's little sister playing Tetris (captioned "Uncompressed").
NP wrote:
What's in the new Power Data Box? The first number is program memory size, the second shows character memory size. The M stands for Megabits. The type of MMC used and the size of the Work RAM are also shown.
So the "Power Data Box" contained a subset of the data shown on a game's page in BootGod's NesCartDB: PRG ROM size, CHR ROM size, mapper, and PRG RAM size.
It mentions "dual inline" mask ROMs used in NES Game Paks and "flatpack" ROMs used in Game Boy Game Paks. Those appear to be
DIP and
TQFP respectively.
And the end appears to agree with what several forum regulars have been saying all along:
NP wrote:
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.