Nintendo NES-001 User Guide - Page 26

4 - Game Hardware 4.1 Cartridges NES games came on cartridges known as a Game Pak. The game itself was stored on ROM chips inside the cartridge. Some cartridges also featured RAM, powered by a battery, in order to allow games to be saved. Figure 4-1. Ys cartridge for the Famicom compared to Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt cartridge for the NES [28]. Figure 4-1 shows the difference between cartridges for the Famicom and NES. Nintendo designed a basic cartridge for the Famicom, as shown top in figure 4-1, but other developers designed their own cartridges with a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. With the NES, Nintendo produced the cartridges to a standard design, which is shown bottom in figure 4-1. Although the NES cartridge is bigger, much of it is just wasted space. Famicom cartridges had a 60-pin connection while NES cartridges had a 72-pin connection, making the two formats incompatible without an adapter [28]. Figure 4-2 shows the inside of a NES, Figure 4-2. Inside the NES, the 72-pin connector is indicated by the red line [36]. looking at the bottom of the motherboard. The red line indicates the 72-pin connector to which cartridges connect. Figure 4-3 shows a cartridge being used with the original, front-loading, version of the NES. Figure 4-4 shows the inside of a NES cartridge. The chip on the left is the CHR-ROM and contains the pattern tables, the graphics data for the game. The chip on the right is the PRGROM and contains the program code for the game. 26