Wanna predict how much the Switch will sell?

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Conina said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

I don't know why I keep hearing that the NES had "normal" hardware.  It had same processor as the Atari 2600.  Nintendo seems to do its best work when the hardware is underpowered.

 

The_Liquid_Laser said:

The NES had a graphics chip.  However, it had the same processor as the Atari 2600.  The NES is notorious for flicker and slowdown because its processor was so weak.

 

No, it hadn't. They have processors of the same CPU family, both based on the 6502... not the same CPU!

The Atari 2600 had a dumbed down 6507, clocked 1.19 MHz, with very limited memory access: the chip can only address 8 Kb memory and the cartridge slot limited it further down to addressable 4 KB.

The NES had a Ricoh 2A03, clocked 1.79 MHz.

You also can't just ignore the different co-processors and suggest that both devices had the same limitations, but Nintendo was better in optimization. 

Thank you so much for helping me with my argument, which is that the NES hardware was considered weak when it was released.  In Japan it was released in 1983, while the Atari 2600 was released in the US in 1977.  As your post points out the NES processor was only 50% more powerful.  But according to Moore's Law it should have been 1600% more powerful after 6 years.  50% vs. 1600%...hmm, the NES sure was weak.  And considering it was released in the US and the rest of the world even later than that, by that time the NES was considered really, really weak.  And yet, so many people remember this console so fondly in spite of it being so really, really weak.  Nintendo really does do their best work when using underpowered hardware.  They rebuilt the home console industry from scratch using that weak NES hardware. 

Thank you so much for pointing out these details, so that the rest of the forum knows just how really, really weak and underpowered the NES was when it was released.