Wanna predict how much the Switch will sell?

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Conina said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

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. 

Moore's law ain't about clock rates and only indirectly about performance... but I know what you mean.

Of course there were "next-gen" CPUs already available, f.e. the Motorola 68000 was released in 1979. But it took years to get these technologies into consumer products back then, especially into home consoles which were considered as toys.

The 68000 was used exclusively in expensive workstations the first years (Sun, SGI, HP, Apollo), then it trickled down into cheaper products: into the $2500 Macintosh in 1984, then into the $1300 Amiga 1000 and into the $800 Atari ST in 1985, then into the $700 Amiga 500 in 1987 and finally into the $189 SEGA Genesis in 1988/89. So it took almost a decade to reach consumer products below $500.

Nobody would have expected such a CPU in a $179 console in 1983 and Nintendo would have been crazy to plan with that in 1980 - 1982.

So which other options than a modified 6502 did they have in the planning phase of the NES? The Z80 and the intel 8085 were't that much faster (and a lot more expensive).

I think you are agreeing with me while trying to sound disagreeable.  You state in this post that there were more expensive options, but they weren't a good value.  Do you know what usually is a good value?  The cheap option.  Nintendo chose to go with the "good value".  They didn't go with an expensive high end processor.


"Original plans called for an advanced 16-bit system which would function as a full-fledged computer with a keyboard and floppy disk drive, but Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi rejected this and instead decided to go for a cheaper, more conventional cartridge-based game console as he believed that features such as keyboards and disks were intimidating to non-technophiles."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System

If you do just a little research into the history of the NES, you'll see that they chose to go with a cheap system.  Famicom = Family computer.  Consoles didn't exist with the Famicom/NES was released in either Japan or the US.  The standard was the computer.  Yamauchi chose to go with a cheap "family computer".  It was far cheaper than other "computers" at the time. 

However, even if you compare the NES to the Atari 2600, it was considered cheap.  The Atari 2600 launched at a price of $199.  When the NES was first released as a basic set it was only $89.  Of course that was in 1987, but that was also the year that NES sales really got going.  (It had a limited US release in both 1985 and 1986.)

Any way you cut it the Famicom/NES was considered cheap.  It was cheap in Japan compared to other computers.  It was cheap in the US compared to the Amiga (it's main competitor).  It was cheap compared to the original Atari 2600 price once ROB and Gyromite were taken out (which didn't take long).  People at the time considered it cheap.