[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES for short) (also known as Family Computer or “Famicom” in Japan or “Dendy” in the former Soviet Union) was a very famous third generation (8-bit) in the second half of the eighties with several notable games.

Being a 8-bit, comparatively simple (even when taking into the different Multi Memory Controllers I’ll later elaborate on) game console, not very powerful hardware like current Windows Mobile devices can easily run NES games at their original speed, including music. In this roundup and tutorial, I elaborate on how this can be done. In addition, I publish a reliable, dependable (I've made all the tests MYSELF and don't rely on any other, in most cases, unreliable source) compatibility list with many-many famous titles.

As with my previous emulation-related articles (see the reader feedback I’ve received to my, say, SNES emulation article), it was because of many reasons that made me publish this roundup:

There are absolutely no comparative, let alone up-to-date roundups on emulating this platform.

There are a LOT of apps to choose from (see Michu's related, excellent link / archive repository HERE), which really makes a newbie cry, given that there has been almost no comparative information on these titles on the Internet.

Users’ reports you can run into in different Windows Mobile forums are really unreliable. So are the advertisements of some software developers ;-) (never EVER believe any advertisement without reading an unbiased expert’s report / evaluation!)

While, technically, NES is pretty much inferior to fourth generation (16-bit) and fifth generation(32/64-bit) consoles released later (fourth-generation consoles - and even some of the fifth-generation ones; namely, Playstation - are very easy to emulate on Windows Mobile), the platform still has a lot of titles worth playing. For example, it was on the NES that the Final Fantasy, the Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest) and the Zelda series debuted. These titles (the first three Final Fantasy and first four Dragon Warrior titles) are not necessarily available on later, technically more advanced and/or, under Windows Mobile, easily / efficiently emulated platforms (except for the Sony PSX re-releases of the Final Fantasy titles, which are perfectly playable even under the current version of the Windows mobile PlayStation emulator).

As they’re very good RPG’s, if you are into the genre, you may definitely want to check them out. The same stands for some other titles like Elite (which doesn’t have a really non-beta WM version, as is also explained in the Bible of Windows Mobile Games – Part I) and Prince of Persia, which has a pretty good NES version (Windows Mobile still lacks a decent port of this title; it’s only recently that a port has been announced and an early alpha released by Mobirate but it’s still far from being perfect).

Finally, the generic games (which I and Allen Gall have cleaned up last year - after that, we haven't received any criticism) and, particularly, the Emulators category received so much negative criticism (see for example THIS) before my starting to completely update & rework the annual Best Software Awards at Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine that I found it absolutely necessary, now that I’ve been appointed the Awards Nomination Manager, to, finally, show the whole world the right person (someone that REALLY knows what he’s doing and REALLY knows everything about the available software titles for Windows Mobile) was chosen for this task ;).

Bird's-eye view on NES emulation: what makes NES emulation easy / hard?

While the built-in circuitry itself in the basic NES console is pretty easy to emulate, the custom chips / electronics (for example, enhanced sound generators for the Japanese Famicom – Famicom supports external sound generator circuitries, as opposed to the NES sold in Europe / the States) present in many game cartridges requires require a lot of additional work. You can read a bit more HERE on what chips there are. Implementing emulation for all of these technologies takes a LOT of time and effort; this is one of the reasons why “from-scratch” one-man projects like SmartGear have so low a compatibility rate.

Getting game ROM files

As usual, I may not tell you were to download games from. Believe me: it's far easier than you think if you know what Google is. Fortunately, there isn't a plethora of available ROM formats: everything you run into (most probably .nes files, in most cases, in a compressed form) will run under the emulators.