The Nintendo Entertainment System began life in Japan as the Family Computer, or Famicom. It reached America in 1985 in a grey, video-recorder-like box with a front-loading cartridge slot, designed to look nothing like the consoles of the 1983 video game crash.
It went on to sell more than 60 million units and brought home gaming back from the brink. Games came on cartridges, and many carried extra chips that added memory and banking tricks, so later games did far more than early ones.
The picture was built from 8x8 tiles. Its master palette had 54 usable colours, but only 25 could be on screen at once: four background palettes and four sprite palettes of three colours each, plus a shared backdrop. Colour was set per 16x16 block of background. It could show 64 sprites, but only eight on one line, so busy games flickered.
Five channels: two square waves with four pulse widths, a triangle wave with no volume control (which gave NES bass lines their sound), a noise channel for drums and explosions, and a channel that played low-quality samples.