Every Famicom and NES runs on two chips made by Ricoh, a company better known for cameras and photocopiers. One, the 2A03, holds a 6502 processor and the console’s sound hardware. The other, the 2C02, draws the picture. Nintendo needed them cheap. Masayuki Uemura, the Famicom’s lead designer, told Ricoh they had to cost no more than ¥2,000, and Ricoh, according to David Sheff’s history of Nintendo, thought that price absurd. Hiroshi Yamauchi changed its mind by guaranteeing an order for three million chips within two years.
The company
Ricoh began in 1936 as Riken Kankoshi, the sensitized paper division of a business set up to sell the inventions of Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research. It was renamed Riken Optical in 1938, made cameras, and in 1955 launched its first copier, the Ricopy 101. The name Ricoh Company came in 1963.
By the 1980s it was a major maker of office equipment. In 1993 Amiga Format described it as “the world’s second largest manufacturer of laser printer engines”. It also made chips, and not only for Nintendo: The Atari Compendium lists an RP5C15, one of Ricoh’s real-time clock chips, as the clock in Atari’s Mega ST.
Ricoh had worked with a home-computing company once before. In the 1960s Jack Tramiel went to Japan looking for a cheaper way to make adding machines for Commodore. “They made cameras, printing and photocopying machines,” he recalled. “And we went into a partnership to produce the adding machine, and in twelve months’ time I had the same adding machine made in Japan for half the price.”
The Famicom order
Uemura had chosen a 6502 as the Famicom’s processor and wanted a second chip to drive the television picture. Nintendo needed an outside company that could help design both chips and then make them. Several would not take the risk at Nintendo’s prices. Uemura took his preliminary circuit diagrams to Ricoh, at a time when, Sheff writes, its semiconductor division was short of work.
Yamauchi’s three-million-chip guarantee looked reckless inside Nintendo. Leading Japanese manufacturers were selling 20,000 to 30,000 games consoles, Sheff writes, and the most Nintendo had ever sold of its TV Game 6 and 15 was a million. Ricoh accepted. The head of Ricoh’s five-person Nintendo team, Sheff writes, said he was looking forward to taking the new console home to his children.
Ricoh’s development specifications for the two chips, the RP2C02 and RP2A03, are dated October 1982 and were revised that December. The Famicom went on sale in Japan on 15 July 1983. The order that had seemed reckless turned out to be small. By the end of 1986, Sheff reports, Nintendo was Ricoh’s largest customer and accounted for 60 to 70 per cent of its semiconductor division’s sales. Ricoh, like Sharp, went on to form a division that did nothing but supply Nintendo.
The chips
| Chip | Consoles | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 2A03 | NTSC Famicom and NES | 6502 core at 1.79 MHz, five sound channels, sprite DMA, controller port signals |
| 2A07 | PAL NES | The same at 1.66 MHz, with PAL sound timings |
| 2C02 | NTSC Famicom and NES | Picture processing unit: tiles, 64 sprites, 52 colours |
| 2C07 | PAL NES | PAL version of the picture chip |
The 2A03’s processor is a 6502 with one difference programmers notice: decimal mode does nothing. The SED instruction still sets the D flag, but ADC and SBC ignore it, so games keep their scores in binary-coded decimal by hand. The five sound generators, which Ricoh’s specification letters A to E and programmers call the APU, share the die with the processor, along with a DMA unit that copies sprite data to the picture chip. The picture chip itself has its own entry, the PPU.
Ricoh also made the processor of the Super Nintendo, the 5A22, which combines a 65C816 core licensed from the Western Design Center with a custom memory controller.
Sources
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999), chapter 2, “In Heaven’s Hands”: Uemura’s choice of the 6502 and the need for a picture chip, the search for a supplier, the ¥2,000 price, Ricoh’s semiconductor division, the three-million-chip guarantee and the million-selling TV Game consoles, the five-person team, Nintendo’s share of Ricoh’s semiconductor sales by the end of 1986, the division that only supplied Nintendo.
- Ricoh, development specifications KA-A002-B (RP2C02) and KA-A003-B (RP2A03), October 1982, revised December 1982 (unpublished): the dates of the two chips; the five sound sources lettered A to E.
- Ricoh, “Company History” (web, secondary): Riken Kankoshi in 1936, Riken Optical in 1938, the Ricopy 101 in 1955, Ricoh Company in 1963. https://www.ricoh.com/about/history/1936_1969
- Amiga Format, issue 44, March 1993: Ricoh as “the world’s second largest manufacturer of laser printer engines”.
- Ricoh, RP5C01/RP5C15 Application Manual: the RP5C15 as a Ricoh part. Scott Sanders, The Atari Compendium, appendix B, p. B.45: “Mega ST Real Time Clock (RP5C15)”.
- Roger Kean, The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books), opening chapter: Tramiel on the adding-machine partnership with Ricoh.
- Nintendo, press release of 30 September 2016 (web, secondary): the Famicom’s Japanese launch on 15 July 1983. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/release/2016/160930.html
- NESdev Wiki, “CPU” (community reference, web, secondary): the 2A03 and 2A07 clock rates and the missing decimal mode. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/CPU
- Pan Docs, “SGB Functions” (community reference, web, secondary): “The SNES CPU is a Ricoh 5A22, which combines a 65C816 core licensed from WDC with a custom memory controller.” https://gbdev.io/pandocs/#sgb-functions