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Messages - Anders_A
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Pixel Art / Re: NES mockup - new screen
« on: March 31, 2007, 11:12:01 pm »
Quote from: ptoing on March 30, 2007, 12:18:42 pm
Anders: well not really the TV cuts it off. The NTSC NES variants (US and JAP) are only 224 high because of the different cycles, so basically they mask them. And as I said before, I don't give a flying fuck here about the 16x16 thing at all.

I've looked into this some now (talking to people doing nes development that actually owns an ntsc nes and tv) and no, the nes does not cut anything off, but the tv set doesn't display about 12-16 lines in the top of the frame and about 2 lines in the bottom. A newer tv might display those (which will make some nes games look weird since they might have garbage in the top of the frame). And I imagine some games turn off rendering during vblank and then turn it on after those top lines to get some extra time in which gfx-ram can be written. (It can only be written to during vblank unless rendering is turned off)

The key here is that I was wrong about the palette grid not being aligned if you use 256x224. It will be since almost all rows are cut off at the top.

I love those mockups btw. Damn, I've been wanting to make a demoscene like demo for the nes for some time now. If I could draw stuff as good as that it would be done long ago. :)

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Pixel Art / Re: NES mockup - new screen
« on: March 30, 2007, 06:26:57 am »
I noticed your mockups are 256x224 pixels, the resolution of the NES is 256x240. The reason some emulators cut of 8 pixels on the top and bottom of the frame is because older tv sets cut off some (approx 8 pixels i guess). The 16x16 palette grid is aligned in the 256x240 frame though.

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Pixel Art / Re: NES mockup - now with 85.6% more titlescreen
« on: March 28, 2007, 08:43:06 pm »
The MMC5 has 1kb of ram inside it which is used for the extra bits of the tile number, and the extra attribute bits.

EDIT: I'm sorry, I don't intend to derail this thread about your beautiful art into a NES hardware discussions. I'll stop now unless any questions comes up (I've done a fair deal of NES programming).

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Pixel Art / Re: NES mockup
« on: March 28, 2007, 08:08:16 pm »
Quote from: Helm on March 26, 2007, 06:21:16 pm
check out Batman for the NES too, by Hudson, for how NES games can look. It's down to skill and dealing with the restrictions in a smart manner. There's not many people around now that can do this like Ptoing, and there weren't very many then either.

Now that's a big part of the explanation, but also almost all nes developers had to deal with stricter restrictions then ptoing have used.

The NES can't by design set the palette per background tile as ptoing has done, it can only set it per 4 background tiles (that is per 16x16 square consisting of 4 8x8 tiles). It is possible to set the palette per tile by using special hardware in the game cartidge, but hardware for this didn't even exist until 1989, and even then it was way too expensive for most game makers to use. It was only used in a handful of games released outside Japan of which Castlevania 3 is the most well known.

This is why most NES game levels are made up of 16x16 blocks.

EDIT: When using the MMC5, as the hardware chip mentioned above is called, you can also use up to 16384 background tiles at once instead of the standard 256. so the only problem with that awesome title screen is the one 8x8 tile that has too many colors (on the upper part of the D), but that can easily be fixed by using a sprite overlay.

EDIT2: That title screen can most likely be displayed on a NES without any special hardware, if you switch tileset mid frame. and then use sprite overlays on the spots where the palette restrictions are violated.

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