Need some information on the NES and SNES consoles

[Tetiro]

For my final university year project, I hope to make a game that is almost exactly like it was developed for the NES or SNES (most likely NES)

So I need to know how something.

With 8x8 pixels being a block, that was the max number of blocks for the NES
Same question for the SNES

I'd really appreciate it if someone could find out for me.

[ptoing]

Kasumi made a lengthy post about NES specs in the Non-Exhaustive Restrictions Thread

[Tetiro]

Question then. How did Square Enix make so many sprites for Final Fantasy 1 and 3?

[HughSpectrum]

They had carts with larger storage compared to, say, Mario.

They also used tiles for enemies while the characters were sprites.

[ptoing]

You can only have 2x 256 8x8 chars in memory at the same time I think, but that does not mean you can have more on the cart and more or less dynamically load what you need.

[Tetiro]

Ah now that makes along more sense. Does anyone know how many 256 8x8 sets Final Fnatasy 1 ROUGHLY had?

[Kasumi]

A quick check makes it look like there's around 19.5 sets of 256 8x8 tiles.

Final Fantasy 1 is a CHR RAM game, which means each individual 8x8 tile can be swapped out or even dynamically edited at runtime, rather than having to swap out an entire bank. This also means the graphics can be stored ANYWHERE in the ROM, but Final Fantasy's tiles are actually mostly in the same places.

Edit: And indeed, I suppose my NES post doesn't seem to reference that sort of tile swapping. I made it mainly for people who wanted to make mockups, and not who just wanted general info. The assumption was a mockup would be a still image and so someone making one would only need to know there are only 256 background tiles and 256 sprite tiles at once.