AuthorTopic: NES Restrictions: Survival Mockup  (Read 7765 times)

Offline tcaud

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Re: NES Restrictions: Survival Mockup

Reply #10 on: November 13, 2013, 12:47:42 pm
Are you making an NES game?

Offline Mr. Fahrenheit

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Re: NES Restrictions: Survival Mockup

Reply #11 on: November 13, 2013, 09:28:45 pm
No, not unless someone wants me to. It's just a mockup exploring the restrictions.

Sorry about not making any updates, I've been busy.

Offline PypeBros

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Re: NES Restrictions: Survival Mockup

Reply #12 on: November 15, 2013, 01:19:04 pm
couldn't the 2 bars be somehow merged into the "medal" icon ?

Offline tcaud

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Re: NES Restrictions: Survival Mockup

Reply #13 on: November 17, 2013, 02:04:13 pm
NES restrictions can be summed up thus: 3 color sprites, 4 if you made use of the entire square, 6 colors if you are willing to settle for having either only two sprites onscreen or loads of flicker + major slowdown. Most people don't like NES graphics and only dealt with them because they were the best available at the time. The story is different for Genesis and SNES, so maybe you should consider those restrictions instead. The Master System is also much more capable.

And no, no one prefers that you make a game with NES restrictions. I'm glad the FF7 demake is over and I frankly hope it's the last NES demake we ever see.

And that goes for the GBC, as well.
« Last Edit: November 17, 2013, 02:10:25 pm by tcaud »

Offline Kasumi

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Re: NES Restrictions: Survival Mockup

Reply #14 on: November 17, 2013, 03:37:55 pm
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NES restrictions can be summed up thus: 3 color sprites, 4 if you made use of the entire square
Nope. It's 3 colors (plus transparency) per hardware sprite always. As a matter of fact, filling the entire square with non transparency is even worse. Super Bat Puncher takes advantage of its mostly black backgrounds and uses transparency to use black in a sprite. (Like for the cat's eyes. If you look closely, his eyes change color if they're overlapping a non black part of the background.)
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6 colors if you are willing to settle for having either only two sprites onscreen or loads of flicker + major slowdown.
Nope. As said above, it's 3 colors per hardware sprite always. Even assuming you're talking about sprite layering to get said 6, that would allow you to get up to 12 colors in the same area using only sprites.

Sprite layering doesn't limit your use of sprites to two (You still get 64 on screen), nor contribute any more to slowdown than just having a thing made of two non layered sprites (actually, it's probably usually less, but it depends on how you do it). The difference between layering one sprite and not adding an extra sprite is 0.15% of the CPU time available in a frame (44 cycles out of  ~29780) assuming it's directly overlaid over another previously drawn sprite. Even if you don't want to make that assumption, or assuming I'm missing something else, that time doubled is still slightly less than a third of ONE PERCENT of the time you have in a frame.

True about flicker, though, but two sprites vs one, or even four sprites vs two doesn't make that big an impact.
I make actual NES games. Thus, I'm the unofficial forum dealer of too much information about the NES

Offline tcaud

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Re: NES Restrictions: Survival Mockup

Reply #15 on: November 17, 2013, 07:46:37 pm
Ten sprites per scanline, plus the issue that moving the sprite eats cycles in a chip that runs at 800khz. But yeah you can't hardly expect to get more than a few hundred sales from an NES game produced today.

Offline Mr. Fahrenheit

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Re: NES Restrictions: Survival Mockup

Reply #16 on: November 17, 2013, 08:03:49 pm
As I said I'm not making a real game out of this. I'm just using this set of restrictions to foster some creativity. And also, Retro City Rampage sold fairly well I think though it wasnt released on the actual system.

Offline Kasumi

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Re: NES Restrictions: Survival Mockup

Reply #17 on: November 17, 2013, 08:32:33 pm
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Ten sprites per scanline
Eight!
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a chip that runs at 800khz
This is also not a correct figure. And you can move all the sprites NES has all over the place with plenty of time to spare. Of all things that you need to do in an NES game, it's the last thing I'd worry about being a bottleneck. It's clear you don't like NES stuff, but don't post things about its technical aspects that you haven't verified in some capacity.

Retro City Rampage/Megaman 9 and 10 do prove a digitally sold NES game could do well, but none are really NES games. (RCR does contain a watered down actual rom, though. For another type of game like a platformer, it wouldn't even need to be a watered down version of itself.) I'd say the reason it's not done is an actual NES game is harder to make than a game that looks like one, but there are plenty of modern indie games that would work fine on the platform. Whee, okay, hopefully enough off topic stuff.

I'm actually interested in seeing what else you do with this mockup. As far as I know, there aren't games like this on NES, so it's pretty cool to think about how one would look and work.
« Last Edit: November 17, 2013, 08:36:02 pm by Kasumi »
I make actual NES games. Thus, I'm the unofficial forum dealer of too much information about the NES