Final Fantasy III (VI) does this too. It's trading a window for VRAM. On NES and SMS there was hardware to hide 8 pixels on the side of the screen for a similar reason, and some games took advantage of it. Yes, on SNES all backgrounds can be 64x64 if you want, except for mode 7. It's just part of th...

Here's something else I just noticed; I'm not sure how they are doing the nice gradient on the window in this level plus the black used for the rest of the background colour behind layer 3? They're just changing one specific palette colour each scanline, using HDMA. (Specifically colour $15, i.e. t...

If you start the game, you can just run up the stairs and go in the door next to the stairs on the second floor (just jump off the stairs). That'll get you to the level we're looking at faster, plus you can play around and investigate.

...it's literally showing parts of objects that are on the one background layer that are both opaque and semi-transparent, correct? There is literally nothing showing through those fully white highlights that I can see. It's additive blending. White + anything = white. So, yes, white is fully opaqu...

But I just checked again in Mesen-S and there aren't any parts of the beakers or glass pipes on BG1, just on BG2. BG1 is used for the wooden tables and solid metal pipes, BG2 is used for the semi-transparent beakers and semi-transparent pipes (which both have the white opaque highlights drawn direc...

On a side note, I was looking at the following level in Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt and couldn't figure out how they were showing the background glass objects that were part opaque and part semi-transparent It's just two separate layers that are scrolled together. It's mode 1. BG2 is the transparent o...

No, OAM1 and OAM2 are the two tile pages selected via OBJSEL . (The "name base" page, and the "name select" page that is offset from the base.) Similarly 1, 2, 3, 4 above them correspond to the tile address via BG12/34NBA , or just address 0 for a mode 7 layer. The also seem to a...

I don't know. Even in my functions that are written in Assembly, I usually need A, X and Y and cannot afford to keep one with the same value. Especially not in those huge character game logic functions. I've found it very practical on multiple major projects. X fits best, because it has more releva...

Dwedit wrote: ↑Thu Jun 30, 2022 10:26 amThe game is indeed reading its own font from the CHR ROM to plot the bricks. Just copy-pasted the C over the B and got this:

Battle City - Copy-0.png

That really neat! What a way to try and save PRG space.

So A and B are the scene names for buses? A and B bus are referred to throughout the DMA section of the official docs. (See: 2-17-1.) I don't think they ever get officially referred to by these names outside of the context of the DMA device, so maybe extending their meaning to a wider context is a ...

Honestly, it'd be hard to suggest any real speed optimization that isn't writing in assembly. In assembly, it's probably quite reasonable to just keep the current index in X, and in cases where you need to reuse X temporarily, reload it quickly from a ZP variable afterward. I find that having only o...

...but these were powered by actual Amigas (and sometimes Atari STs) rather than specialized hardware. There was a canadian science show I used to love as a kid called Concepts in Science that I'm almost certain was animated on an Amiga or ST, plus some dreamy synthesizer music, and calm narration....

As Snes can display 128 simultaneous 64 x 64 sprites, if the screen resolution only support 16 of them? Yes. You can fit 4 full 64x64 sprites on a line before tiles start dropping out from the 34-tiles-per-line limit. (Tiles are 8x8.) They didn't intend for you to use all 128 sprites at that size, ...

Canadian teletext pages had music? Well, not as teletext. It was just a regular video channel displaying the output of a teletext machine, so I'm not sure that it really counts. Just they usually had pleasant "elevator music" kinda stuff to go along with it, from what I remember. Here, I ...

BTW do you have teletext in America? I heard it was originally made as part of the longer vblank time of the PAL broadcast signal, but there is a Japanese variant of it as well, although I'm not sure if there are many Japanese teletext lovers like in Europe. In Canada I remember some channels in th...