nesdev.org

Really? There's not much you can do in an 8x16-pixel area, artistically speaking. IMO, that would only work if your view is pretty zoomed out and there really are a bunch of sprites active at all times. I saw a thread down lower comparing the advantages of 8x8 sprites with the advantages of 8x16 sp...

I think the later NES Mega Man games have some pretty stunning background art, which is mostly composed of monochrome objects and given shape with shading and highlights. It also allows them to maintain strong contrast between the terrain and the background, which I think is pretty important, especi...

So a sprite is visible if its top left corner is onscreen. This applies whether the sprites are 8x8 or 8x16, right? If an object composed of multiple sprites is just a bit off the top or left of the screen, then would only part of it be visible, with a possible gap between the visible portion and th...

Okay... I think I might have it now. If only two of the nametables are kept in memory for a typical game though, and the other two are mirrored, it might be easier for me to conceptualize it if I just forget the other two nametables exist, and think of the two in use as wrapping around on the other ...

No, every step would be aligned to a tile, not a nametable. You have a grid of four nametables (two are the same). Within them is a grid of 32x30 tiles. If you're nametable aligned (scroll at 0, 0), and move a tile to the right (8, 0), you're still tile aligned but not nametable aligned. (One colum...

Dragon Warrior's mapper doesn't even have mirroring control, but the reason reason games that do have it won't do it is because the screen would get messed up if the scroll wasn't perfectly aligned to one of the name tables. See, if the name tables are arranged horizontally, and the character is wa...

There's also some CHR-ROM switching going on to cancel out the background movement (The background pattern repeats every 8 pixels, but the moving parts move in 4-pixel increments). A lot of these fancier games must devote a considerable portion of their space just to animating backgrounds. In games...

Thanks for that link, it cleared things up. I hadn't realized so many games did that kind of thing, and I also hadn't considered smoothing the effect by sacrificing some sprites. The link also prompted me to do a quick search of these forums for Bucky O'Hare. That game seems to have a lot of "h...

I took a peek at the nametables. It took me a bit to figure out what was going on, and I'm still not entirely clear on it (like everything onscreen apparently appearing twice), but I think I get the gist of it now. The camera borders move around and only a row or column is updated. Final Fantasy and...

Thanks again for all your help. I have an eclectic assortment of questions now. How does the dialogue box in Final Fantasy 1 work? Why does SMB3 have scrolling artifacts even in areas with no vertical scrolling Dragon Warrior 1 has some dark dungeons that include a halo of light effect. This was don...

Does every game with a save function have added RAM? Maybe I'm wrong but some games seem like they wouldn't need that much extra memory. Zelda 1, for example, seems fairly minimal, at least for its genre.

Well, you could disable sprites after the edge to make it moot. In that case, sprites would appear to go behind the status bar, right? The NES only provides 2048 bytes of RAM for the entire state of the game, for every purpose. Oh, wow. So for each onscreen enemy, I'd imagine the game would need to...

About use of Z and X: German and French keyboards move Z far from X, and a lot of people prefer to play using a USB joystick. You'll want to make keys configurable. Ah, that's a good idea. I'll start looking into that. It should use the global background color, because that's what's displayed when ...

Sorry, tokumaru. I missed that earlier post somehow. Right now I only have thirteen animated tiles, and I think I've been assuming I'd simulate CHR-RAM for that, but I may need to reconsider. I've included an image of my status bar. The icons for the NES buttons have been replaced with icons for key...

You can swap any tile data you want into the four background tile windows or the four sprite tile windows. Are those windows dedicated to their purpose, though? Could I take tiles in my background windows and use them to draw a sprite? Another question that's come up: Does the NES have drawing func...