nesdev.org

Tech demos in the vein of "Bad Apple" serve a purpose. If you can do near-full-screen color FMV at 12 fps, then with enough ROM, you can do a 16- or 32-frame loop and make a rail shooter with a prerendered background. Compare Cube Quest for LaserDisc arcade (whose location tests led to th...

I did notice some patterns though, like these are all shooters, a genre which benefits from constant-speed scrolling on one axis (you can stream new tile bitmaps in as it scrolls in a predictable way), and from enemy waves which are groups of one enemy type at a time (only need to have graphics for...

I never knew the SMS had these kinds of limitations (I only knew about the lack of sprite flipping), and it really makes me appreciate what the NES afforded its developers. Now I want to go back and see how certain games (like the SMS Sonic and Mickey Mouse games) handle their vram. Honestly, they'...

Super Castlevania 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNVQeYZz3SE Sonic 2: Chemical Zone plant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOWXaQaPVI4 Gaiares: stage 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFRwRi1Zm-o ThunderForce 5: Duel Of Top https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwJzASaXrc0 SOR2: Go Straight https://www...

Palette cycling effects (waterfalls, fire, blinking lights, etc.) have little to do with the number of palettes, because the colors are changed in place. If you're limited to one palette, then colors have to be reserved in said palette for cycling. If you're using 4 colors reserved for animation(wa...

Regarding the sprite palettes; that's one thing I never understood with Sega and the SMS or MD. I mean, sure the NES is 2bit pixels but it has 8 palettes! Arcades at the time, even Sega's own 8bit and 16bit, had up to hundreds of palettes. It seems such a small thing to skimp, especially considering...

SMS is so painful to program that most new stuff is Alex Kidd hacks. You'll get attention just for making something new. I disagree completely. I haven't done much with the SMS myself besides playing with the VDP a little bit, but from all the documents and resources I've had contact with, it looks...

Compared to what? Surely not the NES haha. SMS is pretty straight forward. Yes, NES too. The existence of a decent C compiler makes all the difference, sdcc is just not that good. Z80 vs 6502 is mostly a matter of opinion. I do not want to restart that discussion though, we have done that enough ti...

I haven't found SMS to be painful on any regard, the hardware is really straightforward... As far as the color goes, SMS output is not linearly spaced though the difference is quite minor. +--------------------+---------------------+--------------------+ | SMS1 (315-5124) | SMS2 (315-5246) | MD (al...

calima wrote: ↑Tue Dec 17, 2019 4:01 am SMS is so painful to program that most new stuff is Alex Kidd hacks. You'll get attention just for making something new.

Compared to what? Surely not the NES haha. SMS is pretty straight forward.

alright.. i sort of have a rough idea of what's going on with the wrong warp thing. After comparing savestates in the 1st room of the dungeon and leaving. 1 that's normal, and your savestate that has the wrong warp. I found out that the uhhh "return address" or "exit" or whateve...

Well, he only wants the random crash and random teleport (which sounds like a crash recovery - intentional or otherwise). I'm unaware of all the bugs in this game. Not saying this is a one day job, by any means, but writing an entirely new game engine from scratch? Then what? Rip the assets from th...

i can not imagine And that's the problem. You know, I admire rom hackers because they put in a tremendous amount of work. It takes them years to hone that skill too. If you were to put a price tag on the work some of the hackers do, you'd be shocked! And they do it for free. If profit is not a moti...

Compared to tracking down and fixing a bug in a rom??! I can't think of any situation where that might be true. When the bug is the game's engine itself, reverse engineering the engine from byte code and fixing it (or more likely rewriting it) can be slower. Correct, if it really was "just tra...

calima wrote: ↑Tue Dec 10, 2019 1:11 am I agree with knight0fdragon. For changes like that, it might end up cheaper to rewrite the entire game.

Compared to tracking down and fixing a bug in a rom??! I can't think of any situation where that might be true.