Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

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3gengames
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by 3gengames »

tokumaru wrote:
3gengames wrote:I'd imagine contra does.
Contra has been mentioned in the first reply, but apparently it doesn't overlap the sprites, it just uses different palettes for different parts of the sprite.
Ah, okay. I was just playing it with a friend and just thought of this threads title when I noticed it. :) I'd imaging Gimmick overlaps some sprites thinking about it...
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rainwarrior
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by rainwarrior »

Gimmick has a separate sprite for his orange hat.

Actually, something unusual about Gimmick is that it uses the same sprite palette set for the whole game. All sprites are green, orange, black, or pink.
3gengames
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by 3gengames »

How does it not overlap for SOMETHING? It has 4 colors on it's main body. :) Green, darker green, black, and white. :P
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rainwarrior
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by rainwarrior »

There's no black. Gimmick's pupils are dark green.
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Hamtaro126
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by Hamtaro126 »

rainwarrior wrote:There's no black. Gimmick's pupils are dark green.
The main character's name is not really Gimmick, It is Yumetaro, at least according to the Japanese version.
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rainwarrior
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by rainwarrior »

Oh really??? I wonder who Mr. Gimmick is...
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Hamtaro126
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by Hamtaro126 »

rainwarrior wrote:Oh really??? I wonder who Mr. Gimmick is...
I do not know, Sunsoft possibly thought of making fun of it's own games, like Ufouria!
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Denine
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by Denine »

rainwarrior wrote:Actually, something unusual about Gimmick is that it uses the same sprite palette set for the whole game.
I believe that "Treasure Island Dizzy" does that too.
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Hamtaro126
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by Hamtaro126 »

Treasure Island Dizzy uses a seperate palette on the Status Bar using Sprite 0 also.
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Denine
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by Denine »

Hamtaro126 wrote:Treasure Island Dizzy uses a seperate palette on the Status Bar using Sprite 0 also.
So do Fantastic Dizzy and Dizzy The Adventrer.
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Macbee
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by Macbee »

I was thinking about an alternative way to show more colorful sprites (and probably backgrounds) on the NES.
It creates an illusion that a 3-color sprite seems to have 5 (or more) colors without overlapping techniques.

My goal was to make a 5-color Donkey Kong like this:
Image

So I've created two images - both with 3 colors (black, brown and skin color).
Wherever I wanted lighter tones of brown I inserted skin / brown lines. And wherever I wanted darker tones of brown I inserted black / brown lines.
Colors of these lines are different on each image (a brown line on image number 1 is black on number 2 and vice-versa):

Image Image

If you make both images alternate fast enough you'll have the illusion of a sprite with more colors.
You can see by yourselves downloading a Rom with this Donkey Kong experiment: http://www.mediafire.com/?3yjs10pvgb94eng

It's not the ideal solution (because the colors are always "shaking" and you need two versions of the same image) but maybe someone can make a good use of this.
This ROM was created with NES Image Converter by thefox. Thanks again for this wonderful program!
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Dwedit
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by Dwedit »

Flickering looks great on an LCD screen, where screens tend to be slow to refresh, and it looks like the average of the two colors. But on a CRT TV, where the screen can completely refresh at 60FPS without blur, flickering looks terrible. If you have Batman, you can see this for yourself when you watch the intro.

Also, you can post attachments here. No need for mediafire.
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tokumaru
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by tokumaru »

Yeah, flickering looks terrible on CRTs, and it also has the disadvantage of slowing the game down to 30fps, since you need objects to be in the same positions for 2 consecutive frames.
lidnariq
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by lidnariq »

Is there a reason you interlaced detail horizontally, like so:
DK2.gif
DK2.gif (614 Bytes) Viewed 6154 times
And not checkerboard dithered, like so:
DK2chk.gif
DK2chk.gif (666 Bytes) Viewed 6154 times
?
Shiru
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Re: Do any games use tile/sprite overlap for more colors?

Post by Shiru »

The flickering was a common tech for demo coders on all platforms, and in games made by demo coders. Barely seen in commercial games, because it doesn't look too good.

Batman isn't the best example, though, because it flickers between two completely different pictures, which is the worst case scenario.

It isn't necessary to slow down the gameplay to half of the frame rate, by the way. There was an attempt of SMB unofficial port to ZX Spectrum (Soviet clones, to be exact) that used flickering to increase number of shades from 2 to 3 and it was running at 50 FPS, which is quite an achievement for the platform. It didn't look too bad. Unfortunately, all videos of the game on YouTube aren't represent the game well at all, they all has crazy lag (example).
Last edited by Shiru on Fri Oct 12, 2012 10:29 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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