Could some kind widescreen game be done on SNES using 512 and/or 448 modes?

[SNES AYE]

High-res background with low-res sprites are literally the opposite of what arcade hardware like Popeye or Tapper had.

I just learned something new today! The visuals in that Popeye game are really quite nice.

The lower-res sprites in my example remind me of how the sprites were done in the recent SNES version of Celeste created for Game Jam 2025:

Celeste on SNES

[creaothceann]

High-res background with low-res sprites are literally the opposite of what arcade hardware like Popeye or Tapper had.

I just learned something new today! The visuals in that Popeye game are really quite nice.

It should be noted that the game used interlacing to achieve vertical hi-res.
Arcade monitors were really in a league of their own, with RGB inputs and freely-chosen frequencies.

[SNES AYE]

High-res background with low-res sprites are literally the opposite of what arcade hardware like Popeye or Tapper had.

I just learned something new today! The visuals in that Popeye game are really quite nice.

It should be noted that the game used interlacing to achieve vertical hi-res.
Arcade monitors were really in a league of their own, with RGB inputs and freely-chosen frequencies.

Here’s a random idea: what if [the royal] you made a 512×448i SNES version of a Popeye-style game that flips the script—using lower-resolution sprites for the background and high-res backgrounds for the characters?

The concept would be to use larger sprite objects (like 32×32 and 64×64) to cover more area with fewer total sprites. The main “Popeye” character—and possibly a key rival, like a Bluto equivalent—could then be rendered using high-resolution background layers, creating a look reminiscent of the original Popeye arcade game.

You could even split the screen horizontally, dedicating different sections of the layer to separate characters. As long as they don’t overlap vertically, this could allow say two high-resolution characters per layer, with up to four total characters rendered using the high-res background technique.

It would likely be easy to mock this up visually: just extract the original Popeye and Bluto sprites along with an arcade background to see how the style might look on the SNES. Could be a really fun experiment!

Edit: Yeah, I could totally see that potentially working quite well there:

PopeyeSNES512.png

[Nikku4211]

Here’s a random idea: what if [the royal] you made a 512×448i SNES version of a Popeye-style game that flips the script—using lower-resolution sprites for the background and high-res backgrounds for the characters?

The concept would be to use larger sprite objects (like 32×32 and 64×64) to cover more area with fewer total sprites. The main “Popeye” character—and possibly a key rival, like a Bluto equivalent—could then be rendered using high-resolution background layers, creating a look reminiscent of the original Popeye arcade game.

You could even split the screen horizontally, dedicating different sections of the layer to separate characters. As long as they don’t overlap vertically, this could allow say two high-resolution characters per layer, with up to four total characters rendered using the high-res background technique.

It would likely be easy to mock this up visually: just extract the original Popeye and Bluto sprites along with an arcade background to see how the style might look on the SNES. Could be a really fun experiment!

Edit: Yeah, I could totally see that potentially working quite well there:

PopeyeSNES512.png

Actually, this is what it'd look like:

SNESPopeyeRaw.png

SNESPopeyeScaled.png

The SNES can only do 256px max for sprites regardless of video mode.

[93143]

You missed his point. Those characters would be BG graphics. Software-rendered, I imagine, to allow characters to approach and overlap one another, with one key character on the other layer to minimize load, and only the relevant areas DMAed to VRAM (software dirtybox with tilemap updates? Window masking might be too limited, since the characters aren't the only high-res elements). Antitwitter might be a tall order under these circumstances...

The backdrop would be made of sprites.

[SNES AYE]

Actually, this is what it'd look like:
SNESPopeyeRaw.png
SNESPopeyeScaled.png

The SNES can only do 256px max for sprites regardless of video mode.

Regarding the faux backgrounds made with sprites and their 256-pixel horizontal limit: could a combination of using the color windows directly over the backdrop color with no color math applied, along with HMDA to change colors on specific scanlines to block out some shapes, and using sprites for the remaining shapes (Note: Not every shape below would be an individual sprite), work to address that?

So, breaking down the layers very roughly, something like this:

BackdropColor.png

ColorWindowsOpaque.png

SpritesDrawntoFit.png

512x448iSplitBackgrounds.png

AllLayersCombined.png

[SNES AYE]

Here's something else quite interesting, which I believe is also possible using Mode 5's 512×448i resolution with 2bpp colors. I quickly converted all the images to the SNES' 2bpp palettes using Rilden's tool and repositioned them to fit the SNES resolution:

1.png

2.png

3.png

4.png

5.png

Would that work in principle?

Edit: I just realized I initially set the conversion to use an 8×8 tile size, but I’m not sure if that was correct for this case, given how I think the tiles work in 512×448i mode. So I tried converting several images again using 16×16 tiles, and they looked almost identical for the most part.

[Nikku4211]

You missed his point. Those characters would be BG graphics. Software-rendered, I imagine, to allow characters to approach and overlap one another, with one key character on the other layer to minimize load, and only the relevant areas DMAed to VRAM (software dirtybox with tilemap updates? Window masking might be too limited, since the characters aren't the only high-res elements). Antitwitter might be a tall order under these circumstances...

The backdrop would be made of sprites.

ROFLMAO. Then yeah, software rendering characters on a hi-res background layer sounds like it needs a bit of codardry on its own.
Especially considering you'd still have to deal with planar graphics for the hi-res background layer's tileset.

What's antitwitter? Google thinks I'm talking about a Twitter alternative even when I add in the 'programming' keyword into my search.

Regarding the faux backgrounds made with sprites and their 256-pixel horizontal limit: could a combination of using the color windows directly over the backdrop color with no color math applied, along with HMDA to change colors on specific scanlines to block out some shapes, and using sprites for the remaining shapes (Note: Not every shape below would be an individual sprite), work to address that?

Okay, then the SNES can technically already cover the entire screen in sprites.

Sprites are limited to 256px horizontal resolution because that resolution is spread across the whole screen even in 512px hi-res background modes. But in terms of sprite coverage, you technically get 272px of sprite coverage per scanline.
It's not as great as it sounds, as that means you only get 16 sprite pixels in addition to the 256 necessary to cover entire scanlines, and you need to use 16x16 sprites for the sprite background so that you don't run out of the 32 sprites that are able to get rendered before you run out of the 34 8x8 sprite tiles that can be rendered per line(which are indeed separate limitations). The best thing you can do there is scroll, but I don't remember if Popeye on arcade scrolls at all.
So you're probably good with just using sprites for the background without needing to worry about windowing and all that.

[tepples]

What's antitwitter? Google thinks I'm talking about a Twitter alternative even when I add in the 'programming' keyword into my search.

Interline twitter predated the social networking silo now owned by Mr. Muskrat. "Anti-twitter" mechanisms apply vertical blur to limit the local difference in brightness between even and odd fields. The Super Smash Bros. games for GameCube and Wii called the setting for this "Deflicker".

For an example of a full-screen background layer built out of sprites, see Cameltry (released as On the Ball in the west).

[Nikku4211]

Interline twitter predated the social networking silo now owned by Mr. Muskrat. "Anti-twitter" mechanisms apply vertical blur to limit the local difference in brightness between even and odd fields. The Super Smash Bros. games for GameCube and Wii called the setting for this "Deflicker".

For an example of a full-screen background layer built out of sprites, see Cameltry (released as On the Ball in the west).

Oh, so he meant deflicker.

Yeah, that's a tall order, enough to ruin interlaced mode on CRTs entirely for some people.

But not me. Does arcade Popeye have deflicker in its video hardware? If not, then I guess you can say it'd be more arcade-accurate not to have deflicker anyway(but continue to warn people on game download page that there is interlace flickering just in case they try it on a real CRT).