Dracula in the MSX version of "Castlevania"

[DRW]

O.k., we all know him:


But what I've always wondered: Why is he a skeleton in the MSX version?


What does that look have to do with vampires?
Any theories?

[Drag]

The only thing that can kill a vampire is a nasty splinter in the chest. So perhaps he just slept this whole time and his body wasted away?

[tepples]

The only thing that can kill a vampire is a nasty splinter in the chest.

That or the same thing that kills data on an EPROM: exposure to harsh UV rays. (At least in some versions of the mythology.)

[Drag]

They can also die when they walk into a home uninvited, but I'm pretty sure Draccy's in his own castle during Castlevania.

[MottZilla]

Make he looks that way due to hardware color limitations. That's the reason for lots of things in older games.

[psycopathicteen]

Slightly off topic, but what are the MSX color palette limitations. It looks like 2bpp sprites on top of a 4bpp (could even be 3bpp for what I know) background. Do 4bpp sprites cause extra flickering, or is the system just limited to 2bpp sprites?

[tepples]

MSX1 has the same VDP as the ColecoVision with the same limits: 1bpp, one color (for sprites) or two colors (for backgrounds) out of 15 for each scanline of a tile or sprite, no background scrolling.

MSX2 uses a Yamaha V9938 VDP, whose color limits are slightly less onerous. Apparently in "sprite mode 2" it's possible to overlap two sprites in such a manner that their overlapping parts produce a third color.

[DRW]

The only thing that can kill a vampire is a nasty splinter in the chest.

That or the same thing that kills data on an EPROM: exposure to harsh UV rays.

Or beheading or fire or a nice little grenade.

They can also die when they walk into a home uninvited

Doesn't that only mean that the entrance has an invisible border that the vampire cannot cross? I have never heard of a vampire actually dying by entering a home uninvited.

Make he looks that way due to hardware color limitations. That's the reason for lots of things in older games.

But in this case, they could have just made him black under the cape, like they did in the NES version anyway.
I just find it odd that you have a game with not only some random vampire as the final opponent, but actually the Count Vlad Tepes Dracula and then you do something so un-vampiry like sowing him as a living skeleton.

[tokumaru]

Doesn't that only mean that the entrance has an invisible border that the vampire cannot cross? I have never heard of a vampire actually dying by entering a home uninvited.

Look at you guys, discussing this like there's any actual logic to it... how cute.

Depending on the the fictional story you're using as a reference, vampires will obviously react differently.

[tepples]

Depending on the the fictional story you're using as a reference, vampires will obviously react differently.

Our vampires are different.

And no, my nick does not derive from "Vlad Tepes".

[Drag]

Slightly off topic, but what are the MSX color palette limitations. It looks like 2bpp sprites on top of a 4bpp (could even be 3bpp for what I know) background. Do 4bpp sprites cause extra flickering, or is the system just limited to 2bpp sprites?

If you play a lot of MSX1 games, you'll notice a lot of them will suffer badly from sprite flicker, especially if the main character is a multi-colored sprite, since you need one sprite for each color, which means the individual colors of the character will flicker.

I think you can only have 4 sprites per scanline too, but you can have 16x16 sprites, so it balances out.

[DRW]

Look at you guys, discussing this like there's any actual logic to it... how cute.

That's why I added the statement:

I have never heard of a vampire actually dying by entering a home uninvited.

which basically translates to: "Is there a story where this happens?"

[Shiru]

MSX1 has 1bpp 16x16 sprites, 4 per scanline. MSX2 has 1bpp 'multicolored' 16x16 sprites, 8 per scanline. Multicolored means each horizontal pixel line of a sprite can have its own color. To get more colors you have to overlap sprites.

MSX2 also has entirely different blitter-like rendering system which allows to have as much sprites as one wants, in trade of speed.

[tokumaru]

I have never heard of a vampire actually dying by entering a home uninvited.

which basically translates to: "Is there a story where this happens?"

I remember a scene in Let the Right One In/Let Me In where the vampire girl was bleeding and suffering a lot in a room before the boy who lived there invited her in. She would possibly have died if he hadn't invited her.

[Bregalad]

I read the entiere original Dracula by Bram Stoker, and as far as I remember, the following things were hazardous to vampires :

- Garlic - although it would not prevent anything they would just not like the smell
- Host and crucifixes and anyother catholic religious sign.
- Flowing water (stagnant water is okay though)
- Not staying in quality earth for a long period of extended time - this is why he has to ship some special earth boxes to London and how they were able to catch him

Anything else has been made up afterwards. Dracula also comes to several places without being invited in the story. Also the guy is old, ugly and has a mustache, something that was changed in most remakes of the story.

PS : Sprites on the MSX sucks, I mean 1 BP ? How comes so many NES games were ported to MSX ?