nesdev.org

Just love the game and wondering this might be an interesting project?

8-bit NES can be run by various emulators on various platforms and I think 8-bit CPU is good enough for such tiny game... but unfortunately I am not good enough to make one!

There already is one. It's called Balloon Trip, and it was released soon after the launch of the Famicom.

Splashy Fish is a clone of Flappy Bird, which is a clone of Piou Piou, which is ultimately a clone of SFCave. I don't know to what extent SFCave was inspired by Balloon Fight.

I'd make something, but I'm tied up with other projects at the moment.

Since the title says "8-bit" rather than "NES" I'll just point out that there's a Commodore 64 version and a Vectrex version.

I may do it as a small side project. However, even though it's a simple game, making a (somewhat) faithful NES conversion isn't completely trivial. But if C64 can have two scroll layers, NES sure as hell better be able to do so as well! (And yes, I'm aware of games like Battletoads and Bucky O' Hare that have something similar.)

With the commodore 64, the way graphics and the machine works are extremely different from the NES, despite both machine having a 6502 and being designed arround the same time.

The commodore can have 8 sprites per line, but the sprites are 24 pixels wide, and it's possible to stretch them for 48 pixels (the texture is duplicated for two consecutive columns (or 4 columns if a multi-colour sprite is used)), so it's possible to have 8*48 = 348 pixels of sprites in a line, larger than the standard 320 pixels of resolution the machine have after the borders are removed !
So it's easy to have more than 100% sprite overlay without any hardware trick, something not doable on the NES, if there is no other sprite at all on that line and if a detailed texture is not required.

thefox wrote:I may do it as a small side project. However, even though it's a simple game, making a (somewhat) faithful NES conversion isn't completely trivial. But if C64 can have two scroll layers, NES sure as hell better be able to do so as well! (And yes, I'm aware of games like Battletoads and Bucky O' Hare that have something similar.)

The Sword Master CHR flipbook trick would easily be able to do the parallax scrolling seen in that C64 example.

rainwarrior wrote:The Sword Master CHR flipbook trick would easily be able to do the parallax scrolling seen in that C64 example.

Yeah. Metal Storm does the same thing. But it would end up eating a fair chunk of CHR data depending on the size of the scrollable area. I guess it wouldn't too bad. It would probably be possible to use CHR-RAM for this as well, but it's probably not worth the effort.

City Connection works around it by scrolling the playfield tile-by-tile on top of the distant background graphics, but that might be too jerky.

If you think you can do it in 12 days, feel free to enter it in the compo.

I'll make one with whatever you want, but I'll only do it if you pay me $1000 (or best offer).

Drag wrote:I'll make one with whatever you want, but I'll only do it if you pay me $1000 (or best offer).

That blog is funny as hell. And depressing at the same time.

Even Sesame Workshop is in on it, with the HTML5 game Flappy Bert.

Since various people brought up CHR switching to fake parallax scrolling...

Would it be possible to design a custom board, or mapper, that makes bankswitching BG tiles much more suitable for a parallax effect? Of course it's more effort and costly than it's worth, but I wondered if you could have a custom board do stuff like that. Bee 52, which uses a UNROM clone, does that pretty well with the clouds going behind some of the scenery.

There's not much more a mapper can do to help parallax scrolling besides offering CHR bankswitching in small chunks, which most of the more complex mappers do.

Well, I guess that something MMC5-like that expanded the capabilities of the name tables and used special tile indexes to indicate the visibility of a second scroll plane, which would have its own tile map and scroll values, would help a lot with complex parallax effects. That sounds terribly complicated to implement though, and you'd still have color problems because the tile attributes would be aligned to the foreground layer.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the answer.

@Thefox: I would love to see how your hypothetical port would come out. You did a damn impressive job porting a flash game almost 1:1 to the NES, so I have faith in you.

OneCrudeDude wrote:Would it be possible to design a custom board, or mapper, that makes bankswitching BG tiles much more suitable for a parallax effect?

Since this is a tangent, I put my reply over here. But I believe vertical-only parallax would be surprisingly easy to add.