Mockups of games from other platforms

[tepples]

I was under the impression that the leftmost and rightmost two columns (i.e. 16 pixels each) were not safe. Then again, I'm going by Sega docs, but since the NES screen has the same width and resolution I assume it'd be the same.

Nintendo's official background planning sheets likewise assumed a 16-pixel margin at the left and right sides and thus a 224-pixel-wide title safe area. By modern standards (Rec. 601), which specify an active scanline period equal to 280 TMS9918 pixels, this is an 80% title safe area to account for the tolerances of 1970s TVs. By the sixth generation (PS2, GameCube, Xbox), as TVs became manufactured to tighter tolerances, console makers started allowing an 85% title safe area, which in TMS9918 terms would be 238x204 pixels.

[OneCrudeDude]

What I personally would do is assign the hearts to the same palette as the rooftops for this screen. The hearts would automatically be assigned a color palette that would closest match red, be it pink or orange. Think how Double Dragon's status bar always changes color. I think some other games had the status bars change color.

Alternatively, make the hearts one tile big and make them sprites, with a max of 8 (assuming the game maxes out at 8 hearts). If you can get more than eight hearts, then make a life bar with an indicator with how much life you actually have, similar to Zelda 2 or Pokemon. This might not work that well since not many enemies would share the same palette as the hearts, unless you deliberately design all enemies with a single set of colors like Mr. Gimmick did (or comparable to how Micronics handled their games, since this is a hypothetical port).

[jayminer]

What I personally would do is assign the hearts to the same palette as the rooftops for this screen. The hearts would automatically be assigned a color palette that would closest match red, be it pink or orange. Think how Double Dragon's status bar always changes color. I think some other games had the status bars change color.

Alternatively, make the hearts one tile big and make them sprites, with a max of 8 (assuming the game maxes out at 8 hearts). If you can get more than eight hearts, then make a life bar with an indicator with how much life you actually have, similar to Zelda 2 or Pokemon. This might not work that well since not many enemies would share the same palette as the hearts, unless you deliberately design all enemies with a single set of colors like Mr. Gimmick did (or comparable to how Micronics handled their games, since this is a hypothetical port).

That is an interesting idea. I actually redid the picture adding in red into the "gray" palette I already had, redesigned the springboard (the gray box with an up arrow) and redid the "tower" with one less shade of gray, had to use some more dithering but it doesn't look to bad IMO, but the dithering might not look as good on a real NES (this is probably true for a lot of the dithering I have used in my mockups).

Anyway this is how it looks now, I squeezed everything together a little to still show the house but also show a little more of the tower.

This will probably be the last update to Wonderboy III, I have done an almost complete mockup of Golden Axe Warrior which I will add real soon.

[jayminer]

And here is Golden Axe Warrior. For those of you not familiar with the game, it's a rather blatant Zelda ripoff for the Master System, but it's actually a quite good game!

This time I also ran out of colors for the Statusbar... :/

[lidnariq]

Here's that last Wonderboy mockup run through blargg's nes_ntsc:

[RT-55J]

Here's a reinterpretation of the DOS classic Jetpack:



(The bent ladders would be animated, as with the conveyers.)

The original game's tiles are 12x12, and the levels were 26x16 tiles. In an NES port, if the levels were 16x13 (like in the picture), they would have only half as many blocks to work with. However, if levels were 2 nametables wide (32x13) the block count would be identical.

One of my goals was to make it look decent for any background color from the first row (ie the darkest).

There's still a few things I'm not quite happy about (eg. the 1-up graphic). Also, if anybody has any suggestions for a better palette for the gold, I'd gladly take it.

[OneCrudeDude]

And here is Golden Axe Warrior. For those of you not familiar with the game, it's a rather blatant Zelda ripoff for the Master System, but it's actually a quite good game!

This time I also ran out of colors for the Statusbar... :/

Here's an idea; sprite for middle weapon and magic bottles; the protagonist is a bluish color, so his palette could be used here. I'm not sure what the scale thing is supposed to hold in the end, and the one image I seen looks like they're all similar enough in color. Alternatively, magic is turned into a sprite based magic bar with a value mark (IE: 1/4).

[jayminer]

Here's that last Wonderboy mockup run through blargg's nes_ntsc:

Cool, it actually looked better than I thought it would!

[jayminer]

Here's a reinterpretation of the DOS classic Jetpack:

Finally, someone else contributed to this thread, great! I like your mockup, it looks very NES.

[jayminer]

Here's an idea; sprite for middle weapon and magic bottles; the protagonist is a bluish color, so his palette could be used here. I'm not sure what the scale thing is supposed to hold in the end, and the one image I seen looks like they're all similar enough in color. Alternatively, magic is turned into a sprite based magic bar with a value mark (IE: 1/4).

Well, there are a few problems with using sprites. The player changes color when you get a new armor (same as the rings in Zelda 1) and the magic bar fills up all the way to the edge of the screen. Sure it could be shortened but I think it would be nicer if it would stay the same. The "scale" holds the orbs you get when finishing a castle, it's basically the triforce. On the Master System all orbs are different colors but here they would all have to look the same, no biggie.

Here's an update to Golden Axe Warrior using palette changes, there's two scanlines of black in the beginning of the status bar, and three of the palettes are changed.

[OneCrudeDude]

Can the NES even do something like your picture shows? Did any NES games even do that? I thought MMC2 would allow you to do something like that.

[jayminer]

Can the NES even do something like your picture shows? Did any NES games even do that? I thought MMC2 would allow you to do something like that.

Well, from what lidnariq wrote earlier in the thread:

It is straightforward to change palette midscreen, but as far as we know, these are the constraints-
1- You have to have at least one scanline with rendering disabled
2- Six palette entries can be changed on a scanline without any visible artifacts
3- Up to 18 palette entries can be change on a scanline if you're willing to accept a smear of colors, but that can partially be masked by using the NES's greyscale bit. This thread goes into much too much detail.
4- Sprite memory will be damaged by disabling and re-enabling rendering. This basically means it can only be used for bottom status bars.
It's conceivable that there are specific (mid-scanline) times when you could disable and re-enable rendering such that it would not damage sprites (during the time that OAMADDR is 0), but it would produce an irregular edges on the relevant scanline.

I have no idea if any games actually did this.

[lidnariq]

I have no idea if any games actually did this.

In the thread I linked,

For example, the following games changes palette for status bar:
-Wizard & Warriors.
-Fantastic Adventurers of Dizzy.
-Dizzy the adventurer.
-Tom and Jerry.

I should probably explicitly mention that the "palette entries" I was referring include the normally unusable slots at $3Fx4, $3Fx8, $3FxC, so writing from $3F0D-$3F12 would be 6 visible colors, but writing from $3F01-$3F06 would only be 5. And writing from $3F01-$3F12 would change 15.

[thefox]

I have no idea if any games actually did this.

Mickey's Adventure in Numberland changes palette before the status bar on bottom.

Here's a video which clearly shows that the border color is changing (border color is same as the background color): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UITwFE04wh0#t=89s

I quickly checked it out in Nintendulator, and what it does is this:
- IRQ trips on scanline 187
- At the end of scanline 188 it changes background color ($3F10 i.e. mirror of $3F00) to black
- At the end of scanline 189 it changes $3F00 and $3F01 to black
- At the end of scanline 190 it sets $3F01, $3F02 and $3F03 to the colors used by the status bar

Another game which does it is Jungle Book:
- IRQ trips on scanline 175
- Changes all 4 palette sets on scanlines 177..180, 3 colors per each scanline
- Uses same palette for all palette sets. I presume it does this so that it doesn't need to upload attributes for the status bar (status bar code in this game is a bit complex due to 8-way scrolling with horizontal mirroring).

I'm sure there are other games that do similar stuff.

EDIT: ninjaed, but whatever

[OneCrudeDude]

It might not be on par for the thread (this asks for mockups of non-NES games on NES hardware), but this is something I wanted to do. I tried my best to 'dissect' the infamous Great Gatsby "NES Prototype", and come up with a palette that it might've used as an NES game. I apologize beforehand for the large image.



The game uses some very odd graphics placement, and it seems to be able to lay down a background attribute to a space as small as 8*8. If this were an MMC5 game, it would be feasible, but using a mapper as advanced and expensive as the MMC5 for a game with only four levels is quite a waste. Not to mention, I haven't actually tried making up an NES mockup of the graphics, and the palette seems to be based on an MSPaint estimate of the palette. The game runs at 240p as opposed to 224 for NTSC regions, so the playfield would have to be shrunken down a little. There's also some discrepancies with the colors, most importantly the chandelier; you could probably get away with layering the sprites, but they fall down, and would cause a LOT of flicker when they do.

So what do you think?