Mega Man 9 - Feasible on NES?

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Great Hierophant
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Mega Man 9 - Feasible on NES?

Post by Great Hierophant »

Mega Man 9 looks like a(n advanced) NES game, sounds like a NES game and plays like a NES game. But would it be possible to create such a game on a stock NES?

The emulator Capcom used to create MM9 was supposed to emulate NES hardware and the programmers were to adhere to those limitations. However, having partially completed the game, I wonder how closely they did so. More importantly, if it could run in a real NES, it should.

In this article, Hironobu Takeshita, the producer of the game, says that the game could not fit in a Famicom cartridge because it is too large.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3 ... onobu_.php

However, I wonder if it were reprogrammed, I think it could probably fit within a large NES cartridge. Mega Man 4-6 on the NES used 512KB and had more stages than this game. MMC3 can support 768KB. MMC5 can support 2 Megabytes! Graphics during those cutscenes would obviously need to be compressed.

In terms of removing features, the online capabilities would have to be removed. The challenges may also have to go if they take up too much space or slow the processor down (because there is alot to track!)

The sound and control should be fine. The chief problem is the graphics, given the NES's color and sprite limitations. Undoubtedly there will be more flicker in a NES port than in the Wii version. I cannot tell whether they are breaking the background tile limitations (too many colors, too many unique tiles) or the sprite limitations (more than 8 per line/64 per screen). Finally, if there is too much going on in a particular screen, would the game increase speed to avoid slowdown whereas the NES would be stuck with 1.79MHz?

The cartridge would also need some S-RAM to handle the save function within the game. However, the NES and Gameboy games used a password system that would probably work well enough to encompass the shop items (but not the challenges!) Perhaps to save space and manufacturing costs a password system would work better.
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kyuusaku
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Re: Mega Man 9 - Feasible on NES?

Post by kyuusaku »

Great Hierophant wrote:Mega Man 9 looks like a(n advanced) NES game, sounds like a NES game and plays like a NES game. But would it be possible to create such a game on a stock NES?
A similar game sure, probably even a better game, it's just a matter of offloading stuff from the CPU and enhancing the PPU's addressing. The only true limitation are the palettes, mappers can open up anything else you'd want though it'd be a little silly for them to approach the complexity of the CPU and PPU.
Great Hierophant wrote:The emulator Capcom used to create MM9 was supposed to emulate NES hardware and the programmers were to adhere to those limitations. However, having partially completed the game, I wonder how closely they did so. More importantly, if it could run in a real NES, it should.
Are you SURE it's emulated? I have read somewhere that it's not, it's just an original game which strives to look "8-bit" for gamers on the retro bandwagon.
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blargg
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Post by blargg »

It seems reasonable that they would write a graphics engine that had limitations similar to the NES in terms of what's displayed. I imagine everything besides the graphics and sound you get out is done very differently than a NES game, in a a high-level language (C++ most likely), using gobs of memory and many megabytes of object code. All that would have to be reimplemented on the NES>
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Post by Celius »

I think they might cheat every now any then and so "Oh, we'll have 5 colors instead of 4, it's close enough; no one will know". Though this seems like a tiny cheat, it might be incredibly difficult to correct to use 4 colors.
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Dwedit
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Post by Dwedit »

The gigantic swinging platforms are not feasible on a NES.
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strangenesfreak
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Post by strangenesfreak »

Dwedit wrote:The gigantic swinging platforms are not feasible on a NES.
Considering the background is completely empty and black at the area of those platforms, I think it could be done on the NES with crafty CHR-RAM and nametable writes, since some tiles repeat in the platforms.
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Dwedit
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Post by Dwedit »

Then there's another one in the Wily levels surrounded by background.
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MottZilla
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Post by MottZilla »

The real question is why do people think Capcom would make a new NES game when it's not going to actually be sold for NES? Making a NES game is alot harder than making a modern game that looks like a NES game.
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BMF54123
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Post by BMF54123 »

I noticed a lot of things in MM9 that could not be done on a real NES, usually involving too many colors on-screen/in one 16x16 area. Those perfectly smooth scene transitions might be a bit difficult, too. ;)
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Dwedit
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Post by Dwedit »

Can't you get 8 levels of color fading on a NES using the emphasis bits?
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Great Hierophant
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Post by Great Hierophant »

I was extremely impressed by the "feel" of the game. The gameplay is as fluid as the NES games and the timing is spot on. I would suggest that would be difficult to recreate using a different programming language and a processor running several orders of magnitude faster than a NES 2A03. This suggests they did not start from scratch here and may have emulated the gameplay itself using a limited CPU emulator.
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kyuusaku
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Post by kyuusaku »

No way, there's nothing difficult about making a modern game with the exact same timing. Since all modern consoles still render frames at 60Hz, and can sync code to each frame, there's no reason they couldn't perform the same animation and physics algorithms as the original games without a unnecessary emulator in the mix.

I bet all graphics are stored as bitmaps and audio as PCM (composed with a power tracker) like that Rockman 7 FC thing.
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Bregalad
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Post by Bregalad »

In this article, Hironobu Takeshita, the producer of the game, says that the game could not fit in a Famicom cartridge because it is too large.
This is the popular way to say "the graphics of MM9 doesn't fully respect the NES' true limitations so it can't be done on the NES".

The MMC5 can do 8x8 color area tiles and more than 256 tiles on both BG and sprites, so that may help a little.
Soneone would have to reverse engineer MM9 and scale it down to make a true NES game from it.
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Post by tepples »

kyuusaku wrote:there's no reason they couldn't perform the same animation and physics algorithms as the original games without a unnecessary emulator in the mix.
Except the new programmers might misunderstand the classic games' physics when trying to reimplement it from a disassembly of the old game. Look at the defect in the brick-breaking physics of SMB1 in Super Mario All-Stars.
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Bregalad
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Post by Bregalad »

Except the new programmers might misunderstand the classic games' physics when trying to reimplement it from a disassembly of the old game.
If professional programmers uses disasemblies from their own old games then they really suck. They should keep archives for both informatical and paper copies of their old sources code internally.
I guess the SMB1 changes probably were done on purpose. If Nintendo lost the sources in 1994 of a game they made in 1985 and that was their most sucessful, then they really, really suck.
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