How common are NES games which use 8x16 tiles?

[GradualGames]

My impression is the vast majority of games use 8x8 tiles...is this correct or are 8x16 tiles common also?

Regards,
-Zom

[Celius]

I think Zelda might use 8x16 tiles, but this is pure hypothesis, because I know Zelda: Link's Awakening on GBC uses 8x16 tiles.

I use 8x16, because you have twice the amount of spritage on screen, and you can take from both pattern tables. But this comes with disadvantages too (wasting 2 tiles for really small sprites like bullets).

[smkd]

SMB3 uses 8x16 sprites. I'm think the batman games use 8x16 sprites. i'd figure older games would use 8x8 tiles since you couldn't really afford to waste tiles like celius said. to add to the above post, 8x16 sprites means you also spend less cpu time writing OAM since there's less tiles to write when using larger sprites.

[tepples]

Contra uses 8x16 sprites, and so does Smash TV.

But if you're using 8x16 sprites, you also have either bigger game objects or more game objects, which tends to cancel out the CPU reduction.

[Celius]

Well, my main character is made of only 4 sprites when standing still now that I've used 8x16 sprites. He is 16 pixels wide and 32 tall. If I were to use 8x8, it would be 8 sprites, which seems like a really big waste. With 8x16 you just cut that in half.

[AWJ]

Hiryu no Ken Special uses 8x16 sprites in order to use both halves of the pattern table address space for sprites. It's a 1-on-1 fighting game with a simple background made of just a few repeating tiles. Player 1's character uses the first half of the pattern table, Player 2's character uses the second half of the pattern table, and the tiles for the BG are repeated in every 4KB bank of the CHR ROM (minus the banks containing the graphics for the title screen, demo screens, etc, and the banks that don't contain graphic patterns at all--like many Culture Brain games, HnKS has data stuffed into its CHR ROM)

Gyruss is another game that uses 8x16 sprites for the same reason--the game uses lots of different sprites at once, but has almost no BG graphics at all.

If you examined a wider variety of games I bet you'd find many that use 8x16 sprites--I suspect your dataset might be biased towards games on TxROM (MMC3) boards, which are very unlikely to render sprites from both halves of the pattern table because it messes up the MMC3's pseudo-scanline counter if you do, and MMC3 supports fine-grained CHR banking so there's little need to.

For the record, Hiryu no Ken Special is SLRROM (what's the difference between this board and SLROM anyway?) and Gyruss is CNROM.

[BMF54123]

SMB2 is one MMC3 game that uses 8x16 sprites from both pattern tables, but it doesn't use the scanline counter, so...