psycopathicteen wrote:I wouldn't be suprised if it flickers on real hardware, knowing that the NES could only display 4 16x16 sprites on a line.
The video in that page appears to have been recorded in an emulator with the sprite limit disabled, but I don't use that in any of my emulators, and the flickering is perfectly acceptable, specially on the explosions.
I haven't tried it on my PowerPak yet, but I'm curious to know if this game is well coded enough to run flawlessly on hardware.
I have tried it on my PAL NES and it ran just fine. Flickering isn't too bad, but I think SHMUPs kinda get it easier in that area because the objects are constantly flying in all directions, whereas in a sidescroller they're often lined up horizontally. Not to mention the chaotic nature of these type of games in general probably lessens the effect even further.
In any case, that demo is very well done. I wonder if that's all there is to it, does anybody know what's the current status of the project?
thefox wrote:Flickering isn't too bad, but I think SHMUPs kinda get it easier in that area because the objects are constantly flying in all directions, whereas in a sidescroller they're often lined up horizontally.
There are plenty of shmups that have a dozen bullets lined up horizontally. I don't think the NES could handle DoDonPachi, Espgaluda, the Touhou Project games, or anything of that ilk, though I'd love to be proven wrong. At least GBA can do mid-screen OAM rewrites to make danmaku work (see Vulkanon).
I notice there are a lot of spiraling explosion where animated explosion sprites get activated one after another while rotate their spawning direction.
However they might be using a trick where the spiraling explosions are actually prerendered overlayed sprites. There might be 24x24 pixels of sprites that look like 5 individual overlapping 16x16 explosion sprites.
That could make it appear like the NES is doing more sprites than it really is.
