nesdev.org

Note: the below videos are in Japanese and require you to have a Niconico account. If you can't read Japanese they'll "mostly" make sense (depending on how technical you are), but reading the written text helps greatly in some cases. There are 5 videos:

http://www.nicovideo.jp/mylist/24061717

If you want clarification of what's shown in the videos or need some help translating/understanding things, just post a reply and I'll try to get an explanation up.

P.S. -- The video with Rockman 2 in it (oldest video, 5:55 mark) -- because I'm sure someone will bring it up -- uses an optical illusion. Using sprites for the building windows and ledges, the sprites are moved downward on their Y-axis (incremented) while the actual background is panned vertically at a slower rate. The result = optical illusion of panning upwards. :-)

With today's emulators, which include so many debugging features, it's pretty easy to figure out how these effects are pulled off. You can disable/enable sprites, look at the unmodified tilemap, look at the patterns to see if they are being modified, and step through the code that manipulates everything.

Still, it would be nice if there was a sort of "guide" for these kinds of effects, with screenshots/videos and detailed explanations about how they work (I'm not really sure what these videos contain, I can't watch them). That would be a wonderful addition to our wiki. I would certainly want to contribute with some info on games I have personally researched, like Bucky O'Hare.

I'm a little surprised the videos didn't have sprite priority "stuff" shown, like at the very start of CV1 (main castle doorway), and the "swamp" of CV2. A lot of emulators got those wrong, resulting in Simon walking into the castle wall (literally) in CV1, and the lower half of his body being visible in CV2.

So yeah, it would be neat to compile all the tricks into a page where it might give upcoming programmers ideas.

After registering, I did a quick watch (at the least) the nes related one. It was interesting. Didn't took the time to read it what they said but will do someday.

I can't even read enough to register. I found a link with "ROGU-IN" (log in?) at the top, then a yellow button with "AKAUNTO" (account?), which takes me to a page mentioning 525 yen, "PUREMIAMU" (premium?), and what appears to be free accounts not being able to play through the entirety of a 25-minute video (bottom left).

I also can't read enough even to register.

Well if there is anything really interesting and new, please tell us. I already knew about the MM2 trick and I admit it's really impressive. By the way I think it should be possible to actually do something similar with one BG layer with really narrow $2006 writes midscanline. You'd need a "black zone" to compensate the CPU/PPU alignment jittering though.

Then maybe we should make some kind of community account that everybody can share (if they allow multiple connection of course).

Or make a tutorial on how to create an account with images. This will not translate the videos though.

Couldn't someone grab the .swf out of their temporary files (if it is indeed a .swf) and upload to Youtube?

UncleSporky wrote:Couldn't someone grab the .swf out of their temporary files (if it is indeed a .swf) and upload to Youtube?

Video sites often leave a .flv or .mp4 file in your temporary internet files folder if you use IE. If the video really contains anything new or interesting (as opposed to just a raw capture of the game's video), you guys who managed to register could re-upload the video for the rest of us to watch.

Use the Nico Video Redirector.
http://www.mmcafe.com/nico.html

Give it the URL of a video, not a playlist.

Worked fine. thanks.

Anyway, nope. Do I need glasses?

Looks like they're only talking about sprite/BG trickery, not raster effects or pattern manipulation (although pattern manipulation of the water tiles is certainly necessary to make that huge ass ship leave the port). There are some interesting tricks there, in game that I haven't played before (or not to the point where such effects take place).

tokumaru wrote:Looks like they're only talking about sprite/BG trickery, not raster effects or pattern manipulation (although pattern manipulation of the water tiles is certainly necessary to make that huge ass ship leave the port). There are some interesting tricks there, in game that I haven't played before (or not to the point where such effects take place).

Battletoads used a similar technique to get parallax scrolling in certain stages (like the cave level).

Same with Metal Storm, except Metal Storm did it with CHR bankswitching instead of CHR-RAM!

tokumaru wrote:Looks like they're only talking about sprite/BG trickery, not raster effects or pattern manipulation (although pattern manipulation of the water tiles is certainly necessary to make that huge ass ship leave the port). There are some interesting tricks there, in game that I haven't played before (or not to the point where such effects take place).

They discuss raster effect "stuff" (e.g. changing video modes mid-scanline, and a bunch of other things) in the later (more recent) videos (mainly covering Megadrive, SFC, and PCE). It greatly depends on the console. The NES/FC videos didn't discuss any raster stuff.

Ok, so what's the red and green thing?