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Choco1980 posted:Did any other games feature multiple direction scrolling like SMB3 did with its extra processor chip? I want to say it popped up in one of the later Mega Man games... Sure. I'm not so sure about Mega Man - I think they all only scroll in one direction at a time - but a few others come to mind. Zen: Intergalactic Ninja, Street Fighter 2010, RC Pro AM, all three Wizards & Warriors games and Isolated Warrior off the top of my head. e: Oh, and the game that never was, Bio Force Ape.  vvv I especially adore La-Mulana for nailing the perfect MSX look, including most or even all of its restrictions. It's wonderfully nostalgic. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Nov 21, 2015 |
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Nov 21, 2015 23:20
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shovel knight might not be perfectly NES but it still holds to more of the restrictions than just about anything else out there. I don't think it would gain more by being more slavishly restrictive to the NES's incapabilities, and really you can only get so close to that before poo poo just starts becoming annoying isntead of immersive (lets include slowdown and flickering too, that'll be real immersive!) It's a far cry from a poo poo ton of indie games that just have programmer art or are low effort poo poo and claim to be eight bit. There's a precious few of them that actually DO look almost exactly like the old games. Like the first La Mulana, and You Have To Win the Game.
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Nov 21, 2015 23:20
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:e: Oh, and the game that never was, Bio Force Ape. The gently caress  ?What kind of wizardry did they do?
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Nov 22, 2015 00:30
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Bio Force Ape was an MMC3 game, same as Super Mario Bros. 3... as to how they managed to get it so fast-paced, I don't know, but I'm guessing it's because there's so little going on besides the main character jumping on things. Bio Force Ape has an amazing backstory, too; it was first mentioned in a magazine, I think Nintendo Power, back around 1990, but then SETA shut down production on the game and it disappeared. Until someone claimed to have a prototype of it and posted a bunch of (fake) screenshots. It was all revealed to be a prank in the end... until a few years later, when a real prototype copy surfaced, was auctioned off, and ROM dumped.
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Nov 22, 2015 00:42
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I'm not going to lie, part of me is skeptical that the "real" copy isn't just another hoax game put on a cart. It's super impressive for NES technology, but the creative con job history the game has is hard to ignore. I'd want to hear from someone who worked on the game. Has that happened?
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Nov 22, 2015 01:03
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how come  gets to have 5 colours?
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Nov 22, 2015 04:40
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Great Joe posted:how come He's got layered sprites working for him. It's really expensive for the NES to do that though, since there's only 4 active palettes allowed at a time for sprites. This is a good write up on how they went about deciding what they wanted to do when creating the look for shovel knight. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidDAngelo/20140625/219383/Breaking_the_NES_for_Shovel_Knight.php
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Nov 22, 2015 04:47
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Great Joe posted:how come That's done with a little bit of trickery; Mega Man's face is a separate sprite from his body.
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Nov 22, 2015 05:14
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His face, or his head? Cause if it's JUST his face, and his helmet is a separate sprite, that really IS some sneaky design.
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Nov 22, 2015 06:31
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Choco1980 posted:His face, or his head? Cause if it's JUST his face, and his helmet is a separate sprite, that really IS some sneaky design.  Just the face.
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Nov 22, 2015 06:34
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Mega Man is really impressive that way. His face is the yellow-white-black palette, and the body is the black-blue-blue palette. This means they can just change the body palette whenever Mega Man equips a new weapon, and additionally, they can use that palette for whatever the projectile that weapon launches is. The yellow palette, meanwhile, is also used for Mega Man's normal bullets and his health bar. The weapon bar uses the body palette again. This leaves only two palettes (six colors) for enemies at the same time on any on screen, which seems like very little, doesn't it? Economizing with palettes and figuring out ways to reuse them cleverly was a big part of it. The later Mega Man games in particular have some of the best graphics on the NES, bar none.     Look at how organic those trees are, and how well they hide the 16x16 grid nature of the game. That dragon is particularly interesting. It is made mostly out of background tiles; there is no way to have a sprite that big, though some of the details are sprites. Yet it looks flowing and dynamic, and the edges between colors (and thus color palettes) are so seamless. How they did that is pretty amazing, actually. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Nov 22, 2015 |
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Nov 22, 2015 10:30
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I thought I read an article about NES visual design a while ago, which showed a splash screen or title screen or something, which, kinda like those trees, had a lot of diagonal elements. By very clever use of the common color (black?) they managed to make it blend in perfectly, you wouldn't even know the limitations if you didn't know what to look for. But I can't find that article or screenshot anymore.
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Nov 22, 2015 11:28
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Casual LP Thread: Come for the enthusiasm, stay for the effort(posts) 
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Nov 22, 2015 14:34
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The NES posts are very interesting, thanks!
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Nov 22, 2015 14:52
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my dad posted:Casual LP Thread: Come for the enthusiasm, stay for the effort(posts) It's all because Someone Was Wrong On The Internet.
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Nov 22, 2015 14:54
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Carbon dioxide posted:I thought I read an article about NES visual design a while ago, which showed a splash screen or title screen or something, which, kinda like those trees, had a lot of diagonal elements. By very clever use of the common color (black?) they managed to make it blend in perfectly, you wouldn't even know the limitations if you didn't know what to look for. I've actually read the article you're talking about, but I can't recall where it was either. I have however found an article specifically about Shovel Knight that discusses the NES's limitations, as explained by the devs. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidDAngelo/20140625/219383/Breaking_the_NES_for_Shovel_Knight.php
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Nov 22, 2015 15:06
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They went pretty hog wild with title screens sometimes, since they could just devote all four palettes (plus sprites) to making it look kickass without having to worry about what it would look like in motion or sprite flickering or whatever. The title screen to Bad Dudes, for example, has a lot of stuff going on, although I myself have a weakness for the cleaner, more stylish ones like Ninja Gaiden 3.   But, yeah, the Shovel Knight people clearly knew what they were doing, ain't never said anything else. But I think the departures they chose to make were critical ones; scrolling backgrounds in particular stick out so much as to make the product profoundly non-NES. Whether you feel that is an improvement or not is up to you. I think the game came out well, though I clearly don't agree with some of the closing statements in that article. That article mentions another really cool game, though... Summer Carnival '92: Recca, which as you can tell from the date was developed very late in the NES's lifecycle. Here's a video of it in action; now, this game is extraordinary in the lengths they must've had to go to in order to make it look and run the way it does. It's hard to appreciate just why, but just the sheer number of sprites on screen and the speed at which everything happens should tell you a bit. It is also tough as balls and I've never gotten anywhere in it. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Nov 22, 2015 |
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Nov 22, 2015 15:38
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Summer Carnival games were made specifically for shmup tournaments that would go around the country. There weren't a lot of cartridges made, and you could only buy them new at the site of the tournament. There's four games, though I think Recca is the most impressive one in the series.
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Nov 22, 2015 16:52
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CJacobs posted:Shovel Knight's visual style is probably best described as, "NES aesthetic without the physical limitations". I can't say I blame you considering how batshit hard it is. The thing about switching the gameplay style that is ducktalesvania to variable bomberman with over complicated jumping mechanics is annoying especially when the game isn't designed for it in any way at all. Literally none of the level layouts have changed aside from making some vertical jumps just SLIGHTLY higher to give an excuse for the stupid bomb jump- which you wouldn't even need if the double jump was actually worth anything. Also you lose out on being able to use artifacts which means the godly crutch for people that suck at games, the phase locket, is no longer at your beck and call. It's kind of bullshit.
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Nov 22, 2015 17:37
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Question: I'm trying to make some videos for here but my audio is decidedly poo poo. Anyone minds if I use this thread for a bit of an LP technique self-improvement? I mean, there's having low effort in editing and comentary and there's forcing you to listen to the creaking of my table because I can't figure out how to remove the thing.
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Nov 22, 2015 17:55
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anilEhilated posted:Question: I'm trying to make some videos for here but my audio is decidedly poo poo. Anyone minds if I use this thread for a bit of an LP technique self-improvement? As someone who's occasionally had to do this, the only way I've found makes the audio a lil' weird at times, because it involves first cancelling the noise in general, then specifically noise cancelling the creaky thing in question, and it's not guaranteed to work throughout. But either way,  
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Nov 22, 2015 20:44
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Let me just say, Crab, don't stop with the technical NES talk. I find any talking about the NES super fascinating above all other game topics (mostly because of the impact the system had on my childhood) and the casual space we have here makes it far easier to keep up than like jumping headfirst into things over in the "hundred replies a day" style of the main games sub-forum. Also holy poo poo that Recca game. I'm woefully underinformed when it comes to non US titles. I do however know enough about the hardware to be awestruck at how much they were able to cram into a single cart. Does this have extra chip power inside it? Because holy crap does it do some surprising things with speed and graphic processing. Like this seems like the obvious progenitor of the modern bullet hell shmup sub-genre right here. I'm always happy to see major ambition in NES design from companies that aren't the "big 3" (Nintendo themselves, Capcom, or Konami seem to dominate the field with the "big" games). Often these go unnoticed in history. Games like say, Totally Rad, which has some of the most gorgeous sprite work on the system despite being only a so so game, with graphics on par with those later tricks Mega man pulled off. Or games that are just ambitious, like Godzilla: Monster of Monsters which doesn't have the best graphics, but makes the kaiju enormous as far as NES sprites go, and the game has TONS of potential length to it, with literally hundreds of stages possible (though you'll unlikely go through them all in one playthrough, and they're mostly pretty routinely patterned). Or the gems that almost were, like all the ambitious stuff Color Dreams had planned just before they completely changed everything to become the born-again Wisdom Tree, like the Hellraiser game they had gotten the rights to that was going to have internal chipsets to make a game over a hundred levels long, supposedly unlike anything ever seen on the system. I've heard mixed reports (all that remains are prototypes of the chips and a title screen, as that's about as far as they got in actually physically making the game before halting) but some rumors suggest it might have even been a rudimentary FPS--during the days when stuff like Wolfenstein 3D or Faceball 2000 were all that were around of the genre.
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Nov 22, 2015 21:07
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Two guns, thousands of robots, one rear end in a top hat: Let's Play Hard Reset Level 1 Hard Reset is a shooty game that is mostly spent running around in wild panic. I'm doing this live (bad idea) and I'm fighting my audio setup the whole way, so any tips or feedback are appreciated. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Nov 23, 2015 |
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Nov 23, 2015 17:14
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anilEhilated posted:Two guns, thousands of robots, one rear end in a top hat: Let's Play Hard Reset Oh hey, Hard Reset! Love that game. I was actually thinking about LPing it myself for this thread before I decided on Transformers. I like that you're trying to keep things pretty breezy, I think it works well for the game. As for constructive criticism, one problem is that the video was really quiet. And, even with my speakers turned up, there were still a few points where I was struggling to hear you over the gameplay. Apart from that, it sounded like you need to be more confident about the whole process. During the part around 6 minutes in where you were explaining why you started the LP it almost sounded like you were trying to justify its existence, which isn't something you should feel like you need to do. But, you mentioned you're making this so you could get more comfortable with doing videos, so I'm sure you already realize that.
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Nov 23, 2015 18:02
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anilEhilated posted:Two guns, thousands of robots, one rear end in a top hat: Let's Play Hard Reset Well, you were worried about table creaking, so I can definitely say that what you've done with the audio definitely helps! Hard Reset is indeed a tough game (Although it was, as I recall, even harder before it got patched and DLC'd... Guess which poor bastard reviewed it on release?), but, apart from what Wanamingo's mentioned, you're not doing bad, so it's just a case of practice.
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Nov 24, 2015 00:41
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Choco1980 posted:Does this have extra chip power inside it? In a sense, all NES games do! Okay, so the NES itself basically consists of three units: the CPU, the PPU, and the APU. The CPU is your general purpose central processor unit (specifically, a Ricoh 2A03/2A07) and handles general stuff, game logic and so on. The PPU does all the graphics stuff I mentioned above, and translates it all into an NTSC or PAL signal. The APU does audio synthesis and mixing. Each has its own set of registers and RAM. The NES CPU can map up to 64 kilobytes of memory, but it only has 2 kb of actual RAM. Many memory addresses actually refer either to the same blocks of RAM, or to things that aren't RAM at all. For instance, communicating with the PPU is done by writing memory to a few specific memory addresses which are mapped onto an internal bus shared between the PPU and CPU. The PPU has its own address space and its own dedicated RAM, which is not directly accessible from the CPU, so instead you write specific values to these memory mapped registers in order to make the PPU do what you want. Other parts of the memory space are mapped to the game cartridge itself, which can contain not just program ROM, but RAM and even more sophisticated components. Furthermore, because the NES cannot address more than 64K, there is a bank switching mechanism that can map new areas of cartridge ROM or RAM onto the CPU's memory space. If all this is mumbo-jumbo to you, the upshot is this: NES cartridges are not just ROM chips with data on them. They actively interact with the main system architecture. The simplest and earliest cartridges used technology called NROM. Super Mario Bros. is an example of this. NROM cartridges are very simple, they have only program data (PRG-ROM) and some graphics data (CHR-ROM). PRG-ROM is addressable by the CPU and is where program code resides, CHR-ROM is addressable by the PPU (but not directly by the CPU) and contains tiles, sprites etc. With NROM, these are mapped at fixed places in the memory map and never change. They're basically just soldered straight in. This quickly proved inadequate for more complex games, so new chips called UxROM (actually two variants, UNROM and UOROM) were made and used for games like the original Mega Man, Castlevania and more. UxROM is capable of bank switching, and therefore supports bigger games. The next evolution from Nintendo's side was called MMC1. MMC1 was a chip setup that existed in various configurations collectively referred to as SxROM. Besides bank switching, MMC1 supported PRG-RAM in addition to PRG-ROM - in other words, it extended the amount of available work memory above the 2kb the NES had internally. Some SxROM boards also featured battery backup, allowing for persistent save games! Examples are Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and many more. MMC1 was wildly popular and many games used it. MMC2 was an improvement that, to my knowledge, was only used in Punch-Out!!, and was soon superceded by MMC3, which was also extremely popular. Super Mario Bros. 3, Mega Man 3 and onward, and many more use this mapper. Other companies had their own proprietary mappers, too, like Konami's VRC series and Namco's Namco-163. Most used one of Nintendo's aforementioned mappers, though; it was cheaper and easier that way. The fact that NES games are not just code, by the way, makes the job for emulators more difficult since they don't just need the program ROM, but also need to know the details on all the other crap the cartridge was doing that the program code depended on. The prevalent ROM format for NES games, iNES, contains this information in the header, but the emulator needs to have specific support for the mapper a particular game uses. Recca uses MMC3, and is thus hardware-wise on the same level as Super Mario Bros. 3. Phew, that's a lot of text. Enough for now. There's way more could I tell though and I want to write a post about scrolling at some point. Maybe I should make a video about it..? Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Nov 24, 2015 |
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Nov 24, 2015 12:49
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Effort in the casual LP thread? Why I never! (go for it)
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Nov 24, 2015 15:59
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As someone not at all familiar with the inner workings of early consoles, I find these posts super-interesting! If you're up for more, they're appreciated
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Nov 24, 2015 20:19
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Like I said, super interesting, because I'm a total NES geek, and only smart enough to follow what you're throwing with out actually being able to program a thing myself. The mapper stuff makes sense to me, I was in a different forum devoted to emulating right when the Nintendo DS NES emulator (the creatively named NesDS) got picked up by a guy who knew what he was doing after having been abandoned and just so-so for about 3 years, and the biggest work he had while he was posting updates was having to integrate individual mapper supports. There's several hundred out there, some really obscure. Like the pornish games like Bubble Bath Babes use a mapper nobody else does. IIRC his other big hurdle was proper FDS support, due to the very different sound setup and the disk flipping the system used. I'm not going to link it because of  but it's probably one of the best NES emulators of all time. Just make sure you get the one with the "open source" label. I've been curious for some time also of seeing what the people who are super technical about the hardware, like the people who speedrun Mike Tyson's Punchout! have to say about its timing input. (fun fact, emulators and flat screens have frame delays that make them imperfect to using on actual hardware on a CRT screen. There are very few games where frame perfect accuracy makes a difference, but MTPO is one of them. There's lots of tricks you just flat out can't do on other methods of playing the game.) In the same vein I'd be curious to see the timing differences in say, the NES-101 or like 3rd party hardwares like Retron systems.
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Nov 24, 2015 21:09
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For my birthday, I was gifted a Blue Yeti microphone. With no real recording experience of any kind and without any refresher on the game, I did a Gunstar Heroes - Extreme Difficulty Run - Timeron, How Long Can You Last?  Not Long Enough Basically, I used to play this game every year, but haven't in maybe half a decade? I explain some of the nuances of the game that are required to beat Extreme difficulty, and also talk about whatever else that comes to mind. If you can guess which level I dieded, you get an imaginary cookie. Or cake. Dessert of preference really. Best game? Best game.
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Nov 25, 2015 10:49
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Reading those NES posts was really interesting, thanks crab buddy. I'm in a similar boat with Choco1980 here; I have a fairly good understanding of the inner workings of consoles because I used to be a tiny bit into romhacking, but I never dove in that deep. Good reads. Also, here's the next batch of our silly videos.  Part 10: WELCOME TO HUMANFACTS Part 11: JESUS CAN'T BE CRUSHED?! Part 12: NOT REALLY KICKING  Playlist Part 10: MEGA EPISODE: MID-BOSS MAYHEM Part 11: WAS IT ALL FOR THE BURT GANG?!! Part 12: DIE PLZ, THANK U Playlist
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Nov 25, 2015 14:55
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I legitimately love that this thread turned into NES awesomeness 101.
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Nov 26, 2015 08:38
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Let's Play Blue Estate https://youtu.be/t7j3bcHqCe0 This game charmed me 5 minutes in, and I hope it warms your heart too! So join me on this wild ride to save our girl(?)friend(?)/girlfriend(?) and teach the world the name of Tony. Luciano. Edit: Now with working subs! Jobbo_Fett fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Dec 23, 2015 |
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Nov 26, 2015 21:46
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I figure the thing to do in spirit is to actually play a Japan-only Famicom game for the thread (yes I know I already have an LP going, screw it), so here we go, complete with shamefully foreign English and Japanese: I found trying to talk about the technical details while playing to be too hard, so here's the technical spiel in text form instead: Remember what I said about tiles? Well, the NES PPU has space for two screen-sized blocks of tile references, called nametables. The cart can configure the system either lay these out horizontally or vertically; so you have your choice of a "left/right" setup or a "top/bottom" setup. Either way, you can set the PPU to scroll within this space with pixel precision. Every scanline, the PPU fetches a scroll offset from memory and uses that to figure out what tiles to draw. Sprites are unaffected by this system entirely and are always positioned in screen space. There is another important thing going on: mirroring. Imagine a 2x2 grid of screen-sized blocks. Now imagine that you have set the system up in left/right mode; those two screens occupy the top left and top right blocks of the 2x2 grid. What's in the other two slots? The same screens! The same goes the other way around, if you configure the system that way. Scrolling works across this mirror boundary, so that if you scroll past the end of the screen it will appear to wrap around. This has important implications for scrolling. You see, as long as you're scrolling within the two screens that are available to you normally, you can scroll perfectly smoothly and wrap around when you reach the edge and everything will look fine the whole way around. This is how games that only scroll in a single direction work, like Super Mario Bros. Games that need to scroll in more than one direction can't do this for both axes. They have to choose one axis to be the "smooth" one, and the other was, well, the ugly one. What do I mean by that? Look at this screenshot from the video:  See those weird artifacts at the top of the screen? Those are caused by the fact that the top of the screen is the same memory as the bottom of the screen, since Getsu Fuuma Den is a horizontally scrolling game. Thus, the top and bottom of the screen share palettes, and there's nothing you can do about that other than try to hide it. The programmers on this game didn't try very hard. You can see the same artifact in games like Super Mario Bros. 3 and Little Nemo on the left and right sides of the screen, or games like Final Fantasy on the top and bottom.  Some games hide it better... for example, the top and bottom 8 pixels are typically not displayed on an NTSC television (the NES is 256x240, but the effective visible area is 256x224 due to overscan), so if you're smart with your palette management (again, unlike Konami with this game) you can hide artifacts on those edges pretty well. You'll also note that the leftmost 8 pixels in that screenshot are all black; that's a feature most games enabled that simply shuts off rendering for the leftmost 8 pixels to hide artifacts like this and allow sprites to slide smoothly in from off-screen. There is no such feature for the right side, though, so hiding artifacts on that side is much harder. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Nov 26, 2015 |
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Nov 26, 2015 22:21
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Hard Reset - level 2. HD version probably still processing. I fiddled with the audio and tried to record it in 60 fps as opposed to 30, hopefully it turned out better. The noise is getting worse, though. Also featuring me forgetting what upgrade I bought literally two minutes ago. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Nov 28, 2015 |
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Nov 28, 2015 21:19
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I'm still looking for a second to do an LP of The Suffering. Just PM me details of when you're available and I'll get back to you.
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Nov 29, 2015 09:33
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Mycroft Holmes posted:I'm still looking for a second to do an LP of The Suffering. Just PM me details of when you're available and I'll get back to you. pretty short lp. reckon you'll actually need at least a few minutes
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Nov 29, 2015 09:44
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Is this video stuttering really badly for anybody else? e: checked it on my phone, it's stuttering really badly e2: the blaster was my go-to weapon when I played this, it was (pretty obviously) good at dealing with the hordes the game throws at you. Wanamingo fucked around with this message at 10:44 on Nov 29, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 10:32
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dreezy posted:pretty short lp. reckon you'll actually need at least a few minutes haha, nice one. 
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Nov 29, 2015 10:37
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Wanamingo posted:Is this video stuttering really badly for anybody else? I'm getting the stuttering too, yeah. Hopefully the problem is just with the encoding and not the source video. D:
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Nov 29, 2015 10:41
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