koitsu wrote:
You can't "gain a new palette", but you can use split-screen to change the palette in $3Fxx to new values "mid-screen" so that you have more actual colour choices to work with from that scanline onward.
Thanks so much for clarifying this. So basically I can change the shared colour only? (so from sky blue to white, but the other colours need to remain the same.) In theory this works and thats good enough for me.
koitsu wrote:
I often tell people developing games on non-NES consoles this: if you want to make a game that's "like" the NES in graphical style, go right ahead. But unless you absolutely no-questions-asked plan on making the game for the actual NES itself, there's really no reason to limit yourself to how the system behaves or how some of the mappers are implemented (ex. MMC5's graphical extensions, scanline/IRQ counter, etc.); just make the game you want and make it look like whatever style you want.
While I agree with you, on a personal note; I've been hammering away on pixel art on and off for most of my life. I have a relatively busy schedule these days so really I have just enough time to geek out on this one. I'd like to set myself a challenge, and learn more about the NES... then I'll probably break all the rules later

koitsu wrote:
A great present-day example of this is Shovel Knight, where the graphics are "NES-like" but wouldn't work flawlessly if the game were actually designed on the NES (it would work fine on the SNES).
That game was awesome. Also an awesomely liberal use of the word 8-bit.
koitsu wrote:
On the other hand, the music done by Jake Kaufman/Virt and Manami MATSUME was actually composed in FamiTracker (I believe) and thus is 100% natively available on a NES (more specifically: on an actual Famicom -- the music uses Konami's VRC6 mapper, whose audio capabilities would not work on a non-modded NES). The MP3/in-game versions sound more "full" or "fat" because of post-mixing (ask Jake, he can tell you

). NSF is available here (read text):
http://virt.bandcamp.com/album/shovel-k ... soundtrackThis for me seemed a little strange. They started out with strict NES graphics, then changed to loosely authentic graphics, but the music stayed authentic when it could have done with the same liberties IMHO.
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