NES graphic memory limit

A place for your artistic side. Discuss techniques and tools for pixel art on the NES, GBC, or similar platforms.

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tepples
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Re: NES graphic memory limit

Post by tepples »

On GBA, you might fake the "breathing" of a walking mech's legs by messing with the affine registers.
Sik
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Re: NES graphic memory limit

Post by Sik »

To be fair the ability to load a lot of graphics in no time is useless if you need to store them compressed anyway because otherwise they won't fit in the ROM (so you end up losing even more time now thanks to having to keep the CPU busy doing decompression). There's a reason why Neo Geo games were so expensive, they had gigantic ROMs in comparison to other games.

Incidentally this is also why the NGP(C) is stuck at 2bpp graphics, because they had prioritized smooth animations over colorful graphics. Use 2bpp graphics → less space needed for a sprite → less bandwidth needed to load them and less ROM space needed to store them → leaves room for more animations.
psycopathicteen
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Re: NES graphic memory limit

Post by psycopathicteen »

That animation would take up almost half the DMA, and half the VRAM with double buffering.

@Sik, I agree. Compression is not a good enough reason to use VRAM over CHR-ROM, because you're only going to be able to compress some of the data, some of the time.
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