Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept)

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Drew Sebastino
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Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept)

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Sprite Flicker Ahoy!.png
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psycopathicteen
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by psycopathicteen »

This has both clever palette choices and clever uses for sprites and backgrounds.

I don't really like the white in the character. Too much contrast with the somewhat dark purple and blue. I'm thinking a light blue would work better. I don't think you need that grey, so you can replace it with the dark red color you're using.
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OneCrudeDude
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by OneCrudeDude »

Never mind the sprite flicker, what about the slowdown?

While the picture does look very nice, I can't help but feel that the detailing is a bit TOO busy for the NES' capabilities. It's kind of hard to look at at times, basically.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by Drew Sebastino »

OneCrudeDude wrote:Never mind the sprite flicker, what about the slowdown?
Well, then it will be even more accurate to the source material. :wink:
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by Bregalad »

What, what, do you mean, the NES is supposed to be able to render that image ?!
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by tepples »

It doesn't look too far off from what has been done on NES. The explosions aren't any bigger than those in the NES game Thwaite; they just look more like popcorn. And both the floor and the craft above it can be drawn as background. With CHR ROM banking, there isn't much of a 256 tile limit.
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tokumaru
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by tokumaru »

tepples wrote:With CHR ROM banking, there isn't much of a 256 tile limit.
Or with MMC5's extended attributes.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Well, here's an "improved" version:
GunForce 2 NES.png
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Here's a picture of how it originally looked (well, not exactly, but you get the idea.): (I hate how vibrant the NES's color palette is. I couldn't find a brown that didn't look straight up red, so I just used grey for the plane. The same situation happened with the train):
Original.png
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Now, I have absolutely no clue how you'd transfer this scene:
GunForce 2.png
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OneCrudeDude
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by OneCrudeDude »

Do a Kid Niki and make that take a sprite while the ship is a BG object that moves around. Of course, the Tank is too big to be used as a sprite, so only use around 16 pixels or so.

Image

Alternatively, just remove the tank entirely and just walk around on the ground to shoot the boss. I find it amazing what sorts of workarounds and creative liberties contract developers had to come up with when it came to ports.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by Drew Sebastino »

OneCrudeDude wrote:Alternatively, just remove the tank entirely and just walk around on the ground to shoot the boss.
If you mean the train, (the thing the player is standing on) I'm not sure how that would work. The whole level is fought on the train and you go to the front of it, which you are seeing there. I know this really isn't practical and that the developers would never do something like this, but could you actually have it to where the boss and the train are both BGs? You'd have tiles of the train moving around and the scrolling counter acting it so it looks like the boss is flying around. (The boss would use more than one palette, unlike the train.) I don't even know how this would work without making a million different tiles and I imagine processing it all would be a nightmare... Because of how the NES uses tiles, would it actually be possible to have hardware in the cart that renders the tiles of the train moving? I guess you could do this with CHR ram and some sort of enhancement chip?
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by tepples »

You could have a second PPU that produces tile data. This is how Wide Boy works. But for the price of designing such an ASIC, you could already have made your own game console out of an ARM SoC.
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tokumaru
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by tokumaru »

I think that the obvious fix would be to not have the train and the boss overlap. Would that change the gameplay much?
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by Drew Sebastino »

tokumaru wrote:I think that the obvious fix would be to not have the train and the boss overlap. Would that change the gameplay much?
Even if they don't overlap, you still need all the tiles of the train moving, unless you want the boss to float in one place...
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by tokumaru »

As long as they don't overlap (and I mean vertically overlap, so even if they are horizontally apart that'd be overlapping), you can move both the train and the enemy freely, in both axes.
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Re: Quite Possibly the Most Ambitious NES Port Ever (Concept

Post by OneCrudeDude »

Predator does something similar for the big-mode stages.

Image

Arnold has been rendered as a background image, while everything else, including the mid-air platforms, are sprites that scroll. So what you could do is have the floor and tank be the lower layer, and the flying machine to be the upper layer. That means the machine can't fly below the tank and touch the floor, limiting its area of movement. You could move it horizontally, though, and I'm pretty sure you could make the machine fly 'under' the tank, by performing some sort of overlapping trick. So I'd say you should have the tank take up most of the horizontal space, since if the machine were to go under the "blank area", it might disappear? I actually wonder.

It wasn't uncommon for NES ports of arcade games to either rework some aspects (the mazes in the Contra bases for example) or to cut stages out entirely.
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