I looked at your
Mayhem examples from a "how'm I gonna port this to NES?" point of view.
Both NES and Master System can do that effect using sprite-to-background priority.
Oziphantom wrote:Also note the birds outline is black, but the fish is dark blue, watch as it crosses the water line and switches to black.
In that particular scene, there appear to be two enemy palettes from the NES-ist point of view: one for submerged enemies and one for enemies above the water line.
Oziphantom wrote:https://youtu.be/ldo2ewLBt3Y?t=1865 note how mayhem is between things in front of the pink and (would be purplish mountains on a crt) but behind the green and the trees.
Crouch for five seconds on a white block in
Super Mario Bros. 3 to see a similar effect.
Oziphantom wrote:Also note how the eyes on some trees follow while others don't.
Artistically yes, it's attention to detail, but technically not more difficult than the "some pumpkins are decoys" rule in
Haunted: Halloween '85.
Oziphantom wrote:Then watch as he collects the invulnerability pickup and sparkles.
Or Sonic in 8-bit
Sonic the Hedgehog.
It's a repeating 16x16 pixel pattern shifted as a second repeating background layer. I've seen that sort of effect in
Battletoads, and I've implemented it before. In a CHR ROM game, you'd instead do like
MetalStorm, use 4 BG + 2 OBJ switching, and devote one of the 4 background windows to parallax tiles for this effect.
Oziphantom wrote:https://youtu.be/ldo2ewLBt3Y?t=2857 Waterfall + that enemy and then there are still more enemies on the same line with mayhem and then at the end he gets invun which he could go back and visit the monster again.
Yes, that's a large enemy, and I concede it'd probably the first thing to start flickering.
You mean those spinning star-shaped coin things? Compare to the spinning round coin things in the background of
Super Mario Bros. 3.
Oziphantom wrote:To do this game on a NES or SMS you would have to drop the enemies and mayhem to 16x16
Or 16x24 (
Balloon Fight size), which would maintain roughly the same size given the pixel aspect ratio difference. A sprite that's 24 C64 pixels wide is 24*3/4 = 18 square pixels wide, and a sprite that's 16 NES pixels wide is 16*8/7 = 18 square pixels wide.
Oziphantom wrote:the graphics is not the only thing that makes you say "is that an Amiga?" because his animation - he has over 50 frames, and the smoothness of his movement and momentum are also quite high for an 8bit machine - they are not perfect, but very high for an 8 bit.
There are about 50 frames in each player character in
The Curse of Possum Hollow as well.
But not much color depth, nor much frame rate on the background.
That one's impressive. But again, not much frame rate on the background.
EDIT (2020-08-19): Correctly identify which game has the crouching on white blocks