tepples wrote:
NES and SMS differ on where the priority is set. NES sets it on each sprite; SMS sets it on each tilemap entry in the background. In either case, color 0 allows the sprite to show through, and the blue in the dots in that example is color 0.
There's also "impossible triangle" priority on NES, where sprite A with the behind bit appears in OAM before sprite B without the behind bit. This causes any pixel of A that overlaps an opaque background pixel to appear as the background pixel, covering pixels of B. SMB3 uses this to put mushrooms behind the blocks they sprout from. RHDE: Furniture Fight uses it to put the player's units behind tall furnis in a house. The Curse of Possum Hollow uses it to put Donny behind telephone poles.
The C64 also has a similar bug, we call it "cookie cutter" it was mostly famously used in Caren and the Tangled Tentacles.
tepples wrote:
OK, then the smoke from
Thwaite. Being 8-bit doesn't rule out particles, particularly if they're drawn in alternate frames.
Oziphantom wrote:tepples wrote:You mean those spinning star-shaped coin things? Compare to the spinning round coin things in the background of Super Mario Bros. 3.
No it was the 2 large moles down the bottom, which are 48px wide each, + 24 for mayhem + 16 for smoke + 24 for sparkles on a single line. the large black monster is 70 pixels wide.
The moles would be 32 pixels wide based on the PAR difference. You'd get 16 for Mayhem, 32 for a single mole, and 16 left for smoke/sparkles that can cover 32 if drawn in alternate frames. On Game Boy Color (which has 8x8 and 8x16 sprites, 10 sprites per line, and 160 pixels per sprite), you'd get 16 for Mayhem, 48 for two moles at 24 each, and 16 left for smoke/sparkles that can cover 32 if drawn in alternate frames.
C64 can do a few effects that NES cannot do. But vice versa as well, and art direction for each console would play to its strengths. What makes the C64's advantages over the NES more reminiscent of 16-bit platforms than the NES's advantages over the C64?
You have gone through every leaf on the trees and found them all to be 8bit leaves and to which you will say its doesn't look 16bit as all of it can be done on an 8-bit. yes this is true, as it was actually done on an C64. And you have valiantly defended the NES's honor ( not that it was being attacked ) by finding an instance of each of MIM leaves in some games on the NES, and then SMS when the NES didn't quite do it. However you have missed the forest, the point is all the leaves are in MIMs forest and 25 years ago when we played it on a CRT we all said "Mate your pulling my chain, you put an A600 in the case didn't you...", it doesn't look 16 bit explicitly, it feels 16 bit, the high colour, the insane full screen scroller, the full music, the moving eyes on the trees, the way he accelerates, the way he launches of the top of slopes at full speed the way he looks down and worried when he gets to the end of the platform, the way his eyes go up and then down as he jumps, the way it has more than the fixed palette of 16 colours on screen, the smoothness of his jump, and his turn around. Since then it has been determined that it would actually be mostly possible on an A500 at EAB, but it would need some compromises, to be fair to the A500, less than the NES would need
Its a lot harder for the NES to look 16bits due to 3 crippling factors.
1.) Teeny tiny VBlank update, its really hard to push enough data through to add more animation, change the background etc. To make this worse you can't even access VRAM but have to spend even more time sending data through a tiny pigeon hole.
2.) RAM, tiny amounts of RAM, which limits the amount the game can remember or the size of the world it can update.
3.) 64 sprite pixels per line, flicker is decidedly cheapening and a key thing of the SNES was it got rid of most of it ( unless you were Konami )
I'm not saying (and have never said) that no NES game can be so high polish and update the wold and avoid sprite flicker to make you think you are playing something that is 16bit. I don't know of any examples but I didn't really own a NES, my friends had it. I started at SNES. I would imagine the NES could make a pretty decent shoot-em-up that would rival some 16bit platforms.