/vr/ - Retro Games

Yoshio Sakamoto, director of the Famicom Disk System game Metroid (1986), explains how this digitizer worked: ”Regarding the program environment, we didn’t understand it well, but as regards the image drawing environment, with the Disk System, we had to draw lots of pictures. In the old days they were really made by hand, using equipment consisting of rows of 16x16 LEDs, and we would light this up to match what had been put on graph paper, and draw it by filling the grid up one box at a time, thinking “this is green,” “this is brown”.”
“This was done with a Famicom controller, adds Kid Icarus designer Toru Osawa. A Famicom controller came out for that kind of device, but it was really one controller. It could only draw pictures, and the second controller was a microphone! (Laughs) Because of that, the cursor matched the graph paper, you would sense the color, and naturally you could fill the boxes one at a time.”
Device used by Nintendo to digitize sprite sheets. In the early years of the Famicom era, sprites rarely exceeded 16 pixels or a multiple of 16. In Super Mario Bros.1, little Mario is 16 pixels tall but he doubles his height when he eat a mushroom

The end of the hexadecimal era didn’t make the developers and the grid paper makers terminate their relationship. In order not to stretch their drawings, some graphic designers used custom grid paper with the same ratio as the pixels displayed by this or that machine. Tose, a company specialized in developing games for other entreprises, resorted to this technique on Famicom, as did Capcom with its arcade games and Hiroshi Makabe (Seiken Densetsu 1 and 2) when he worked on MSX.