/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7040452
what bothers me the most of NES era games is not the graphics but the limited color palette
for example the sprites could only display 3 colors, I still play the games and have finished DQ I, II, III and even IV with it's horrific use of pink as town floortiles, but it sometimes pissed me off seeing the Mario sprite from 3 being only black, white and red.

Ok guys, bear with me for a second. So a while ago, I was toying with a concept of an NES romhack for Megaman 3 that used the standard control for the first controller and mapped certain new functions to the second. For instance, pressing left or right on the second controller's d-pad would cycle weapons; pressing A would dash, and pressing B would fire the buster if a special weapon was equipped. The idea here was that on an emulator, you could take a single SNES controller and map the buttons however you wanted, effectively giving you four additional buttons to use for whatever in your romhack. One could recreate a controller that simply plugs in to both controller slots on a physical NES to take advantage of this feature.

So then I got to thinking, some games use stacked sprites for more detail, right? And after a certain amount of sprites are drawn on a scanline, you wind up with flickering to display them all, which sort of conflicts with these higher color count sprites. So what if, let's say, you took a basic MM3 rom, programmed it to render half the colors of each sprite, and then took another rom, had it display the other half of the colors, and then combined the display output together, superimposing each on top of each other to create composite sprites without the drawbacks? Effectively, you'd have two stacked NESes that would connect together at the AV output, have their signal combined, and output to a single screen. This would open up more color depth on sprites, double your sound channels, and possibly relieve stress on each individual processor. Would such a thing work in theory?

Why didn't more NES games use stacked sprites to achieve more colors per character/object?

>>438890
>>438905
>NES didn't exactly have the most amazing color palette

If you remove the limitations on how many colors could be displayed at a time, you'd actually be surprised at how good the NES color palette was.

Check out this article: http://www.duelinganalogs.com/article/the-nes-that-never-was/