/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.1675115]

Why did NES games so frequently get the colors of characters wrong?
Look at this, how hard is it to make his hat the same color of his shirt? Hell, it happend on the SNES, too. Agahnim and Kefka wore green in their games despite wearing red in the official artwork.

Did developers just not care?

[Anonymous No.1675128]

>>1675115
The NES had around 56 colors at the very most, and only 3 of them could be on a sprite at once.

[Anonymous No.1675129]

>>1675128

[Anonymous No.1675130]

Terra's green hair always perplexed me, and they definitely had enough colors available with Celes right there.

[Anonymous No.1675131]

Why did the official artwork so often get the colors of characters wrong?

[Anonymous No.1675134]

>>1675130
This is because Nomura was in charge of bringing some sanity into Amano's designs, back then. If not for Nomura, pretty much every NES / SNES FF character would be blonde.

[Anonymous No.1675146]

>>1675131
I was hoping for this response.

[Anonymous No.1675149]

>>1675115

[Anonymous No.1675152]

>>1675134
well blonde is better than green hair...

[Anonymous No.1675153]

>>1675128

And that is why Wario's hat is purple in this game even though it should logically be white?

[Anonymous No.1675178]

>>1675153
Muh boi, This color contrast is what we all strive for

[Anonymous No.1675250]

>>1675152
nah. blond is boring.

[Anonymous No.1675347]

>>1675250
Blonds have more fun.

But, I agree that diversity would be nice. Like some brown and black now and again. Maybe a res here ans there. But, since it's Japan, and everbody in thier art style has to have a vaster array of colors, it's only typical. Also, isn't she an esper? So having an abnormal charateristic is logical.

[Anonymous No.1675415]

>>1675115
It seemed like late NES games didn't even bother doing the best they could.

[Anonymous No.1675450]

>>1675347
>Also, isn't she an esper? So having an abnormal charateristic is logical.


This is how I understood it when I was a kid playing it.

[Anonymous No.1675796]

>>1675152
You aren't mah nigga. You a punk-ass bitch. I fucking hate you.

[Anonymous No.1675843]

>>1675128
To add to this, in practice NES can only show about 12 colors on the screen at once so the color choices are rather limited meaning the if the correct color isn't available in those 12 colors they have to use one of the other ones instead. This is also the reason why the outlines of characters in certain games alternate between black, brown or some other colors when moving between screens/levels.

[Anonymous No.1675918]

>>1675843
No, thats 26 colors, OP's shot has more to do with that the NES' hardware can only do 256 title blocks, more ram can expand on that and the MMC5 & VRC7 chips can run 16,384 title blocks.

Heres what the shot will look like with the MMC5 chip instead of the MMC3 chip.

[Anonymous No.1675924]

>>1675843
No, thats 26 colors, OP's shot has more to do with that the NES' hardware can only do 256 title blocks, more ram can expand on that and the MMC5 & VRC7 chips can run 16,384 title blocks.

Heres what the shot will look like with the MMC5 chip instead of the MMC3 chip.

[Anonymous No.1676924]

>>1675152
>Blonde is better than green hair

[Anonymous No.1678000]

>>1675924
The MMC5 doesn't change the colors, it just expands the graphics RAM (as you mentioned) and narrows down the attribute table from 16x16 to 8*8.

I think the real reason why Wario wears pink is because the NES has this bullshit limitation that restricts the number of palettes you can use in the entire game. You have eight palettes of three colors, four for sprites, four for backgrounds. However, each of those palettes can only be assigned a value that's in storage, which I believe is 16 palettes total.

[Anonymous No.1678042]

There appears to be 9 colors in that image. We'll assume that everything in that image is treated as a sprite and not as a background tile. The NES allows you to have up to 4 sprite palettes, each one made up of 3 colors + transparency. That means that this image could be made from 3 sprite palettes. That would leave one additional sprite palette which could be used for any additional sprites (including text) that maybe appear on that same screen.

Of course, this image is not made up entirely of sprites. Much of it (or possibly all of it) is made up of background tiles which have their own pool of 4 separate color palettes (made up of 4 colors each, no transparency).

Long story short, while the NES has a 64 color palette, at most you'll get 28 on screen at once (actually, you can increase this with trickery, but that's not important). They could have gotten a lot more colors on there if they put in the effort. Why didn't they? Most likely they were lazy and used the same background and sprite color palettes throughout the entire game and created that screen using what they had easy access to. Looking through some screenshots of Wario's Woods this seems very likely to be the case.

[Anonymous No.1678441]

>>1678000
The NES can do 26 colors on screen and theres 18 colors in that shot.

The 16,384 8x8 title blocks does help.

[Anonymous No.1678450]

>>1678441
How many games out there made good use of the MMC5 chip?

[Anonymous No.1678454]

>>1678450
In the system's life span, around 26-30'ish, most of them from Koei.

HAL, Capcom & Konami could of done so much with this chip.

[Anonymous No.1678461]

>>1678454
Considering what MMC5 and VRC7 could do with the Famicom, I wonder how far games could have advanced if both of those caught on, and became more widespread. VRC7 being used in a single game is a crime.

[Anonymous No.1678473]

>>1678461
It was also used in the Japanese version of Tiny Toon Adventures 2:Trouble In Wackyland as well, but that game used the MMC3 chip in western markets and the Japanese version has no FM music.

Someone needs to fix this.

[Anonymous No.1679987]

>>1675115
>>1678042

Here is the make up of this image: Top left is the screen that we see when playing the game, top right is the tiles that make up the image (more specific, left is sprite tiles, right is background tiles, the colored squares is a visualization of the palette data), bottom left is the background image itself, and bottom right are the sprites that they superimposed over it.

Studying the color choices, the color choices are incredibly inefficient. The again, this was around the time when Nintendo's/Yamauchi's disdain of Yokoi (who designed Wario) was starting to take shape.

[Anonymous No.1680781]

>>1679987
That looks pretty standard for doing a large image like that on the NES.

What it probably all comes down to is the reliance on background tiles for large images. The color palette for each BG tile only has 3 unique colors since the third color has to be shared by all 4 BG color palettes, sky blue in this case. One of those palettes is used up by the forest, the dark green/light green/black palette, so you're now left with 3 palettes of 3 unique colors. Because of the cartoony look, black outlines are everywhere so all 3 of those palettes must include black, so now you have 3 palettes of only 2 unique colors.

The tricky part is now building the image from 16x16 BG tiles in such a way that you can make the maximum use of those 3 palettes with their two unique colors each. You can go over and touch up some spots by overlaying sprites on top of them like they did, but you want to blot in most of the color with these BG tiles. Artists don't want to get bogged down in all these technical details so they probably just overlayed a grid on the image and colored it as best they could within these limitations. I'm sure they could have done better if they spent a lot of time working with these restrictions instead of just copping out, but apparently a screen that was flashed for like a second wasn't worth the increased development time. Might also be related to it being a multiplatform game as well.

[Anonymous No.1680787]

>>1680781
>The color palette for each BG tile only has 3 unique colors since the third color has to be shared by all 4 BG color palettes

Meant to say the fourth color.

[Anonymous No.1680883]

I think it was a matter of making it contrast. Had it been white, there would have been too much white on the hat. It'd look weird and would be a little much for the eyes. So to balance that, it was made purple.

[Anonymous No.1682373]

>>1680883
They could've just as easily assigned the white/yellow palette to his hat. Wouldn't look good given how few colors the NES palette has, and especially given Wario's color makeup. Was it possible to make Wario look accurate? Most certainly. How accurate could he look? Not very accurate, especially in a complicated, non-square pose like this.

[Anonymous No.1682521]

It's obviously Wario after picking up a Fire Flower.

[Anonymous No.1683515]

>>1682373
They already used up all their color palettes, so technically they couldn't do that

[Anonymous No.1683564]

>>1683515
Their colors (and picture) are not very efficient, but nothing would have stopped them from assigning the same palette for his shirt on his hat. Not even the graphics would need to be altered in any way. It would look accurate, but at the same time it would look odd.

[Anonymous No.1683694]

>>1683564
See how the hat overlaps with his face though? Unless it's aligned perfectly to the grid, part of that would have to be a different colour, because with blue (sky), white, yellow and purple, there's no room for the skin tone.

[Anonymous No.1683706]

>>1683694
Refer to this image
>>1679987

Specifically the bottom left one. This is what the graphics actually look like with the attribute limitations in place. They covered up any overlap with sprites (such as his ear ans sideburn), which wouldn't be a problem at all. The only issue would be the right sideburn since it has purple on it, but you just simply recolor the purple into the middle color and it will be perfect.

[Anonymous No.1683725]

>>1675115
why the fuck didn't they just do this?

[Anonymous No.1683726]

>>1683725
Wow didn't even notice he had brown in his hair, seriously what a waste of a color.

[Anonymous No.1683730]

>>1683725
>>1683726

Attribute limitations and flicker would probably stop that, though it does look good.

[Anonymous No.1683830]

>>1675152
Hell no. Blondes can't screw the rules.

[Anonymous No.1685652]

>>1683725
You know, looking at that from a distance, he almost looks naked and wearing weird straps that are nailed into his skin. I must say, it has left a very disturbing image in my mind.

[Anonymous No.1688326]

>>1675415
Wario's Woods and Zoda's Revenge beg to disagree with you

[Anonymous No.1688345]

>>1688326
Only two games actually bothered, one of which didn't even bother to get Wario's colors right. Meanwhile you have games like Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt, Rollerblade Racer, Ubisoft Indiana Jones, Cliffhanger, Bonk's Adventure, and Europe's Lion King and Alladin that look no better than games from the fist three years of the NES' existence.