Why did the Gameboy have better graphics and music than the NES?

[Anonymous No.4588951]

The Gameboy had 4 colors and a 168x144 resolution while the Nintendo had 64 colors and a 256x240 resolution. To me NES games looked quite ugly but for some reason the Gameboy games had more detailed looking sprites that were aesthetically pleasing.


The gameboy had 4 sound channels while the NES had six I think. Yet again Gameboy music always sounds more catchy and pleasing.


Why though?

[Anonymous No.4588952]

Are there any Gameboy games that look as good as Batman, Battletoads, or Kirby's Adventure?

[Anonymous No.4588961]

>>4588952
Batman Return of the Joker, Trip World, and Operation C. I will say that Kirby is probably the best looking NES game.

[Anonymous No.4588964]

>>4588951

you must be blind, the spritework in Castlevania and Megaman is way more impressive

[Anonymous No.4588974]

>>4588951
Nostalgia.

[Anonymous No.4588985]

>>4588964
Maybe I am blind but I seriously find this ugly. Maybe it's just the juxtapositions of one shade of bright green against a dull brown. I'm starting to think that maybe the NES devs cared more about making the games insanely colorful as possible while the Gameboy devs were forced to make their sprites appear to have more 3d depth.

[Anonymous No.4588993]

>>4588985
>>4588951
neither of these images are what the games look like on hardware

[Anonymous No.4588994]

>>4588985

Except for the background, that looks better than OP image.

I mean, Castlevania takes place inside a castle, not a mountain region.

[Anonymous No.4588998]

>>4588985
As opposed to 2d depth?

[Anonymous No.4589014]

>>4588951
the game boy's original lcd screen looked horrendous, it didn't have true blacks or whites like in that image.

But you are correct, some game boy games have better dithering than game boy colour games. Using only four colours significantly
increased storage space for graphics.

[Anonymous No.4589017]

>>4588951
Gameboy has more ram and less gotchas. The whole architecture just seems more intelligent. I've only wrote the most simple program to put tiles on the screen but I remember I liked it more than the Nes. The way it expanded to gbc was pretty elegant too if I remember.

[Anonymous No.4589020]

>>4588998
I'm talking about stuff like shading, highlights, etc

>>4589014
I didn't think about how the Gameboy had extra storage space for graphics since it was just in 4 colors. Maybe that's a part of the reason why I like Gameboy graphics the best.

>>4588994
>I mean, Castlevania takes place inside a castle, not a mountain region.

You can tell I've never played Castlevania before lol

[Karakasa-Obake !!bwTnifX4END No.4589021]

The limitation of the medium gave rise to creativity and mastery of the art.

A common trick for pixel artists is to design in 4 color monochrome. Once the piece is perfect, they will then add in colors where necessary.

Also, GB came about later so there were naturally more pixel artists then. Later NES games are much more detailed than early ones for example.

If you're genuinely interested, google pixel art tutorials, pixel art color theory, pixel art color palette and check out the forums on pixeljunk. There's lots of resources out there and it's a pretty interesting subject even if you don't want to create it yourself.

[Anonymous No.4589025]

It usually depended on the developer. I guess the lack of colors forced developers to better design their sprites in order to stand out within the monochrome display.

[Anonymous No.4589037]

>>4589021
interesting info. I'll remember that 4 color trick.

I am an amateur pixel artist

[Anonymous No.4589040]

its looks sharper because its on a small screen, kirbys adventure looks better the gb game but donkey kong land would probably look really bad blown up to the nes resolution

[Batowl No.4589046]

[Anonymous No.4589073]

>>4589021
filtered

[Anonymous No.4589107]

>>4589014
>it didn't have true blacks or whites

Don't you ever get tired of being wrong all the time?

[Batowl No.4589113]

[Anonymous No.4589128]

I think it might be possible to have an album on gameboy like that one NES one kinda with the pretty decent quality sound some voice clips have

https://youtu.be/1lzHfLYzyRM?t=54

I want to make a shitpost rom

[Anonymous No.4589129]

>>4589014
>Using only four colours significantly increased storage space for graphics.

Jesus, you're dumb. Why are you commenting on things you don't know shit about? Both the NES and the GB used index colors. Yes, even with the GB you had to define color palettes which mapped a value to an index which allowed developers to do palette animations with a simple palette swap and to specify a transparent index for sprites. The only memory you're saving is that a palette (of which you only have a few in memory at a given time) and a palette index on the NES would be *slightly* larger. You're saving bits per tile, it's nothing.

And the number of tiles that can be stored in VRAM is set by the hardware, anyways. NES can store 512 tiles in its pattern table, the GB can store 384 tiles. So you're wrong on every level.

[Anonymous No.4589198]

>>4589129
>Index colors
totally forgot about that. I guess Moore's law is real explanation here.

[Anonymous No.4589212]

>>4589014
>it didn't have true blacks or whites
just like america

[Anonymous No.4589296]

>>4589017
The Famicom is nearly seven years older than the Gameboy, a lot was learned by Nintendo in that time regarding console architecture.

[Anonymous No.4589316]

>>4589017
>and less gotchas. The whole architecture just seems more intelligent
Explain.

[Anonymous No.4589328]

>>4589316
You don't have to write your ppu data to an auto-increment ppu register, the tile memory is accessible from the z80 address space.

[Anonymous No.4589329]

>>4589316
The Famicom just has a lot of irksome things like forcing every block of four tiles to use the same colors and not being able to perform split screen scrolling without sacrificing a sprite (unless an MMC3 mapper is used) that you don't have to deal with on the Gameboy. The latter has a much tighter and more logically-designed architecture.

[Anonymous No.4589432]

>>4589128
The quality is mostly limited by memory space and CPU usage. Using ROM bank swapping there's no real limit to the size of a ROM, but if you stick to controllers that actually existed and have flashcart support then I think you're limited to like 8 or 16mb. More than enough tons of digitized content, especially with compression. There are a few open source sound engines for the DMG/CGB with vastly differing performance. CGB in double speed mode would obviously give you the most CPU cycles if you want the best possible quality. Sound engines are pretty complex though, have fun. Even in the industry back then a lot of small studios would just license a sound engine.

[Anonymous No.4589656]

>>4588951
Nobody has brought up the fact that the medium has only been around for like a decade. Computers weren't common place, so you could say the digital art form was still in it's infancy. And there weren't a lot of artists trained in that area.

It's like how 3D models slowly improved over the course of the PS2.

[Anonymous No.4589657]

>>4589656
*Had not Has; referring to the GB era.

[Anonymous No.4589684]

>>4588951
What game is this?

[Anonymous No.4589710]

>>4589107
I had a gameboy and shit was green, thats either a shop or someone replaced the stock screen

[Anonymous No.4589713]

anyone have one of these? are they any good? I kind of want one.

[Anonymous No.4589715]

>>4589656
Artists are artists, a change in the medium isn't a big deal. There's tons of great art for the NES and even older consoles/PCs. The problem lies with OP's insinuation that GB games look better than NES games. On average, the graphics are pretty similar (sans color) on both systems since constraints are similar. OP might like the style of the GB better (you have to make certain stylistic choices for things to read well when working with 4 shade monotone), but that doesn't mean the graphics are any better.

3D models are a little different. Hardware constraints there limit the number of polygons you can use which limit what you're capable of. Rather than artists, it was developers who had to learn to push the hardware to allow higher polygon counts and more fully textured models which is why you saw a dramatic difference between early games and later games even on the same console.

Remember that 3D modeling long predated 3D console gaming. Even things like facial and joint topology were well established prior to the PS2 since it was used heavily in non-real time applications like movies.

[Anonymous No.4589721]

>>4589715
The standards of art were higher. Half of the NES library looks like programmer art.

Also, you see less of the ugly effects of chr-rom limits, compression, and space saving measures. Think about how NES backgrounds often looked like shattered glass. Faxandu for example, even if the tiles are technically competent, the way they're arranged is so confined.

[Anonymous No.4589725]

For one, the GB came out in 1989, a year before the SNES, the Famicom came out in 1983.
Late NES games like Little Samson can look pretty damn impressive.

[Anonymous No.4589731]

>>4589713
would say yes or get a wonderswan

[Anonymous No.4589738]

Konami always had good NES artists but a large amount of games do just have colored blocks including most first party Nintendo titles.

[Anonymous No.4589742]

>>4589738
I guess Technos and Data East had pretty nice graphics as well. Agreed about Nintendo's first party stuff looking like shit for the most part. I know that SMB3 was criticized for having overly limited graphics compared to most 1990 releases.

[Anonymous No.4589750]

The standards for game graphics did get a lot better by the start of the 4th gen and you seldom see Mega Drive games with colored blocks for graphics.

[Anonymous No.4590308]

>>4589046
Case in point. This is what's known as programmers' art rather than pixel art.

[Anonymous No.4590416]

>>4589107
>fucking underagefags

[Anonymous No.4590431]

If I'm not mistaken, the GB supported some functions right out of the box that NES games normally required special enhancement chips for. For instance, I think GB supported simultaneous horizontal and vertical scrolling. Early NES games were restricted to one method of scrolling or the other. In some cases, they could switch between either across alternating stages, but not do both at the same time. To do both simultaneously required an enhancement chip to be added to the game cartridge.

Anyway, that doesn't really answer OP's question about why GB games seem to 'look' better. I believe this is just the result of developers being more experienced with working with the limitations of 4-level graphics detail. And there's quite a bit of creating dithering in OP's screenshot that gives the appearance of the game containing a broader palette than it actually does.

GBC went a step further and expanded the number of simultaneous colors that could be displayed, so it was more on par with, say, Sega Master System.

[Anonymous No.4590443]

>couldn't play Gameboy in well lit rooms or in the sun because you couldn't see shit then

those were hard times

[Anonymous No.4590495]

[Anonymous No.4590505]

>>4589713
I have one, for $35 you can't really beat it. Plays everything I've thrown at it, screen is about as squashed as playing games on the Super Game Boy. Pic related.

[Anonymous No.4590696]

>>4589107
Are you really saying that the GameBoy had black and white colors?

[Anonymous No.4590864]

>>4589721
>ugly effects of chr-rom limits, compression, and space saving measures

Tiles are an "effect of chr-rom limits", whatever that means. The entire point of tiles is so you can build large maps from a small number of graphical assets. That said, the NES can store more than enough tiles in its pattern table to display a unique tile in every position on the screen.

I've literally never seen a NES game with compression artifacts. Nobody would use lossy compression on low resolution tile data. I'm not even aware of compression being that common on the NES, although it was pretty standard on Genesis titles. No idea what you mean by "space saving measures", either. About the only "space saving measure" would be using less data to fit your manufacturing constraints, which could include less unique tiles, which is nothing NES specific.

And that image isn't programmer art. In fact, you can tell it was an actual artist because they're trying to do a lot of stuff with shading. Because of the limited color palette per tile they used transparency through to the dark background to indicate shadow, which probably looked a lot more convincing on a CRT than an HD display with a minor blur filter.

[Anonymous No.4590907]

>>4588951
It probably helps that it's using an old Zilog processor, which had been around for 10 years at this point. Even the SMS uses it. The GB got a lot of PC ports in it's early years.
>The gameboy had 4 sound channels while the NES had six I think.
Just look it up you dumbass. Wikipedia or any other source is just a quick search away. No reason to think.
NES has five channel, though one of those went largly unused. The Famicom Disk System adds a channel, but that got even less use (despite being fucking good).
GB also offers four channels, which offer mostly the same capabilities, but I don't know how it would make music mor catchy.

[Anonymous No.4590915]

>>4590505
Does it support the RTC?

[Anonymous No.4590917]

>>4590495
literally the only filter that you SHOULD be using on emulators

[Anonymous No.4590919]

>>4590917
CRT shaders are useful if you don't have a CRT at the moment.

[Anonymous No.4591421]

>>4588951
Mostly because devs were way better at utilizing the limited technology by that point.
The things they did with the limited sound channels on the Game Boy were works of genius.

[Anonymous No.4591424]

>>4590919
and NTSC cable shaders obviously

[Anonymous No.4591432]

Nothing on gameboy looks remotely as good as Castlevania 3.

The fact that the gameboy displays various shades of puke green makes it even worse.

[Anonymous No.4591454]

>>4590864
The compression used is metatiles, "repeat last entry", etc.

[Anonymous No.4591463]

>>4589107
I just took this picture just now to show you what it is like to play on an actual gameboy. This is what we geezers had to deal with back in the day junior.

Good job exposing yourself as underage, is it really summer already?

[Anonymous No.4591473]

>>4590505
WOW! I never knew about these! Just looked it up, $35 on eBay. Thanks anon, guess what I just purchased?

[Anonymous No.4591474]

>>4589107
what
how?

[Anonymous No.4591475]

>>4589107
Are there really people young enough to not know what a Gameboy looked like?

[Anonymous No.4591485]

>>4591474
It’s shopped. Notice how the power light isn’t even lit.

[Anonymous No.4591487]

>>4590907
the GameBoy was missing the NES's triangle wave channel
the triangle channel was the least used because it's hard for the ear to pick up on triangle waves, but because of that and their unique properties skilled composers could use them to add subtlety and depth

[Anonymous No.4591491]

>>4591487
I guess that could lead to catchier music because music with less subtlety is simpler, and simpler songs are generally easier to remember

[Anonymous No.4591495]

>>4590864
chr rom limits like having to bankswitch a quarter or a half of the pattern table at one time on some mappers. chr-ram was another, more versatile option but with some disadvantages. These had to be provided by the cartridge. Gameboy in contrast has its own internal memory for tile patterns.

NES and Gameboy games relied on compression such as metatiles and pattern repetition routines where an arbitrary sequence is repeated in a loop to fill an area of specified size, also duplication of rooms etc. You're not paying very close attention if you haven't noticed this stuff.

In the original Zelda, metatiles are vertical strips of smaller, 4x4 metatiles. This results in some extremely confined level design. By the time Links Awakening came out ROM was much more affordable, so the compression didn't need to be so confining. It also helps that you don't have to include other, expensive chips on a Gameboy cartridge such as chr-rom, chr-ram, or memory controllers.

[Anonymous No.4591498]

>>4591487
Also the NES triangle wave had no volume control.

[Anonymous No.4591507]

>>4590864
>That said, the NES can store more than enough tiles in its pattern table to display a unique tile in every position on the screen.
No it can't. The PPU can access 256 background tiles. The 32x30 tile screen is 960 tiles. This is why, for example, the intro to Gimmick! has a cutscene in a tiny little box in the center of the screen. Look at the intro sequences of Link's Awakening or the Oracle games to see the superiority of Gameboy.

[Anonymous No.4591515]

>>4591498
really? that seems like an oversight

[Anonymous No.4591517]

>>4591495
>4x4
I mean 2x2, 4 tiles

[Anonymous No.4591569]

>>4591507

[Anonymous No.4591576]

>>4590495
what shader is this?
I've seen a screenshot modification of it with Oracle of Seasons on it and I'd ike that setup as well.

[Anonymous No.4591585]

>>4590917
This one is kinda cool for console games.

[Anonymous No.4591587]

>>4591487
The triangle wave on the NES is mostly used for bass lines since it's pitched an octave below the other audio channels. Occasionally, games will use it for the main register (Dragon Quest I in particular does this a lot).

[Anonymous No.4591594]

>>4591487
addendum: the PCM channel was actually the least used, I think because of how much of a pain it was to produce and store samples for it; the triangle wave was the least used of the four processor-generated channels

[Anonymous No.4591595]

>>4591594
Eh? Loads of NES games have samples, it was easy to do since the PCM channel takes only 2% of CPU time to use.

[Anonymous No.4591597]

The vast majority of games use pulse waves for the main register since it's the easiest waveform to hear. Some games use pure square waves, for example Lode Runner, which sounds pretty bad and ear-raping.

[Anonymous No.4591601]

>>4591587
Also it’s not as versatile as the squares because the volume is only on/off, so only gate-shaped envelopes

[Anonymous No.4591603]

>>4591597
Square waves sound great. All of the duty cycle settings have a purpose.

[Anonymous No.4591627]

>>4591603
>Square waves sound great
Apparently not on Lode Runner, but alright it was very early and one of the first Third Party Famicom games made.

[Anonymous No.4591637]

>>4591595
hmm, I might have been mislead

[Anonymous No.4591640]

>>4591597
Didn't SMB1 use square waves? I could swear it did.

[Anonymous No.4591684]

>>4589128
>>4589432
https://youtu.be/Vjm8P8utT5g?t=4m51s

Even with unlimited space and dedicating almost all CPU time, the GB can still only do ~18kHz ~7bit audio, which is pretty bad.

[Anonymous No.4591705]

>>4591507
Pretty sure you could get around that by bank switching mid scanline. Look at Smash TV.

[Anonymous No.4591743]

>>4591705
That would be great for images but annoyingly complex elsewhere. Maybe it could be used for detailed horizontal parallax backgrounds.

[Anonymous No.4591761]

>>4591743
it was used for that in a few games
usually it was done mid-screen rather than mid-line though, to create status bar areas

[Anonymous No.4591765]

>>4591684
The Gameboy's sound is fairly limited which does make it all the more remarkable when you consider how many excellent game soundtracks like the Pokemon game music were done with it.

[Anonymous No.4591778]

>>4591761
>status bar areas
That's another thing the gameboy does better.

> Besides background, there is also a "window" overlaying the background. The window is not scrollable i.e. it is always displayed starting from its left upper corner. The location of a window on the screen can be adjusted via WNDPOSX and WNDPOSY registers. Screen coordinates of the top left corner of a window are WNDPOSX-7,WNDPOSY. The tile numbers for the window are stored in the Tile Data Table. None of the windows tiles are ever transparent. Both the Background and the window share the same Tile Data Table.
> Both background and window can be disabled or enabled separately via bits in the LCDC register.
> If the window is used and a scan line interrupt disables it (either by writing to LCDC or by setting WX > 166) and a scan line interrupt a little later on enables it then the window will resume appearing on the screen at the exact position of the window where it left off earlier. This way, even if there are only 16 lines of useful graphics in the window, you could display the first 8 lines at the top of the screen and the next 8 lines at the bottom if you wanted to do so.

No interference with your nametable.

[Anonymous No.4591782]

>>4591778
NES games have a lot of graphics glitches/corruption because scrolling or split screen effects fuck up the name table.

[Anonymous No.4591820]

>>4589129
>NES can store 512 tiles in its pattern table, the GB can store 384 tiles.
That's not the whole story though.
NES makes 256 tiles accessible to backgrounds, and 256 accessible to sprites. Gameboy does the same, but shares 128 of those tiles between the background and sprites.
A pretty elegant solution on the Gameboy, and it can even be useful.

[Anonymous No.4591840]

>>4591487
>the triangle channel was the least used because it's hard for the ear to pick up on triangle waves
Maybe if you're 10.

[Anonymous No.4591919]

>>4591765
Well it can do waves okay, it's just PCM that sounds like shit.

[Anonymous No.4591936]

>>4590917
For -any- emulator.

[Anonymous No.4591942]

>>4590915
RTC is on the cartridge, so yes it works fine. I noticed if I leave the cart in the GB Boy when it's not on the clock will lose time, but it works normally when actually playing. I just remove the cart when I'm done.

[Anonymous No.4591973]

>>4589107
The bait is too retard

[Anonymous No.4592410]

>>4591487
lol

>>4591515
Not even a real triangle wave. It's some low resolution... thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N63PzuoTn7E
Rather poor effort by Nintendo, but still far ahead of the competition (except the SID).

>>4591587
drums
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd6nyynuzio

>>4591595
Don't have a list, but I'd guess around 10%. Which is a decent number, but not a lot. It was really impractical when you are tight for space.

>>4591603
75% though?

>>4591640
>>4591627
Most every game does at some point or another.

>>4591765
Not at all. The wavetable gives you a lot of freedom, much more than the NES has. +stereo

>>4591919
Not really. Quite useful on the GBC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=purYMAbZ8Ng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWLmaGqV-LM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lzHfLYzyRM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Fp0tqEsT0

[Anonymous No.4592541]

>>4592410
>Not really.

All of those things are really cool, but you can't say the quality of the PCM in them isn't fucking terrible.

[Anonymous No.4592561]

>>4592410
>Rather poor effort by Nintendo, but still far ahead of the competition (except the SID).
The SID is more flexible in terms of the sounds it can produce, but the NES APU has two additional channels plus it's infinitely easier and less hax to play samples with it.

[Anonymous No.4592584]

>>4589684
trip world

[Anonymous No.4592637]

>>4588951

The reason is interestingly, actually BECAUSE of the color limitations.

You see, 3/4 shades of gray are pretty much minimum to create well shaded and detailed pixel art (black outline, shadow, midtone, highlights).

And the thing is, that NES games in addition to using these 3/4 colors per palette for adding shadows and highlights - they ALSO had to vary colors.

Sprite in grayscale can ALWAYS have accurate shading, because hues will never clash, as everything is uniformly olive.

But when you're doing colored sprites - you need to worry about hues! For example, Mario has to have dark/blue overalls, AND peach-colored face, AND red shirt and a cap. That means that the best NES Mario sprite you can get is pic related - on the left.

However, when working in grayscale, you don't have to worry about hues, and can reuse these three shades of grey WHENEVER you want. Do you want to add some shading to the cap of Mario? Go right ahead! See pic.
On the NES, if you wanted to add shading on Mario's cap - you would need DARK RED in addition to RED. That's an extra color.

In pixel art, we call this 'color ramp" - each HUE you're working with needs a bright color, shadowed color, and a dark color that will serve as an outline.

With 3 colors per sprite - that gives allows you to either NOT use color ramps (and not use shading at all) OR use a SINGLE color ramp, and make your sprites in an uniform hue that will get shadows and highlights. (E.g. all grayscale, all green...) And Gameboy eliminates that problem.
That's why artwork on the gameboy is better - because shading allows to add more detail.

Fun fact: Kirby's Adventure on the NES actually goes to uniform hue route, and THAT'S why it looks so good and detailed! Kirby is uniformly pink, enemies are uniformly orange etc. - and THAT'S why artwork for the game can be so detailed.

Of course, 16-bit consoles made this dilemma redundant by allowing 16 colors, so you could have several color ramps for different hues.

[Anonymous No.4592642]

>>4588951

The reason is interestingly, actually BECAUSE of the color limitations.

You see, 3 shades of gray are pretty much minimum to create well shaded and detailed pixel art (black outline, shadow, highlights).

And the thing is, that NES games in addition to using these 3 colors per palette for adding shadows and highlights - they ALSO had to vary colors.

Sprite in grayscale can ALWAYS have accurate shading, because hues will never clash, as everything is uniformly gray.

But when you're doing colored sprites - you need to worry about hues! For example, Mario has to have dark/blue overalls, AND peach-colored face, AND red shirt and a cap. That means that the best NES Mario sprite you can get is pic related - on top.

However, when working in grayscale, you don't have to worry about hues, and can reuse these three shades of grey WHENEVER you want. Do you want to add some shading to the cap of Mario? Go right ahead! See pic.
On the NES, if you wanted to add shading on Mario's cap - you would need DARK RED in addition to RED. That's an extra color.

In pixel art, we call this 'color ramp" - each HUE you're working with needs a bright color, shadowed color, and a dark color that will serve as an outline.

With 3 colors per sprite - that gives allows you to either NOT use color ramps (and not use shading at all) OR use a SINGLE color ramp, and make your sprites in an uniform hue that will get shadows and highlights. (E.g. all grayscale, all green...) And Gameboy eliminates that problem.
That's why artwork on the Gameboy is better - because shading allows to add more detail.

Fun fact: Kirby's Adventure on the NES actually goes to uniform hue route, and THAT'S why it looks so good and detailed! Kirby is uniformly pink, enemies are uniformly orange etc. - and THAT'S why artwork for the game can be so detailed.

Of course, 16-bit consoles made this dilemma redundant by allowing 16 colors, so you could have several color ramps for different hues.

[Anonymous No.4592652]

>>4588951
>>4588952
The reason is interestingly, actually BECAUSE of the color limitations.

You see, 3 shades of gray are pretty much minimum to create well shaded and detailed pixel art (black outline, shadow, midtone, highlights).

And the thing is, that NES games in addition to using these 3 colors per palette for adding shadows and highlights - they ALSO had to vary colors.

Mario in grayscale can ALWAYS have accurate shading, because hues will never clash, as everything is uniformly olive.

But when you're doing colored sprites - you need to worry about hues! For example, Mario has to have dark overalls, AND peach-colored face, AND red shirt and a cap. That means that the best NES Mario sprite you can get is pic related - up top.
However, when working in grayscale, you don't have to worry about hues, and can reuse these three shades of grey WHENEVER you want. Do you want to add some shading to the cap of Mario? Go right ahead! See pic.

In pixel art, we call this 'color ramp" - each HUE you're working with needs a bright, midtone and dark color, at least. With 3 colors per sprite - that gives allows you to either NOT use color ramps (and not use shading at all) OR use color ramps, and make your sprites in an uniform hue that will get shadows and highlights.

That's why artwork on the Gameboy is better - because grayscale allows to add more detail.

Of course, 16-bit consoles made this dilemma redundant by allowing 16 colors, so you can have several color ramps for different hues.

[Anonymous No.4592663]

>>4588964
Mega Man had to make tradeoffs to make its sprites. For example, because Megaman has a skin-colored face, that takes up an extra sprite on his face, AND an extra hardware palette (out of max four NES can handle). That's why Megaman has usually very little enemies compared to something like contra, and why most enemies in a stage share color palettes.

[Anonymous No.4592716]

>>4591463

I just did a backlight and bivert mod to my original gameboy. I'd highly recommend it. If you can solder even super basically it's pretty easy. I'm good at soldering and finished the mod in about 30-45 minutes even including taking it apart, rewatching key points in the video, and putting it back together. Handheld legends has a screen called "washed yellow" that looks pretty close to the olive green.

Ignore the bad focus and also that the screen looks washed out on the edges. It's not, just the polarizing film messing with the camera. It looks epic in person. Also, you can see newton rings where the rear polarizer film touches the glass, this can (and will) be fixed by applying a light bit of diatomaceous earth. It's basically the same effect when you put a screen protector on a cell phone. I literally did this mod yesterday so I haven't got the d. earth yet. The stuff is a microscopic powder that you can't see on the screen, it just prevents the polarizing film from sticking.

[Anonymous No.4593189]

>>4588951
>Why did the Gameboy have better graphics and music than the NES?
It didn't. Lower res, fewer colours, sound wasn't anywhere near as good etc, also the screen was horrible, the response time was garbage.
Some studios could squeeze out some good looking games and great music but yeahnah the NES was technically 10 times better.

[Anonymous No.4593314]

>>4593189
>sound wasn't anywhere near as good
That's a dumb thing to say. Are you dumb?

[Anonymous No.4593764]

>>4592652
thanks for this anon, I'm definitely saving this

[Anonymous No.4594957]

>>4592541
I think it sounds better, but then again, I've never heard anyone try something similar on the NES. It's mostly used for drums.

[Anonymous No.4595005]

>>4593189
Sound was the same, except with a wavetable channel instead of triangle, plus no DPCM channel. Plus stereo. What are you talking about?

[Anonymous No.4595307]

profesional pixel artist here

no comment on the music but literally the reason the Gameboy had better spritework is because by the time it came out artists were more in touch with the medium.

same reason SMB3 looks better than SMB despite being on the same hardware.

same reason a game like Little Samson has such good spritework despite being on the same console as tremendously ugly games like Cheetahmen

[Anonymous No.4595336]

>>4592652

This image is retarded just FYI, you could absolutely add detail and shading on NES sprites without upping the colour count and many games did.

It just comes down to artist intent. Mario's main concern was always readability.

[Anonymous No.4595507]

>>4595336
You have no fucking idea how NES graphics work.

First, there are techniques to do that - but they were discovered later in NES life cycle, which is why earlier games don't use them. Second, they're not magic, and come with sacrifices.

In picture you posted, this character actually uses TWO different color palettes - first palette is black/red/orange, and second palette is, I'm guessing, black/blue/bright blue.

You can only have FOUR sprite palettes on screen on NES. So by adding detail to a sprite, you sacrifice ability to make more colorful enemies, since if your character uses TWO palettes - only two are left for the enemy. (If I recall, Mega Man works around this by making the palette used for Mega Man's face also the palette used for you healthbar, and for bullets.)

Second, adding this extra detail will require putting ANOTHER hardware sprite on top existing sprites. Sprites on NES are usually 8x8 or 16x8 - and usually characters are build from many hardware sprites stitched together - but if you use extra colors, you will most likely need more sprites than usually.

Still, you can have only 64 sprites on screen, and 8 sprites per scanline - or you will need to use flicker.

So yes, you can add extra detail ... but it will require some sacrifices, and won't work for all games. What works for Mega Man where there are rarely more than 3 enemies on screen, would NOT work at all in e.g. Contra or some shmup (because they need more enemies and bullets on screen) and would result in horrible levels of flicker.

[Anonymous No.4595516]

>>4595507
Also caveat that I'm not a homebrew dev or emulator coder or anything, I'm just a pixel artist who casually knows enough about NES limitations to create faithful-looking pixel art.

If something I wrote sounds wrong, it's possible I'm wrong.

[Anonymous No.4595524]

>>4590505
For $35 you can buy a real GBC.

[Anonymous No.4595539]

>>4595336
Oh, and just so you know - Mario DOES actually use the "extra sprites in different palette" technique I described: >>4595507
so there goes yours "Mario's main concern was readability". In SMB2, Mario, and also Peach have white sclera in his eyes that, I recall, are a separate hardware sprite.
Pic related, older prototype of SMB2 (characters on the left) doesn't include that feature.

[Anonymous No.4595548]

>>4595524
no backlight

[Anonymous No.4596348]

>>4588951
Early NES games have programmer art, but that means you are cherry picking them. There are games with beautiful or very detailed sprites. Same thing happens with the music.
Games that were released in NES later days are up to Game Boy quality and even better.
NES color pallete is hideous, though, I have to agree on that.

[Anonymous No.4596360]

>>4596348
It looks good on games with dark settings, like Batman, Kickmaster, Ninja Gaiden, Sword Master, Street Fighter 2010, Gargoyle's Quest, etc.

[Anonymous No.4596514]

>>4591424
>NTSC
Ew

[Anonymous No.4596987]

>>4595524
Obviously. I have a real GBC, it cost $12 and when it's nice and bright I use it. When lighting is sub-obtimal a GB Boy is a whole lot cheaper than an AGS-101 backlight mod on a GBC.

[Anonymous No.4599251]

>>4590505
wrong aspect ratio

[Anonymous No.4599347]

>>4599251
It's pretty close to the super game boy's and no one gives a shit about that. It's $35 for a backlit GBC, if you'd rather spend $200+ on a backlit GBC because
>wrong aspect ratio
be my guest.

[Anonymous No.4599360]

>>4599347
nah
one of these is fine

[Anonymous No.4599386]

>>4596348
I've realized that early NES programmer art (which was not universally the case at the time btw) is my aesthetic

[Anonymous No.4599603]

>>4599360
>emulating

[Anonymous No.4601206]

bump

[Anonymous No.4602528]

>>4599360
I want a handheld with six face buttons...