Pretty much sums it up. It was a great strategy too Even if Gameboy is weak compared to its competition At least its launch title and its first couple of years was filled with great game and very fun one and the one that is practically NES in your pocket.
@@manghariz2211 The main one that comes to mind is the tilemap size. the NES tilemap was made with either vertical or horizontal scrolling mind, so it would have a map that is two screens wide or two screens tall (with the rest just repeating). Gameboy have a smaller tilemap, but it is larger than the screen both horizontally and vertically, so all those offscreen tilemap updating schemes work better while saving on ram.
@@Mechaghostman2 It's more of a weirdass sharp "homebrew" kinda based on the Z80 but not completely. It sadly lacks the very powerful block copying instructions from the Z80.
While its still difficult nowadays, the porting process isn't as difficult as it used to be, as systems that we have now are alot more standardized and usually have some tier of compatibility layer underneath in the case of like UWP for Xbox/windows, part of why games are bloated now but nice for porting
@@nthgth yeah that guy's wrong while some of us do strive for better graphics and stuff we've also played games that had shit graphics and still had fun, still had fun playing on older consoles, company's are the ones who are constantly trying to improve graphics to pull more people in, not all consumers care about the newest nicest looking game out
@@nthgth It's absolutely the gamers that demand that. How many times have you seen gamers complain about "blurry textures"? What part of a game do you think uses the most amount of disk space?
@@DasAntiNaziBroetchen no one since maybe the '90s has complained about graphics in ANY conversation I've had about video games. Are you in middle school or something?
An interesting thing you missed about Prehistorik Man is the bouncing text at the beginning. Most effects you see in games are achieved by changing things between scan lines or between frames, but that text is done by repeatedly changing the background palette *in the middle of the scan line* while it’s being drawn.
The development of "X" was based around the team looking at the ZX version of Elite, and trying to create a render that could utilise a similar wireframe presentation. Both the ZX and Game Boy used the Zilog Z80 processor, but the difference is that the ZX operated at 4MHz, whereas the Game Boy ran at 3MHz. Indeed, "X" spawned from the initial demo using unofficial methods, but Nintendo was impressed and wanted to seal a deal with Argonaut which forced them to relocate to do so. A semi-translated prototype of X, "Lunar Chase" exists but there was no official release outside Japan, making "X" Japanese-exclusive.
The Argonaut demo not only featured 3D graphics but a method to bypass the GameBoy copy protection as well. (and it was that in addition to the 3D that convinced Nintendo that Argonaut was someone they should work with)
I have Prehistorik Man on my Evercade and I can play it on my Switch as part of my NSO subscription. It’s not the best platformer on SNES, but I still think it’s pretty good.
I nearly put that in, but it's Argonaut software again and seems to use a very similar game engine to X, so I thought I just be repeating the same stuff. Its a great game though, maybe more impressive than X in some ways,
Prehistoric Man is a game that's been on my wishlist for a while. I emulated it once, so I'm aware it's not fantastic gameplay-wise, but as a Game Boy collector, it's up there as a must-have. I wasn't aware how special the water effects are in games like Operation C. I own Final Fantasy Legend 3, and that has a similar effect with scrolling water on the world map. I always assumed that was a simple effect to achieve. I gotta give a shoutout to Race Drivin'. It's a 3D racing game on the Game Boy, complete with shaded polygons and occasional track elevation and loops. I actually own this one, and it plays something awful. Racing games should not run at 3 frames per second. But besides being in 3D, it has another cool feature: if you win a trophy, it saves your "ghost data" of that track, allowing you to race against yourself. At least until you turn off the game.
The caveman game reminds me so much of Joe and Mac on the SNES with pretty much the same exact graphics quality and effects. Essentially a 16 bit game gray-scale on an 8 bit platform. Amazing. I always was impressed with what my gameboy could put out, even today.
I always find it interesting to compare the Gameboy to the SNES as you can see a lot of the features of the SNES in the Gameboy. The SNES just doesn't have the budget, space and power restrictions of the Gameboy but is still very similar to it in many ways.
About Faceball 2000, I found an IPS patch that makes use of the "double speed mode" that the GBC have. By using it, it makes the game go faster and it achieves a pretty good framerate. I totally recommend it.
Gargoyles Quest was the one that blew my mind back in the day, LOved the OG Gameboy with its battery eating soft screen that scratched if you looked at it.
8:41 Sword Master on NES does switch between two background planes for the end credits... Ghouls and Ghosts on Sega Genesis mimics three background layers at the start of the second half of level 1, switching far background (plane A) to closer rain between frames... Actually many games used that trick and I could list some others....
Yours are great too! you both take a technical approach and bring new aspects to the table. There are gamers that make youtube videos and then there are computer nerds that make youtube videos - guess which type other computer nerds prefer ;)
Where's the Race Drivin port? It's a polygonal racer that actually runs fairly well on the GB and was actually developed by the developers of Star Fox!
I've been a fan of the Game Boy for more than thirty years, but I'd never heard of Zas or Prehistorik Man. Wow--thanks for not treading down the same old path! A limit-pushing game that surely doesn't get enough recognition--READ: criminally underrated--is Konami's Gradius: The Interstellar Assault, a space shooter from 1991. (Also called Gradius: Return of the Hero, or Nemesis II.) Gradius excels in nearly every department, including a fabulous soundtrack. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if it's got the most sophisticated audio of any title produced for the original Game Boy. Thanks again!
Same here. I don't usually have this much difficulty in determining what's being said in British English, but his pronunciation is really bad for for such a simple word. I unquestionably heard an 'a' sound.
I never knew the Gameboy was more capable than the NES. Really cool to finally learn that. I always wondered how Super Mario Land 2 looked closer to Super Mario World than Super Mario Bros. 3. Makes perfect sense now
well, it's primarily stylistic. super mario land 2 simply uses a different visual style. the nes is definitely more powerful, and it can push far more sprites. but the gameboy was designed after learning what developers tried to do on the nes so it has more capabilities that way.
A GBC game you should cover sometime is Densha de Go 2. It's an arcade-style train simulator that is developed by Taito and sold in Japan only (which makes sense, as this game revolves around Japanese trains), and it uses similar techniques to Faceball 2000 for the actual game. The intro cutscene for DDG2 is even more impressive.
So many of these things were automated on old computers, the people who know how it works and how to write scan lines and rendering methods work, can seemingly figure out how to write almost anything on even limited hardware like this.
@Gareth Fairclough Whenever I hear "Crikey" I think of the Microsoft internal British ex-pat community e-mail. It was filled with inane banter. The description was originally misspelt as "British noseflashes" (should be "newsflashes") but they liked the misspelling and kept it. There was a serious one called "Blimey" that no one used.
I loved my original Gameboy, it seemed soo ahead of its time. The games always seemed better conversions when compared and the monochrome graphics actually worked in its favour.
That last entry is hilarious - comparisons are hard to make considering the amount of black magic needed to pull it off on the GameBoy in the first place hahaha!
First I'm stumbling upon your channel. Fantastic technical explanations and visuals, as well as an excellent range of examples all showcasing different uses of the system's background layer and tiling features, from which basically all of the tricks here derive. Loopholes (I definitely hesitate to call them shortcuts) and optimizations developers employ to make game experiences seem seamless are some of the most fascinating details in game development. And by design, they're usually overlooked, but that makes them no less deserving of recognition!
People who had GBs when they first came out werent the graphic whiney people of today. We pretty much thought it all looked awesome. Some more impressive than others but the newness of portable games made everything seem semi good back then. I remember being blown away by Battletoads on GB and Daffy Duck. Blades of Steel looked great in the day and is still one of my top 25 games of all time. If the GB screen was as gorgeous and clear without all that ghosty blurry movement crap as the Gameboy pocket, I would still be playing it because it is such a delight to hold. But all these years later....woooo....that screen is just BAD. Faceball rocked.
Perfect example of this snobby nonsense is the Nintendo Switch. Can you imagine having a Gameboy back in the mid 90's that could match the SNES? The Switch is a handheld that has some amazing looking games, and all we get are pathetic losers that look down on it because it doesn't look as good as PS4 or Xbox One. It is a damn handheld!
Never thought about it this way. Had a gameboy as a child and I loved it. I've always been an art style over pure graphics kinda guy. 60 frames refresh rates ray tracing and similar jargon? Meaningless words to me. Lol
@@JT-sx5gl The Switch was advertised as a home console, so it's competing the both the PS4 and XB1, and now the PS5 and XS/X. I don't think anybody had any realistic expectations for this souped-up Nvidia Shield to have groundbreaking performance or graphical capabilities compared to Sony and Microsoft's offerings, but considering it's targeting the same markets, don't fault the consumer for expecting performance on-par with the competition.
@@sampleentry5253 They never implied it was competing directly with the PS4 and XB one. Also, it was clear the thing was a handheld if you watched the trailers. It had a dock, but that in no way makes it a home console. It doesn't even really matter because when it came to direct sales, this thing was beating even the XB one in that aspect. Regardless, now that its capabilities are clear, it's stupid to keep treating it like it should be more than what it is.
@@JT-sx5gl i own a switch and honestly am not a huge fan....I bought it because they put the new Pokemon game on it and I have always loved that franchise and have played them all religiously. If they had released Sword and Shield on 3ds I wouldnt own a Switch. Switch isnt comparbale at all to GB to me and here's why. Everything that came out on GB in the first five years or so was all original content made for that system....Battletoads on Nes isnt the same as GB even though that is one they sort of tried porting. My problem with the switch is not much feels fresh and exciting and I really dont want 5 or 15 or 20 year old ports of games Ive owned and played the crap out of on other sytems. If a person has only been playing Nintendo games a decade or less maybe it is an exciting system My personal opinion, in no way meaning to insult anyone elses, is that they have not done much with a great system beyond ports and shovelware. We didnt even get a "new" Mario Kart for switch yet, just glorified wii u version. I wont even go into the top 20 reasons it turned out to have my least favortie Pokemon games other than they suck. Im not saying it is a bad system but it just feels stale to me and not as innovative as past handhelds by Nintendo. And...no sports games....dang the GB had tons of original sports games
I think that V Rally on the Gameboy is a real hardware pusher. One of the best looking 8 bit driving games out there, runs really smoothly and plays well too.
So the background based baddies were essentially standing still and the rest of the screen (including 1st background) was "scrolling" around them to make them look like they were moving? Is that why their bullets appeared to not go straight but to ebb in the direction that they are moving? Or were the bullets of the end of level baddies treated separately? Which set of physics were they beholden to? (as in which background's gravity were they following?)
I think the Kirby's Dreamland games really showcased the Gameboy's strengths. Good old side scrolling with crystal clear imagery and no messy backgrounds, butter smooth and so easy to play.
i love the idea that someone sold their soul to the devil for some parallax scrolling on the early gameboy. and you kept the joke going for so long. bravo.
Dylan Cuthbert, who worked on X, said that the GB was more flexibel than the NES. I think the amount of wireframe games prove that point. (Ray Thunder, Days of Thunder, Lawnmower Man, Race Drivin) Nice selection of games and great explanations!
I played so damn much on my GB back in the 90s as a kid and have so many good memories. Friends came by with their games, we talked about it a lot. I began to learn English with GB and NES games, as there were only a few German translated games out there. I remember that Probotector (Contra), Double Dragon II, Gargoyle's Quest, Terminator 2 (my first FPS!), SML2 and Tetris were my most favorite GB games. It was a couple of years before Pokemon came out, which I played on an emulator in the early 2000s. ^^
The TI-99 computer had character-mapped graphics, presenting a problem for the LOGO turtle graphics program. It did not have enough tiles to display the complexity of some drawings, and would display an "Out of Ink" message.
When I was little the OG Game Boy blew me away, a tiny NES and attached video screen that could fit in your pocket and run entirely on a few AA batteries like a kid's toy. Then the Super Game Boy let us play those tiny cartridges on a real TV, like the Nintendo Switch except over 20 years early. Of course we now know that the NES had been available in Japan since 1983, although I would have believed it back then, Japan had quite a mystique.
Prehistorik man is not based in the same named game from Snes. It's based on an awesome Dos game called Prehistorik 2. A big game with large levels and a lot of secrets and hidden rooms
On ZAS on Super Game Boy, wouldn't the issue have been the timer crystal been a little too fast for proper playback? The Super Game Boy 2 fixed that issue.
Castlevania Belmont's Revenge also exhibits that flicker in one of the castle, one of the worst things about IPS screen mods as that's one of my favourite GB games. Race Drivin is a very impressive 3D racing game and Ray Thunder (Japan only but cheap to import) is a good attempt at a FPS on the system.
@@Sharopolis Just tried Belmont's Revenge and it happens in Cloud Castle, the mountains in the background flicker and don't seem to move correctly.that's on original hardware with a, IPS screen mod. Also looks the same under emulation.
3:10 not the best start, this is typically achieved with palette swapping, eg. Sonic 3 - and the NES would have been capable of it (barely given 2bpp but still). EDIT: 10:29 : Now THAT is a fantastic example of the same hardware feature, hahaha!
@@DasAntiNaziBroetchen You have a sprite with four different colored regions, each color representing a frame, then swap which colors are black and which are white.
Donkey Kong Country wasn't released for the original GameBoy, it was for the GameBoy Color. If you're thinking of Donkey Kong Land, that was a pretty bog standard GameBoy platform game.
@Sharopolis hi. great vid. but... i had trouble finding this. i couldn't find it in your "Games That Push the Limits of..." playlist. have you forgotten to add it there ?
I believe the Sega Master System could emulate the two dragon segment effect at the end. The Master System can store 256 8x8 pixel sprite tiles in VRAM at once. Basically the total image works out to 128x128 pixels. That should, I would think cover two large dragon sprites at once. Well until it becomes a flickering mess...
@@Sharopolis Thank you for the prompt response :) This does bring up an interesting point. How common was streaming in the 8-bit or 16-bit era? Do you have any data on that?
On 4.12 till 5.24, yes the nes could also do that, check that elivator level and that bossfight tank level in contra 2 ,they both overlapping the background and theres no flicker, Also check those strappy backgrounds in ice land frommario 3 in world 6, if you Shoot on frozen plants and then turn them into coins and grap those coins, you will not see black gaps on screen,same thing by grabbing regular coins or hitting a coin block, thus indicating that it became a sublayer background, On some fortress levels with a background however, once you hit a coin block, you will see a black gap on screen, thus indicating that it is a front layer background, If you can otherwise explain what’s going on , i would be impressed as well.
(12:27) _X_ reminds me a lot of _Arcticfox_ for MS-DOS. Those "gates" look like alien air converters, and the "base" looks like a cross between a radar station and communication fort. The "tunnel" reminds me of the OORXX probe traversing a planet's surface in _Captain Blood,_ however. It's too bad this Game Boy title is exclusively Japanese, as I'm rather interested for the fore mentioned reasons.
Interesting, would have never really thought Op C as pushing the limits, but in perspective it certainly does. EdIt: would something like DKL be considered hardware pushing?
The Elite NES cartridge was only able to do this because it contained additional RAM chips, mapped to an address range normally reserved for cartridge ROM space. The game essentially 'tricked' the NES into reading tile data from RAM instead of ROM.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it feels like a lot of this might come down to the GB being monochrome. Presumably the memory saved not only leaves room for other things, it should also make everything speedier in general.
Both Gameboy and the ZX Spectrum have their graphics linked to the cpu, making those amazing effects possible. Hardware like the Master System/Game Gear or MSX have a graphics chip that has its own cpu, and the main cpu needs to send the data to the graphics one, and that one needs to draw all of that on the screen, making it slower.
For 2 dekades i absolutely NEVER knew that the gameboy also contained a window background layer,and while it may have by only originally intended for the statusbar or huds(hence it did not support transparrancy and it cannot scroll,BUT seeing games such as asterix and prehistoric man etc,,, it does makes me wonder why no more games did heavily make use of this feature to get multi scrolling backgrounds, And those donkeykong land games as well as killer instinct could,ve welcome candidates for it,also it would,ve been cool if those supermarioland games did made heavy use of it,BUT no,that window layer was rarely or only partially used, Also they could,ve make heavy use of the 4bit pcm sound channel to make ports or half ports of certain 16bit games sounding more closer to it’s 16bit brothers(they could,ve use a 4channel pcm chip in a game cartride and mix & stream it’s output to that 4bit pcm channel, Sure fully utelizing that background window layer and 4bit pcm audio would,ve definitely took waaaay more cartride space of memory BUT that would,ve be well woryh it,thing is i always tout that i did hear and saw everything on gameboy but no as it turns out the gameboy could do so much more whether hardwarewise or softwarewise,but het it is what it is.
I think ZAS is doable on the NES. You could implement 'switchable tilemaps' by scrolling between two screens - I think there are a few games on the NES that have true four-screen scrolling, so you could even have vertical scrolling at the same time. Instead of switching screens on every frame, you could switch on every scanline with a sprite 0 hit - CRTs bleed vertically, and you could even alternate which layer was even/odd each frame with no extra cost.
You probably don't even need four screen scrolling, but if you're already using your cycles scrolling on every scanline you might need a few blank scanlines while you swap out tiles. The idea being that you put the two screens "above" each other and vertically scroll back and forth by 240 whilst also using the normal scrolling.
worst comes to worst, you need to keep 2 scroll values ("ground layer" and "cloud layer") and swap out the cloud layer value once per frame when you need it to 'wrap around'. you can probably just alternate STA/STY into the scroll register and cycle count the timing (?)
I was expecting to see Links Awakening on the list. I clearly remember there were some slowdowns in gameplay, especially if there were some many stuff on a screen like explosions and multiple multiple enemies and grass cutting etc. Still was a masterpiece for such a limited device.
Gameboy is the "lessons learned" version of the NES, designed around what the developers actually did on the NES.
Pretty much sums it up.
It was a great strategy too
Even if Gameboy is weak compared to its competition
At least its launch title and its first couple of years was filled with great game and very fun one and the one that is practically NES in your pocket.
@@manghariz2211 The main one that comes to mind is the tilemap size. the NES tilemap was made with either vertical or horizontal scrolling mind, so it would have a map that is two screens wide or two screens tall (with the rest just repeating).
Gameboy have a smaller tilemap, but it is larger than the screen both horizontally and vertically, so all those offscreen tilemap updating schemes work better while saving on ram.
Also don't forget how early the NES was developed. There are a lot of years of advancement in the GB over the NES.
And while using a CPU from the mid 70's, the Zilog Z80. lol
@@Mechaghostman2 It's more of a weirdass sharp "homebrew" kinda based on the Z80 but not completely.
It sadly lacks the very powerful block copying instructions from the Z80.
Nice! I'm programming 3D polygon textured characters on the Game Boy Advance! I'll be posting it soon.
This video has made me appreciate how difficult porting games from one platform to another must actually be.
While its still difficult nowadays, the porting process isn't as difficult as it used to be, as systems that we have now are alot more standardized and usually have some tier of compatibility layer underneath in the case of like UWP for Xbox/windows, part of why games are bloated now but nice for porting
@@parad0xheart do audiences demand that? I think it's the companies themselves that do. Their leadership, or at least whoever controls their funding.
@@nthgth yeah that guy's wrong while some of us do strive for better graphics and stuff we've also played games that had shit graphics and still had fun, still had fun playing on older consoles, company's are the ones who are constantly trying to improve graphics to pull more people in, not all consumers care about the newest nicest looking game out
@@nthgth It's absolutely the gamers that demand that. How many times have you seen gamers complain about "blurry textures"? What part of a game do you think uses the most amount of disk space?
@@DasAntiNaziBroetchen no one since maybe the '90s has complained about graphics in ANY conversation I've had about video games. Are you in middle school or something?
Gotta love that you not only show impressive games for each system but also explain how these tricks were achieved. It is so entertaining :)
"well, put simply, it is the work of the devil" I was not expecting that lol.
The devil is quite the good programmer, you know
and said twice.. :D
I couldn’t believe my own ears everytime he said that, i was like WTH.
An interesting thing you missed about Prehistorik Man is the bouncing text at the beginning. Most effects you see in games are achieved by changing things between scan lines or between frames, but that text is done by repeatedly changing the background palette *in the middle of the scan line* while it’s being drawn.
The development of "X" was based around the team looking at the ZX version of Elite, and trying to create a render that could utilise a similar wireframe presentation. Both the ZX and Game Boy used the Zilog Z80 processor, but the difference is that the ZX operated at 4MHz, whereas the Game Boy ran at 3MHz. Indeed, "X" spawned from the initial demo using unofficial methods, but Nintendo was impressed and wanted to seal a deal with Argonaut which forced them to relocate to do so. A semi-translated prototype of X, "Lunar Chase" exists but there was no official release outside Japan, making "X" Japanese-exclusive.
The Argonaut demo not only featured 3D graphics but a method to bypass the GameBoy copy protection as well. (and it was that in addition to the 3D that convinced Nintendo that Argonaut was someone they should work with)
Prehistoric Man seems to be a 'Look at what the Game Boy is capable of.', rather than an epic addictive game. It's pure genius.
I have Prehistorik Man on my Evercade and I can play it on my Switch as part of my NSO subscription. It’s not the best platformer on SNES, but I still think it’s pretty good.
Prehistoric Man looks amazing. I always thought Gargoyles Quest was very impressive when it came out too. Very detailed sprites and killer music.
I'm so glad this channel just showed up in my recommendations
no race drivin'?
THAT'S WHAT I SAID
TH-cam's been giving me a lot of recommendations based on videos you've watched lately, and it's been great!
Yeah i was wondering that too. For a Game Boy title that was actually very impressive. More impressive than the Hard Drivin port for the Mega Drive
I nearly put that in, but it's Argonaut software again and seems to use a very similar game engine to X, so I thought I just be repeating the same stuff. Its a great game though, maybe more impressive than X in some ways,
@@Sharopolis but hard drivn is waay more impressive then X.
Remember when the Gameboy port of Tetris was still on 3DS eShop? Definitely the best port in my opinion
Glad I kept it on my 3DS when it suddenly vanished from the eShop.
It's not my favorite but it's definitely the most iconic
Soon as I tried Donkey Kong Land, I assumed my gameboy was better than nes.
Prehistoric Man is a game that's been on my wishlist for a while. I emulated it once, so I'm aware it's not fantastic gameplay-wise, but as a Game Boy collector, it's up there as a must-have.
I wasn't aware how special the water effects are in games like Operation C. I own Final Fantasy Legend 3, and that has a similar effect with scrolling water on the world map. I always assumed that was a simple effect to achieve.
I gotta give a shoutout to Race Drivin'. It's a 3D racing game on the Game Boy, complete with shaded polygons and occasional track elevation and loops. I actually own this one, and it plays something awful. Racing games should not run at 3 frames per second. But besides being in 3D, it has another cool feature: if you win a trophy, it saves your "ghost data" of that track, allowing you to race against yourself. At least until you turn off the game.
The caveman game reminds me so much of Joe and Mac on the SNES with pretty much the same exact graphics quality and effects. Essentially a 16 bit game gray-scale on an 8 bit platform. Amazing. I always was impressed with what my gameboy could put out, even today.
Joe and Mac was ported to the game boy just in case ya didn't know.
I always find it interesting to compare the Gameboy to the SNES as you can see a lot of the features of the SNES in the Gameboy. The SNES just doesn't have the budget, space and power restrictions of the Gameboy but is still very similar to it in many ways.
@@Gameboy-Unboxings Yeah I vaguely recall. It didn't look as good as this unfortunately.
6:08 the ZAS technique is very cleaver. Kudos to the programmers!
About Faceball 2000, I found an IPS patch that makes use of the "double speed mode" that the GBC have. By using it, it makes the game go faster and it achieves a pretty good framerate. I totally recommend it.
someone did something similar with i believe the superFX chip on SNES and made a patch for StarFox, giving a much smoother framerate there as well.
Gargoyles Quest was the one that blew my mind back in the day, LOved the OG Gameboy with its battery eating soft screen that scratched if you looked at it.
The Gameboy is one of the many tools of the devil. Lesson learned.
What they did with "Operation C" and "Prehistorik Man" is incredible
8:41 Sword Master on NES does switch between two background planes for the end credits...
Ghouls and Ghosts on Sega Genesis mimics three background layers at the start of the second half of level 1, switching far background (plane A) to closer rain between frames... Actually many games used that trick and I could list some others....
Thanks for the video Sharopolis! Really excited at the possibility of a Game Boy Color / GBA video now
Game Boy Colour is on the list, I've done the GBA if you look though my channel.
Your videos always inspire me to work harder on mine :) They're the bee's knees!
Yours are great too! you both take a technical approach and bring new aspects to the table. There are gamers that make youtube videos and then there are computer nerds that make youtube videos - guess which type other computer nerds prefer ;)
when I was a kid Lawnmower Man on SNES had these fly threw 3d levels and it absolutely blew me a way
That's also on the GB, with the 3D stages.
Where's the Race Drivin port? It's a polygonal racer that actually runs fairly well on the GB and was actually developed by the developers of Star Fox!
Nice to see the good ol' Game Boy get some love!
wow it really make you apperciate how games of the early 8 bit and 16 bit were designed. thank you so much
I've been a fan of the Game Boy for more than thirty years, but I'd never heard of Zas or Prehistorik Man. Wow--thanks for not treading down the same old path! A limit-pushing game that surely doesn't get enough recognition--READ: criminally underrated--is Konami's Gradius: The Interstellar Assault, a space shooter from 1991. (Also called Gradius: Return of the Hero, or Nemesis II.) Gradius excels in nearly every department, including a fabulous soundtrack. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if it's got the most sophisticated audio of any title produced for the original Game Boy. Thanks again!
It took me 15 minutes to realize that I was hearing the word 'tiles' not 'tails'...
Same here. I don't usually have this much difficulty in determining what's being said in British English, but his pronunciation is really bad for for such a simple word. I unquestionably heard an 'a' sound.
Tails-based graphics were only available on the Genesis...
@@Christopher-N Why do you think regional accents are "bad"? Do you think everybody should talk like the Queen?
@@Christopher-N you Americans are hilarious.
I never knew the Gameboy was more capable than the NES. Really cool to finally learn that. I always wondered how Super Mario Land 2 looked closer to Super Mario World than Super Mario Bros. 3. Makes perfect sense now
well, it's primarily stylistic. super mario land 2 simply uses a different visual style. the nes is definitely more powerful, and it can push far more sprites. but the gameboy was designed after learning what developers tried to do on the nes so it has more capabilities that way.
@@nerbulent yeah i doubt we could get Recca on gameboy.
A GBC game you should cover sometime is Densha de Go 2. It's an arcade-style train simulator that is developed by Taito and sold in Japan only (which makes sense, as this game revolves around Japanese trains), and it uses similar techniques to Faceball 2000 for the actual game. The intro cutscene for DDG2 is even more impressive.
My fave series on TH-cam apart from any about my game lol. Seriously though I love seeing what these consoles/handhelds can do.
Thank you!
Your welcome, have you considered doing a push the limits on the Jaguar?
So many of these things were automated on old computers, the people who know how it works and how to write scan lines and rendering methods work, can seemingly figure out how to write almost anything on even limited hardware like this.
watch this video in a single breath! Very interesting, I am even suorised how much
One of the Gameboy Castlevania games actually uses the flicker trick to create faded background images in windows.
I love retro hardware. Limit pushing tricks like... this handful of moving dots representing water! Yet it really is fascinating.
"I dunnow, and I'm going to have to say his name again in a minute." I laughed out loud! I know just how you feel with these hard to say names.
Tough isn't it?
@@Sharopolis Whichever way you say it, you'll get someone telling you you're wrong!
@Gareth Fairclough Whenever I hear "Crikey" I think of the Microsoft internal British ex-pat community e-mail. It was filled with inane banter. The description was originally misspelt as "British noseflashes" (should be "newsflashes") but they liked the misspelling and kept it. There was a serious one called "Blimey" that no one used.
Whenever I hear “crikey” I think of Lawnmower Deth and their comedy thrash classic “Ooh Crikey It’s Lawnmower Deth.”
I loved my original Gameboy, it seemed soo ahead of its time. The games always seemed better conversions when compared and the monochrome graphics actually worked in its favour.
GB Bionic Commando had an out-of-focus intro that must have been rapidly alternating backgrounds.
That last entry is hilarious - comparisons are hard to make considering the amount of black magic needed to pull it off on the GameBoy in the first place hahaha!
Once again, loving the technical background of these vids.
Thank you Stuart for your support as ever!
A New Sharopolis video always makes the day a bit better. Thanks!
First I'm stumbling upon your channel. Fantastic technical explanations and visuals, as well as an excellent range of examples all showcasing different uses of the system's background layer and tiling features, from which basically all of the tricks here derive. Loopholes (I definitely hesitate to call them shortcuts) and optimizations developers employ to make game experiences seem seamless are some of the most fascinating details in game development. And by design, they're usually overlooked, but that makes them no less deserving of recognition!
"Put quite simply, it's the work of the devil." That alone just earned me as a subscriber
Again, this is teaching me so much that I didn't know. Thanks!
Thank you for watching!
From this footage, what the GB can do what the NES can't, you are invisible all the time.
People who had GBs when they first came out werent the graphic whiney people of today. We pretty much thought it all looked awesome. Some more impressive than others but the newness of portable games made everything seem semi good back then. I remember being blown away by Battletoads on GB and Daffy Duck. Blades of Steel looked great in the day and is still one of my top 25 games of all time. If the GB screen was as gorgeous and clear without all that ghosty blurry movement crap as the Gameboy pocket, I would still be playing it because it is such a delight to hold. But all these years later....woooo....that screen is just BAD. Faceball rocked.
Perfect example of this snobby nonsense is the Nintendo Switch. Can you imagine having a Gameboy back in the mid 90's that could match the SNES? The Switch is a handheld that has some amazing looking games, and all we get are pathetic losers that look down on it because it doesn't look as good as PS4 or Xbox One. It is a damn handheld!
Never thought about it this way. Had a gameboy as a child and I loved it. I've always been an art style over pure graphics kinda guy. 60 frames refresh rates ray tracing and similar jargon? Meaningless words to me. Lol
@@JT-sx5gl The Switch was advertised as a home console, so it's competing the both the PS4 and XB1, and now the PS5 and XS/X. I don't think anybody had any realistic expectations for this souped-up Nvidia Shield to have groundbreaking performance or graphical capabilities compared to Sony and Microsoft's offerings, but considering it's targeting the same markets, don't fault the consumer for expecting performance on-par with the competition.
@@sampleentry5253 They never implied it was competing directly with the PS4 and XB one. Also, it was clear the thing was a handheld if you watched the trailers. It had a dock, but that in no way makes it a home console. It doesn't even really matter because when it came to direct sales, this thing was beating even the XB one in that aspect. Regardless, now that its capabilities are clear, it's stupid to keep treating it like it should be more than what it is.
@@JT-sx5gl i own a switch and honestly am not a huge fan....I bought it because they put the new Pokemon game on it and I have always loved that franchise and have played them all religiously. If they had released Sword and Shield on 3ds I wouldnt own a Switch. Switch isnt comparbale at all to GB to me and here's why. Everything that came out on GB in the first five years or so was all original content made for that system....Battletoads on Nes isnt the same as GB even though that is one they sort of tried porting. My problem with the switch is not much feels fresh and exciting and I really dont want 5 or 15 or 20 year old ports of games Ive owned and played the crap out of on other sytems. If a person has only been playing Nintendo games a decade or less maybe it is an exciting system My personal opinion, in no way meaning to insult anyone elses, is that they have not done much with a great system beyond ports and shovelware. We didnt even get a "new" Mario Kart for switch yet, just glorified wii u version. I wont even go into the top 20 reasons it turned out to have my least favortie Pokemon games other than they suck. Im not saying it is a bad system but it just feels stale to me and not as innovative as past handhelds by Nintendo. And...no sports games....dang the GB had tons of original sports games
You can't fool me, whatever's going on in Prehistoric Man is absolutely black magic of a most sinister nature.
Lead Developer: Ganondorf
I think that V Rally on the Gameboy is a real hardware pusher. One of the best looking 8 bit driving games out there, runs really smoothly and plays well too.
that's a gba game? that's already 32 bit...
@@lh_a-spec there's an original Game Boy version of the game.
@@jondixon4937 Wow! I never knew that. The original gameboy version looks really impressive as well. Thanks for telling me!
So the background based baddies were essentially standing still and the rest of the screen (including 1st background) was "scrolling" around them to make them look like they were moving? Is that why their bullets appeared to not go straight but to ebb in the direction that they are moving? Or were the bullets of the end of level baddies treated separately? Which set of physics were they beholden to? (as in which background's gravity were they following?)
I love how you don't do the ones we have all seem 100 times before
I think the Kirby's Dreamland games really showcased the Gameboy's strengths. Good old side scrolling with crystal clear imagery and no messy backgrounds, butter smooth and so easy to play.
i love the idea that someone sold their soul to the devil for some parallax scrolling on the early gameboy. and you kept the joke going for so long. bravo.
Dylan Cuthbert, who worked on X, said that the GB was more flexibel than the NES. I think the amount of wireframe games prove that point. (Ray Thunder, Days of Thunder, Lawnmower Man, Race Drivin)
Nice selection of games and great explanations!
I played so damn much on my GB back in the 90s as a kid and have so many good memories.
Friends came by with their games, we talked about it a lot. I began to learn English with GB and NES games, as there were only a few German translated games out there.
I remember that Probotector (Contra), Double Dragon II, Gargoyle's Quest, Terminator 2 (my first FPS!), SML2 and Tetris were my most favorite GB games.
It was a couple of years before Pokemon came out, which I played on an emulator in the early 2000s. ^^
Very good technical explanations. You’ve blown my mind haha. Subbed!
The NES can switch between two bg layers if the game uses 4 screen nametables. But ironically it would work the best on LCD TVs.
I love this series of vids!
More more more ! 😁
The TI-99 computer had character-mapped graphics, presenting a problem for the LOGO turtle graphics program. It did not have enough tiles to display the complexity of some drawings, and would display an "Out of Ink" message.
Loved the explanations.
Thanks!
Even back in the day I had a feeling the original GameBoy could do some things that the NES couldn’t. Confirmed.
Great video, I learned a lot. Thanks for all your efforts!
6:45 I think you frogot the X16 with it's 2 background layers, and dispite the name, it is 8 bit.
When I was little the OG Game Boy blew me away, a tiny NES and attached video screen that could fit in your pocket and run entirely on a few AA batteries like a kid's toy. Then the Super Game Boy let us play those tiny cartridges on a real TV, like the Nintendo Switch except over 20 years early. Of course we now know that the NES had been available in Japan since 1983, although I would have believed it back then, Japan had quite a mystique.
Prehistorik man is not based in the same named game from Snes. It's based on an awesome Dos game called Prehistorik 2. A big game with large levels and a lot of secrets and hidden rooms
Fascinating video always enjoy your uploads
Have ye' seen Star Hawk? Has plenty of (albeit choppy) parallax scrolling.
Man, I love videos like this.
4:58 i hope the widow layer can find solace in her loss
On ZAS on Super Game Boy, wouldn't the issue have been the timer crystal been a little too fast for proper playback? The Super Game Boy 2 fixed that issue.
I flipping love the Game Boy! I still have my original one that I got for Christmas when it came out 😍 so many good memories
Another one worth mentioning is Pokémon Yellow, which included voice acting.
So if they made a Zardoz game they would be able to have vertical chest hair in the background as well as the foreground. That's indeed ballsy
I loved to do the music on Prehistoric Man. Elmar was a well known Demo Coder on Amstrad CPC.
Batman for the NES had a flickering effect that worked pretty well in the intro.
Castlevania Belmont's Revenge also exhibits that flicker in one of the castle, one of the worst things about IPS screen mods as that's one of my favourite GB games.
Race Drivin is a very impressive 3D racing game and Ray Thunder (Japan only but cheap to import) is a good attempt at a FPS on the system.
Wow, I never knew Belmont's Revenge used that effect, I missed that. And Ray Thunder! That is totally new to me, thanks for the tip!
@@Sharopolis Just tried Belmont's Revenge and it happens in Cloud Castle, the mountains in the background flicker and don't seem to move correctly.that's on original hardware with a, IPS screen mod. Also looks the same under emulation.
3:10 not the best start, this is typically achieved with palette swapping, eg. Sonic 3 - and the NES would have been capable of it (barely given 2bpp but still).
EDIT: 10:29 : Now THAT is a fantastic example of the same hardware feature, hahaha!
I don't see how this would be achievable using palette swapping.
@@DasAntiNaziBroetchen You have a sprite with four different colored regions, each color representing a frame, then swap which colors are black and which are white.
How is donkey Kong country for OG GB not mentioned?!!
Donkey Kong Country wasn't released for the original GameBoy, it was for the GameBoy Color.
If you're thinking of Donkey Kong Land, that was a pretty bog standard GameBoy platform game.
Earthworm Jim?
@Sharopolis hi. great vid. but...
i had trouble finding this. i couldn't find it in your "Games That Push the Limits of..." playlist. have you forgotten to add it there ?
I believe the Sega Master System could emulate the two dragon segment effect at the end. The Master System can store 256 8x8 pixel sprite tiles in VRAM at once. Basically the total image works out to 128x128 pixels. That should, I would think cover two large dragon sprites at once. Well until it becomes a flickering mess...
If you ever do a follow-up to this video, you should do Lawnmower Man. As a game it was so-so, but It had some jaw-dropping visual effects.
Great and informative as always, thanks!
2:39 Could someone elaborate on that? Were the tiles changed programatically? Or where they streamed from the ROM onto the VRAM?
I'm pretty sure they are just shifted along by some code rather than being streamed in.
@@Sharopolis Thank you for the prompt response :) This does bring up an interesting point. How common was streaming in the 8-bit or 16-bit era? Do you have any data on that?
On 4.12 till 5.24, yes the nes could also do that, check that elivator level and that bossfight tank level in contra 2 ,they both overlapping the background and theres no flicker,
Also check those strappy backgrounds in ice land frommario 3 in world 6, if you Shoot on frozen plants and then turn them into coins and grap those coins, you will not see black gaps on screen,same thing by grabbing regular coins or hitting a coin block, thus indicating that it became a sublayer background,
On some fortress levels with a background however, once you hit a coin block, you will see a black gap on screen, thus indicating that it is a front layer background,
If you can otherwise explain what’s going on , i would be impressed as well.
(12:27) _X_ reminds me a lot of _Arcticfox_ for MS-DOS. Those "gates" look like alien air converters, and the "base" looks like a cross between a radar station and communication fort. The "tunnel" reminds me of the OORXX probe traversing a planet's surface in _Captain Blood,_ however. It's too bad this Game Boy title is exclusively Japanese, as I'm rather interested for the fore mentioned reasons.
The NES games that needed Ram released with them,.. so the NES could do it,.. if the Games wanted it to. This is how it was designed.
I love this series
Interesting, would have never really thought Op C as pushing the limits, but in perspective it certainly does.
EdIt: would something like DKL be considered hardware pushing?
DKL was amazing, but I just thought Prehistorik Man was more impressive and I didn't want to drag the video out too long!
3:25 I'm pretty sure Elite on the NES shows that it could write to the graphics tiles without having to use special hardware.
The Elite NES cartridge was only able to do this because it contained additional RAM chips, mapped to an address range normally reserved for cartridge ROM space. The game essentially 'tricked' the NES into reading tile data from RAM instead of ROM.
I've been wanting an English patch of 'X' for years and it seems like it's finally here. I'm off to get it...
It’s such a masterpiece I love it so much that I imported my own Japanese copy.
Wait, wasn't Belphegor associated with toilets and sloth? Sounds like a perfect match for the Game Boy, all told.
When I was a kid, while playing smb1, I was told that Mario didn't always move... It was the background! I know better now!
Correct me if I'm wrong but it feels like a lot of this might come down to the GB being monochrome. Presumably the memory saved not only leaves room for other things, it should also make everything speedier in general.
No. The game boy has specific CPU instructions for fast memory transfer, which the NES lacks.
Alien 3 on Master System has real Parallax-Scrolling too...
Audio wise, Viking Child should be on here.
Great in-game music, where as NO music on Lynx 😂
Both Gameboy and the ZX Spectrum have their graphics linked to the cpu, making those amazing effects possible.
Hardware like the Master System/Game Gear or MSX have a graphics chip that has its own cpu, and the main cpu needs to send the data to the graphics one, and that one needs to draw all of that on the screen, making it slower.
For 2 dekades i absolutely NEVER knew that the gameboy also contained a window background layer,and while it may have by only originally intended for the statusbar or huds(hence it did not support transparrancy and it cannot scroll,BUT seeing games such as asterix and prehistoric man etc,,, it does makes me wonder why no more games did heavily make use of this feature to get multi scrolling backgrounds,
And those donkeykong land games as well as killer instinct could,ve welcome candidates for it,also it would,ve been cool if those supermarioland games did made heavy use of it,BUT no,that window layer was rarely or only partially used,
Also they could,ve make heavy use of the 4bit pcm sound channel to make ports or half ports of certain 16bit games sounding more closer to it’s 16bit brothers(they could,ve use a 4channel pcm chip in a game cartride and mix & stream it’s output to that 4bit pcm channel,
Sure fully utelizing that background window layer and 4bit pcm audio would,ve definitely took waaaay more cartride space of memory BUT that would,ve be well woryh it,thing is i always tout that i did hear and saw everything on gameboy but no as it turns out the gameboy could do so much more whether hardwarewise or softwarewise,but het it is what it is.
I think ZAS is doable on the NES. You could implement 'switchable tilemaps' by scrolling between two screens - I think there are a few games on the NES that have true four-screen scrolling, so you could even have vertical scrolling at the same time. Instead of switching screens on every frame, you could switch on every scanline with a sprite 0 hit - CRTs bleed vertically, and you could even alternate which layer was even/odd each frame with no extra cost.
You probably don't even need four screen scrolling, but if you're already using your cycles scrolling on every scanline you might need a few blank scanlines while you swap out tiles. The idea being that you put the two screens "above" each other and vertically scroll back and forth by 240 whilst also using the normal scrolling.
I can't really take credit for this idea, I saw it in Paragon5 Music Cart (ironically a GBC game)
worst comes to worst, you need to keep 2 scroll values ("ground layer" and "cloud layer") and swap out the cloud layer value once per frame when you need it to 'wrap around'. you can probably just alternate STA/STY into the scroll register and cycle count the timing (?)
I was expecting to see Links Awakening on the list. I clearly remember there were some slowdowns in gameplay, especially if there were some many stuff on a screen like explosions and multiple multiple enemies and grass cutting etc. Still was a masterpiece for such a limited device.
Excellent stuff , thanks for the video👍
My pleasure!
You didn't mention GB Space Invaders. That's a real limit pushing when running on the SGB.