It's easy to forget how novel and impressive some of these graphical effects were at the time. Programmers really showed their skill getting these limited systems to do something new.
Europeans coders created demos on computers (mostly, there's a demoscene for the Atari 2600 that pushes that console to its limits) Japanese coders created games for consoles.
Surprised Kirby’s adventure didn’t make this list, one of the most beautiful, pleasant to look at games on the NES, basically the Yoshi’s island of the NES considering the graphics still look incredible today.
Kirby looks great, but it doesn’t really have any ridiculous techniques like the rest of the games. There’s parallax scrolling, sure, and the occasional animated background feature, but no multi layered backgrounds like in Batman, no massive animated foreground pieces like Gi joe, no multiple scrolling layers and piles of enemies like star force or whatever it’s called. It’s an impressive game for sure, but coupled with the fact that it doesn’t do anything jaw dropping and has slowdown at times, it doesn’t do enough to deserve a spot
@@sonarfungus7571 Well sure it doesn’t utilize “Ridiculous techniques”, but the sheer amount of content in the game should have at least net it some sort of mention right? There are 41 levels in the games, not including the boss rooms, Arenas, Museums, and the 3 different minigames. That’s more story mode levels that Kirby Star Allies, which came out 25 years later. Tons of Sprites are huge and beautiful, and the backgrounds were painted by an artist and digitized to work in the game, similar to Donkey Kong Country, which had never been done before up to that point. I get the subtitle is “Graphics deep dive”, but the series itself is called “Games that pushed the limits” and Kirby’s adventure no doubt pushed the limits of the NES.
Kirby’s Adventure was incredible when it came out. I remember renting it from Blockbuster and I was obsessed. It was baffling how much content they managed to cram into that 6Mb cart.
@@Diembee This is one of the main reasons why i love retro consoles so much. Whereas new consoles keep trying to push 'realism' the NES games all had unique art styles. And Kirby's Adventure was masterful. That game got snubbed by not being included in this video
The channels Game Hut and Coding Secrets (both run by the same guy) go into a lot of depth about how these almost impossible effects were achieved. The guy running the channels is (or was) the head) ceo and lead programmer of Travellers Tales in the 90s and 2000s so he often describes how stuff was done on his own games, as well as ones by other companies. He genuinely a genius. So many things that nobody else could achieve, he managed it. He invented tons of coding tricks himself. He's probably the single most hardware pushing programmer from those times, nobody else individually came up with more stuff than him Like how when he made Sonic 3D blast, he managed to get a full motion video intro on a regular mega drive cartridge, on stock mega drive hardware, not a Sega CD, not a 32x, not a Sega saturn, he achieved this on 1989 hardware with a regular cartridge (not one with an extra chip in it like the Super FX chip on snes). That's simply insane. He has a video just about how he achieved that Other games he made that he explains are things like Mickey Mania, Toy Story, the lego star wars games, etc Even if you know nothing about programming his videos are great and easy to understand. I highly suggest looking them up. Game Hut and Coding Secrets, both on TH-cam
@@duffman18 very nice channel and that guy is a total genius. There's also some interesting stuff off this type by MVG channel about some impossible ports, look also for the interview of the guy who did the Doom SNES port, or the guy who developed Crash bandicoot for the PS1
The bad guys on the elevator are actually part of the background tiles until they jump out that's when they become Sprites that's how the elevator is able to pass them
That was my initial thought, but if you look closely, the bad guys are flickering before they jump out, and they were showing during the sprites-only view, which means they are sprites being occluded by the elevator.
@@kevin12567 They're background tiles until they pass under the elevator. None of them are taller than the elevator while crouched/waiting, and they don't start flickering until they're above the elevator. This says to me that the brief frame when they're completely obscured by the elevator is when the swap occurs.
@@Mayydayy86 You can see at 11:50 that when the background is disabled the enemies are still visible. The effect was most probably done by stacking 6 invisible sprites on the elevator(+the two walls), as the nes can only draw 8 sprites per scanline and the lowest priority ones get discarded
@@Mayydayy86 Nope, they're sprites. Watch the video starting at 11:48. In this segment the emulator is set to show ONLY SPRITES, with the background blacked out. At 11:52 you start to see the enemies appearing below the elevator before they're obscured by it, then reappear above it. Flickering only occurs on the NES when there's more than eight 8x8 blocks of sprites on a scan line (sprites are typically two of these 8x8 blocks wide).
My pick for best looking NES game would have to be Ninja Gaiden 3: The Ancient Ship of Doom. The use of black backgrounds as a shader for the terrain are so clean, and stack with the environment animations (running water in 3-1A, spikes visibly retracting into the floors and walls, the sand in 2-1A) to create an incredible looking aesthetic. The hud elements gradually cycle through a rainbow of different colors as you play too!
@@nebularain3338 You are partially right, there we no additonal processing in any part, the Mapper only provide Access to Extra RAM (Both VRAM and Workram) and lots of Bankswitching, but the PPU with is palette of 52 Colors, 25 Colors on Screen or the CPU was never boosted in any way, in fact in the END all the Data lands in the 2 KB!!! of VRAM in the PPU that displays it all, thats the reason why mappers are so easy to emulate on flashcard the simply have to feed the CPU and PPU with the correct data but inspite of the SNES Chips they don´t have to emulate any real processor functions
Street Fighter 2010 (not the Street Fighter arcade ports as in Street Fighter 2, etc); but the SHOOTER Street Fighter 2010 (which was also made by Capcom) on the NES with its graphics had some effects that were reminiscent of 16 bit even before the SNES came out and/or got off the groudd. When I was playing Street Fighter 2010 on the NES, it felt like I was playing an arcade game.
@Dean Satan right? people say "look this 8 bit game look 16". but nah, they dont, sprites are too small, less detailed, but the color is a dead giveaway, its kinda like those ps1 games people swear look like ps2 games, but clearly doesnt.
@@marcosdheleno no there was no ps2 in 1995, HOWEVER if i compare the ps2 graphics with when i saw those ps1 graphics for the first time, it looked like ps2 graphics to my perception,why? Because in 1995 i never realized that those graphics might,ve be kubistic.
@@johneymute but that's my point, you didnt think it "looks like a ps2", because there was no ps2 to compare with it. you may have thought "this looks amazing!" or something like that. but there's no reason to think a ps1 game looks like ps2, specially when it was almost half a decade before the ps2 even existed!
I am so glad that you covered _Recca;_ everything about it is truly marvelous. I hope that it gets a release on the Nintendo Switch Online service one day. It sure could use more quality games here in the West, and both it and _Crisis Force_ would be perfect for it.
Especially since the rewind would come in handy. Not to mention how much better the emulation will be compared to the 3ds. Because the song called HYDE plays the sample incorrectly for some reason.
I know you know this, but you are making this sound far too easy. I’m guessing these techniques weren’t rare because they were arcane; they were rare because they were hard. The 6502, with its bare minimum of registers, just wasn’t designed to use interrupts for this sort of process juggling. I’m in awe of these early game programmers - you do a nice job giving them a shoutout when you can. Too bad there’s so little documentation from this era of who did what.
Atari 800 has 6502 and hardware support for line interrupts and nearly every game with decent graphics does this a lot. 1979 hardware. Nes/famicom gets comparable abilities only with more advanced mapper chips.
Most of the time it's harder to come up with a nice looking effect than it is to program it, banswitching like in batman and crysis force or split scrolling like GI Joe or Recca for example are just writing a few numbers to certain locations.
This isn't an in-depth technical video. It's to give an overview for people who may not be hardcore coders, and so making it sound easy also makes it more understandable.
Eh, I disagree. The amount of registers on the 6502 isn't an issue with using interrupts like this, you just push them to the stack when you receive the interrupt, and pull them back off when you're done. This adds a little bit of overhead of course, but worst case scenario you miss hblank and have to wait an extra line before you start your writes. The only thing more registers would help with is allowing you to pre-load more values to write during hblank, but this isn't necessary for anything other than swapping colors mid-frame.
Various Memory Mappers/add-on chips built in to cartridges would add advanced Interrupt timing mechanisms that the original cartridge hardware and console don't include support for. Without this capability it becomes very difficult to concisely time when events should occur. This is why you mostly see the advanced graphics tricks being done on the cartridges that include them.
I love your videos because you actually explain why and how the relevant game mechanics and effects work like they do, which is so much more interesting and respectable than most other content that simply shows a game and says "wow this looks impressive" lol
One reason why I only get a console near the end of its generation is because by then there's not only a ton of games in the library (and a ton available used for cheap), but the newest stuff takes full advantage of the system. Early adopters really only get games that look/play last gen.
every game pushed the limits of the NES,... the NES was basically a blank slate of pixels for games to fill, most of the system was in the games themselves.
The $2001 register GI Joe writes to has a way to turn off sprites. I'm pretty sure the sprites first get turned off behind the elevator, then the game just clears the background as well when it casts the shadow
To me it seems the register writes to $2001 only disables the background, the Sprite enable bit is not touched. The wall sprites are still visible in those scanlines too. The sprites probably vanish behind the elevator using the priority bit in OAM, maybe even with a sprite masking technique, using additional sprites with a higher priority in OAM. Not sure if the wall sprites being masked behind the elevator gears is also achieved that way.
That makes sense actually. What I'm thinking is happening there is that the elevator is large enough to cover a single 8x8 or 8x16 sprite, and that the game cuts all sprites that are behind the elevator while reenabling them just behind these zones with the BG priority bit on to simulate them being behind the BG
While I can't get to that portion of the game right now to verify, I am fairly certain the purple background in Recca at 25:00 is accomplished by updating the background X and Y scroll positions. Some older games like Rad Racer and Rad Racer 2 do that to accomplish effects like the clouds moving left/right as well as the road curving left, right, up, and down. The nametables in the those has a sky image in two tables and the road sloping in to the horizon in the other two (plus the dashboard). Recca just does it in such a way that it looks amazing.
26:20 It is probably doing a technique known as "racing the beam" in which the screen is actively re-written every scanline, Those 4 pokes to the PPU are likely timed to the 60 FPS operating time of the NES but divided by 4 to make it 15 frames a second. it actually sounds like a simple 12-byte loop if you ask me.
Most people overlook Track & Field II. It's one of the most impressive looking NES games ever made, especially considering how many different game modes it features.
Really enjoyed this one. Getting clever with the old debugging feature there really adds a bit of extra depth. Check out Elite on the NES for tile swapping taken to an awesomely mental level. There truly was some clever buggers working on the NES.
Gameplay wise, yeah, Megaman on nes is awsome. Graphics wise, I’m sorry, but the entire nes mega man series is one of the blandest looking series on the console. Definitely not pushing the limits of the nes. Not nearly as detailed as the examples in this video.
I used to had a Master System when I was young, thus it is my 8-bit reference. When I look at NES games the first thing that strikes me is how much the color black is used and how the color palette is dark. In comparison, Master System games rarely used black and the colors were very saturated and vibrant. I wonder why there is this difference.
The master system can generate more colours and more colours per tile like a sprite can include upto 10 colours where a nes does I think 3 per sprite also a faster cpu . But the nes had advantages in some display aspects due to enhance chips and sound was better for most part
The number of bits is only an indication of how many bits the CPU can handle in a single machine cycle. So, to do a 16 bit calculation it needs 2 machine cycles. It says nothing about graphics capabilities. So the simple answer is that MS has better GPU.
The Nintendo's color palette isn't as nice to work with as the Master System's, with a weird color distribution and several duplicate blacks and grays. (Tangentally, weird color distribution is why Megaman is blue. There were more shades of blue available to work with, so he didn't blend in with backgrounds.)
@@CptJistuce Also, darker colors look more similar. This limits garishness, and sometimes even allows using one color for 2 different gradients or purposes.
The best part about Return of the Joker here is that it has 16-bit versions you can directly compare it to, and it looks better than both of them. Fewer colors, sure, but it uses them much more effectively.
I remember the first time I played Ninja Gaiden IIII was impressed by the graphics, and when I saw the cutscene to act 5 I thought "this is Genesis stuff, nothing to envy".
Which ones were those? The last NES games I bought new in 1993/1994 were Bonks Adventure, Kirby's Adventure, Adventure island 3, Mega Man 6, Darkwing Duck, and Battletoads and Double Dragon. I paid about $40-50 per title if I remember correctly. Now Genesis/SNES games back in 1992-1995........woo boy, and people complain about $70 games now. HA! I paid $90 for Phantasy Star IV, $70 for Earthworm Jim 1 and 2, $60 for Sparkster, $60 for Splatterhouse 3, $60 for 3D Ballz, $60 for Sonic 3 and $60 for Sonic & Knuckles, $80 for Shining Force 2, etc, etc, etc $90 for Super Mario 64 was the last time I paid a high price for a new game that wasn't a LE/CE.
More than that in some cases. I know this isnt Japan, but from what I understood, the game LaGrange Point cost $120 in unadjusted US dollars after foreign currency adjustments. That being posted, that was the price for a very advanced VRC7 chip that had a cartridge bigger than a typical cartridge. With the inability to use the VRC7 chip in North America both because Nintendo wouldnt allow a third party cartridges, no way to use the sound enhancements that were required, a likely downgrade in graphics when using Nintendo's standard cartridges, and localizing the game for English speaking gamers, it wasnt worth it for Konami to even try to bring the game to North America.
@@Turbotef By that time, the cost of 8-bit hardware was starting to fall. There is a difference in hardware prices for an MMC3 chip made in 1988 and prices in 1992 (seasoned technology by 1992). Combine that with the fact that the popularity of the NES brought on a worldwide chip shortage from 1987 to 1992, so it was more expensive just off of that.
every game pushed the limits of the NES,... the NES was basically a blank slate of pixels for games to fill, most of the system was in the games themselves.
Some more nes games that do crazy stuff -Gimmick!, For its realistic physics -langrange point, for its high quality sound -pictonary, I can't spoil this one, just see for yourself -Micro mages, one of the most effectient pieces of coding -Moon crystal, for its high quality production values -cosmic epsilon, mode 7 esc visuals
One of my favorites for parallax scrolling and other advanced effects was Metal Storm (NES of course). I can never find a video that gives this game love. I always thought it was outstanding.
This video came up in the recommendations and I decided to give it a look because I noticed Recca. Ended up watching all the video non stop. Excellent video. Yagawa is known yo be a genius that pushes hardware as hard as he can, NES or otherwise. You also mentioned GI Joe. I always felt it had a certain something that made it top notch in presentation but could never point a finger to why. Liked and subscribed.
I love how you go down the rabbit hole, figuring out the methods that programmers have used. Breaking that down into a video explaining that to non-programmers definitely isn't an easy thing.
I believe the reason Crisis Force never got an international release is that the the game used the Konami VRC4 mapper, which NOA didn’t allow in NES cartridges due to their policies on third-party hardware.
When Return of the Joker came out and we rented it everyone was blown away. The music and graphics were great but also it was smooth and little slowdown
Thank you for going the extra mile and breaking down tricks that don't immediately impress. This is all quality stuff, and a leap ahead of what's usually waiting in videos like this. Obvious suggestion for a future video: Sega Saturn. I've read an interview with a Lobotomy employee, where they said that the larger the quad in a Saturn game, the more it slowed everything down. Especially in wide open areas. So what's happening in Sonic Jam's overworld? And how is Sonic R ignoring that handicap? I've also seen claims that games like Shining Force III and Virtua Fighter 2 tap into the sound hardware for extra processing assistance. Is that true? (I've heard it was also done for EA's flight simulators on Genesis.)
The impressive part of those backgroud warping effects is that the NES/Famicom doesn't have dedicated DMA capabilities, but instead the best you can get is an interrupt generated by the mapper. On the SNES you simply load a DMA table and the hardware automatically processes it without CPU intervention.
I remember when I got Batman RoftJ I was showing all my friends how great it looked. After that in the years that passed, I rarely ran into anyone else who played it
The concertina effect really isn't complicated at all. Stretching an image (vertically) just means drawing some lines multiple times, while squashing it means skipping some lines. For the background layer, this can be achieved by changing the Y offset on various scanlines. Here's a breakdown. Let's say the Y offset is 0. To determine which line of the background layer to draw to the screen on each scanline, the PPU simply adds the Y offset to the number of the scanline it's drawing. Therefore, if we now just draw our background layer normally, it means that scanline 1 draws line 1 of the background; scanline 2 draws line 2; scanline 3 draws line 3, etc. Our background layer appears in its original shape. Now imagine we start manipulating the Y offset mid-frame. For scanline 1, we leave it unchanged, so we draw line 1 of the background. Then, on scanline 2, we change the Y offset to -1. This means that the PPU will draw line 2 + (-1) = 1 of the background layer. For scanline 3, we change the Y offset to -2, so the PPU will draw line 3 + (-2) = 1. Thus, the result is that the first 3 scanlines will all show line 1 of the background layer, making it look "stretched". The opposite effect can be achieved by increasing the Y offset.
Master System is certainly more powerful than the NES with early cartridge hardware. But less powerful than the NES with later mappers. In any case Z80 is a better CPU too.
The game back in the day (as the kids say.) That impressed me was ninja gaiden. Although to be fare, over the years I realized it was probably mostly art design. However still awesome, not to mention the music is easily one of the best.
I think the effect at 25:00 was accomplished like this: there is a pattern in the background that repeat after 30 or so lines. If part of that pattern is supposed to be squished it will skip a line of that pattern, if it is supposed to be stretched it will double that line.
You don't see videos of people going in depth on the technical hows of old games. Much like someone else said prior, Jon of Travellers' Tales is one great example of going through hoops to overcome technical limitations. Very nice video! Informative too
If I understand this right, the sprites move smoothly behind the elevator because there is no elevator, there is just an elevator being drawn, and so above and below the elevator are drawn as if there is no elevator at all.
If you scroll the background down as the raster beam travels down the screen, the BG image will appear stretched - like playing back a record too slow. The difference in speeds (scanline speed vs scrolling update speed) determines how much stretching happens. Scrolling up causes squashing. Smoothly varying the amount of vertical scroll delta over the corse of drawing a frame will make a wave of distortion. Varying when it starts relative to the frame over time causes the wave to move vertically.
i know what's going on in the last game with the ripple. they have an elongated version of that graphic in memory, a couple nametables worth, it's not only elongated but it's one of those self animating scrolling tile design. (if you design the tiles cleverly, just scrolling them looks like they are animating, that's how some games do waterfall effects for example) then they render but they squash per tile the animation either by swapping out the colors, or by bringing in different frame/tile from the nametable in memory (true animated tiles like the one in the vertical split shooter), the left/right scrolling is just your standard mario3 scrolling of the whole tilescreen. that's basically all that is going on there. it's pretty impressive for sure, that game is so amazing
Late NES releases (post-Super NES releases, so 1991-1995) such as Smash TV, Talking Super Jeopardy!, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Where's Waldo?, Gun Nac, Rockin' Kats, Monster Truck Rally, Magic Darts, Trog!, Bo Jackson Baseball, Wolverine, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Roger Clemens' MVP Baseball, American Gladiators, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?, Pirates!, Darkman, L'Empereur, Eliminator Boat Duel, Home Alone, Sesame Street: A-B-C/1-2-3, Star Wars, Snow Brothers, Vice: Project Doom, Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Space Shuttle Project, Uncharted Waters, The Bard's Tale,Advenutres of Lolo 3, TaleSpin, Tiny Toon Adventures, Barbie, The Simpsons: Bart Vs. the World, The Simpsons: Bartman Meets Radioactive Man, Captain America and the Avengers, Shatterhand, Treasure Master, Tecmo Super Bowl, The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy, Batman: Return of the Joker, Golf Grand Slam, Super Spy Hunter, Nightshade, Kick Master, Wheel of Fortune Featuring Vanna White, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Die Hard, Rampart, Monster in My Pocket, Cyberball, Bucky O'Hare, Cowboy Kid, Dragon Fighter, The Addams Family, Legends of the Diamond, Mega Man 4, Mega Man 5, Sesame Street: Countdown, M.C. Kids, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project, Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters, Hudson Hawk, Sword Master, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero - The Atlantis Factor, Dragon Warrior III, Dragon Warrior IV, The Empire Strikes Back, Wizards & Warriors III: Korus - Visions of Power, Ghoul School, T&C Surf Designs 2: Thrilla's Safari, Paperboy 2, The Mutant Virus: Crisis in a Computer World, Hook, F-15 Strike Eagle, Motor City Patrol, Toxic Crusaders, Advanced Dungeous and Dragons: Pool of Radiance and DragonStrike, Ultimate Air Combat, Race America, Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds, Hatris, Wacky Races, Roundball: 2-on-2 Challenge, Gemfire, King's Quest V, Power Punch II, Darkwing Duck, Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge, Yoshi, Day Dreamin' Davey, The Blue Marlin, Baseball Stars 2, Greg Norman's Golf Power, Defenders of Dynatron City, Capcom's Gold Medal Challenge '92, Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat, RoboCop 3, Might & Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum, Krusty's Fun House, The Blues Brothers, Contra Force, Tecmo Cup Soccer Game, Tecmo NBA Basketball, Adventure Island III, Felix the Cat, the Classic Series re-releases of Metroid, Punch-Out!!, The Legend of Zelda, and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the Konami Classics Series re-release of Blades of Steel, Stanley: The Search for Dr. Livingston, WWF WrestleMania: Steel Cage Challenge, Crash 'n the Boys: Street Challenge, Little Samson, Panic Restuarant, Legend of the Ghost Lion, Swamp Thing, Power Blade 2, Gargoyle's Quest II, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Goal! Two, James Bond Jr., Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, Widget, George Foreman's KO Boxing, Prince of Persia, Best of the Best: Championship Karate, The Jetsons: Cogswell's Caper!, The Great Waldo Search, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, R.C. Pro-Am II, Joe & Mac, Caesars Palace, Tiny Toon Adventures Cartoon Workshop, F-117A Stealth Fighter, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, The Terminator, Lemmings, Overlord, Batman Returns, Break Time: The National Pool Tour, Ultima: Warriors of Destiny, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Hillsfar, Bomberman II, Fire 'n Ice, Alien 3, Zen: Intergalactic Ninja, Mickey's Safari in Letterland, Lethal Weapon, Bases Loaded 4, Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland, Casino Kid II, Rollerblade Racer, Kid Klown in Night Major World, Kirby's Adventure, DuckTales 2, Cool World, Yoshi's Cookie, Jurassic Park, Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team, Mighty Final Fight, Color a Dinosaur!, Bubble Bobble Part 2, The Addams Family: Puglsey's Scavenger Hunt, Mario is Missing!, The Incredible Crash Dummies, Battleship, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Tetris 2, Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing, Championship Pool, Last Action Hero, Cliffhanger, Jimmy Connors Tennis, The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckeroo$!, Wayne's World, WWF King of the King, Pro Sport Hockey, Pac-Man (Namco Hometek version), Ms. Pac-Man (Namco Hometek version), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Ubi Soft version), Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Alfred Chicken, Bonk's Adventure, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II, Mega Man 6, Mickey's Adventures in Numberland, Mario's Time Machine, The Incredible Crash Dummies, The Jungle Book, The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!, and Wario's Woods.
every game pushed the limits of the NES,... the NES was basically a blank slate of pixels for games to fill, most of the system was in the games themselves.
My guess is that the background in the 1992 game is constantly being paused and told to move to the next texture by the CPU, but that the times when it's changed are moving around every frame.
The sprites are behind it because there is a setting to place sprites behind the background, but in front of the background color (black). Once they are above the platform, that bit is cleared and they return to foreground. Thats why they are in big black holes, so they aren't covered
Without looking at the debugging tools I'd guess the enemies in the elevator in GI Joe are sprites that are set to appear behind the background which is why it's black behind them, not rendered at all during the "shadow" and then have their attribute switched to appear in front of the BG when they start moving.
Manhattan Project was the one that pushed the NES way past its comfort point. There are certain levels where they shoe horn more foot soldiers on-screen than normal, and holy hell, you can almost hear that poor console having a stroke lol
I recently discovered Vampire / Master of Darkness on the Master System and I was stunned at how good it looks with its limited 8-bit palette, to the point I sent a picture to a friend and asked them which console they thought it was running on, to which they guessed wrong. I'm so glad the TH-cam algorithm sometimes pinpoints these details
Id never wondered what it'd be like to have the plusnet guy do a pretty damn interesting gaming show, but now i feel like i have a really good idea. Brilliant video!
For me the 90's and up to mid 2000's is the most exciting time in Gaming. Especially the PS1 and PS2 era. I don't know what it was but 1998 was the year when games suddenly, and in general, started to look really impressive on the PS1 and with extreme short loading time. LAPD Futuer Cop, Medi Evil, Final Fantasy VIII, Crash Team Racing, Gran Turismo 2, just to name a few.
I cannot confirm this, but the enemy sprites disappearing behind the elevator could have to do with sprite priorities changing exatly where the scanline reaches the elevator and then switching back to its original number. The grenades then would have a higher priority staying in front of screen all the time.
Idk if you are going to go over some other games like this. But gradius 1&2 were pretty intense for the nes. Crystalis was another that popped in my head, great games to!
You missed that if you beat RECCA, there will be "second quest" that does even more crazy stuff and it even has entirely new enemies. There's a cheat code to select levels so you can get there easily.
I had batman, loved it, but never knew about Return of the JOker at the time, I think I would have loved that as well. Crisis Force looks brilliant! A crying shame it was Japan only. And wow, the next shooter looks darn good as well. At least you called the Nes, 'Nes' once! :p Anyway, great vid.
Please check out Metal Slader Glory. The graphics shouldn’t be possible even with 1mb (that’s right 8 megabit) of space. But it has large, detailed, colorful illustrations! And it is from 1991, like most of these examples.
@@Sharopolis it's definitely not "fun" if you're not into graphical text adventures, but it is nice if you want to simply gawk at the graphics and wonder "how did they do this?"
Thanks for properly underlining, that most of these better looking games run on clearly more pwerful hardware than the first NES games. Of older games, I would probably mention 3D World Runner, a Space Harrier clone with Mode7-like ground. (Yes, there's official Space Harrier port too, but that does the effect much worse) And if people are amazed by something as simple as fast scrolling, Bio Force Ape.
~16:34 - Sprites can be set to be displayed in front of or behind background tiles, so that can possibly be it? The same thing happens with the sprites on both left and right edges of the elevator.
That parallex effect shows how less advanced hardware can benefit from more advanced just by giving the inspiration to try and achieve it. I remember when people said it would be utterly impossible to run Doom on an Amiga but challenge was accepted and we got a few Doom like games , very pixellated but they were playable.
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U should definitely check out the PC ENGINE the best 8-bit processer machine ever IMO
@@mbe102m-
Hard pass. Great video though!
It's easy to forget how novel and impressive some of these graphical effects were at the time. Programmers really showed their skill getting these limited systems to do something new.
th-cam.com/video/gWVmPtr9O0g/w-d-xo.html
ok, that's actual 16-bit, but still... good fun for a console ')
Europeans coders created demos on computers (mostly, there's a demoscene for the Atari 2600 that pushes that console to its limits)
Japanese coders created games for consoles.
@@dutchdykefinger0
I remember when it was crazy that you could control an arrow on the screen by spinning a ball.
Multi scrolls on the NES is just nuts. Lots of Genesis games struggle with it or just dont have it when the game obviously needs it
Surprised Kirby’s adventure didn’t make this list, one of the most beautiful, pleasant to look at games on the NES, basically the Yoshi’s island of the NES considering the graphics still look incredible today.
Kirby looks great, but it doesn’t really have any ridiculous techniques like the rest of the games. There’s parallax scrolling, sure, and the occasional animated background feature, but no multi layered backgrounds like in Batman, no massive animated foreground pieces like Gi joe, no multiple scrolling layers and piles of enemies like star force or whatever it’s called. It’s an impressive game for sure, but coupled with the fact that it doesn’t do anything jaw dropping and has slowdown at times, it doesn’t do enough to deserve a spot
@@sonarfungus7571 Well sure it doesn’t utilize “Ridiculous techniques”, but the sheer amount of content in the game should have at least net it some sort of mention right? There are 41 levels in the games, not including the boss rooms, Arenas, Museums, and the 3 different minigames. That’s more story mode levels that Kirby Star Allies, which came out 25 years later. Tons of Sprites are huge and beautiful, and the backgrounds were painted by an artist and digitized to work in the game, similar to Donkey Kong Country, which had never been done before up to that point.
I get the subtitle is “Graphics deep dive”, but the series itself is called “Games that pushed the limits” and Kirby’s adventure no doubt pushed the limits of the NES.
Kirby’s Adventure was incredible when it came out.
I remember renting it from Blockbuster and I was obsessed. It was baffling how much content they managed to cram into that 6Mb cart.
@@Diembee This is one of the main reasons why i love retro consoles so much. Whereas new consoles keep trying to push 'realism' the NES games all had unique art styles. And Kirby's Adventure was masterful. That game got snubbed by not being included in this video
He already put it in a similar video before this video, explaining how the Nes pushed graphical abilities Kirby was mention.
I'm impressed by a game that can produce effects that are entirely inscrutable even with open access to the code
Maybe not entirely inscrutable to someone who knows more than me! But it is difficult.
The channels Game Hut and Coding Secrets (both run by the same guy) go into a lot of depth about how these almost impossible effects were achieved. The guy running the channels is (or was) the head) ceo and lead programmer of Travellers Tales in the 90s and 2000s so he often describes how stuff was done on his own games, as well as ones by other companies.
He genuinely a genius. So many things that nobody else could achieve, he managed it. He invented tons of coding tricks himself. He's probably the single most hardware pushing programmer from those times, nobody else individually came up with more stuff than him
Like how when he made Sonic 3D blast, he managed to get a full motion video intro on a regular mega drive cartridge, on stock mega drive hardware, not a Sega CD, not a 32x, not a Sega saturn, he achieved this on 1989 hardware with a regular cartridge (not one with an extra chip in it like the Super FX chip on snes). That's simply insane. He has a video just about how he achieved that
Other games he made that he explains are things like Mickey Mania, Toy Story, the lego star wars games, etc
Even if you know nothing about programming his videos are great and easy to understand. I highly suggest looking them up. Game Hut and Coding Secrets, both on TH-cam
@@duffman18 Wow thanks I'll check him out
@@duffman18 very nice channel and that guy is a total genius.
There's also some interesting stuff off this type by MVG channel about some impossible ports, look also for the interview of the guy who did the Doom SNES port, or the guy who developed Crash bandicoot for the PS1
I bet a pasty that whoever at KindleImagineDevelop programmed this game was part of the demoscene. Those mad warpy scrolly bits scream demo.
17:58 "stuff you might see on the old Mega *Syphilis* " wait what?!
The bad guys on the elevator are actually part of the background tiles until they jump out that's when they become Sprites that's how the elevator is able to pass them
Man, that's exactly what I was thinking!
That was my initial thought, but if you look closely, the bad guys are flickering before they jump out, and they were showing during the sprites-only view, which means they are sprites being occluded by the elevator.
@@kevin12567 They're background tiles until they pass under the elevator. None of them are taller than the elevator while crouched/waiting, and they don't start flickering until they're above the elevator. This says to me that the brief frame when they're completely obscured by the elevator is when the swap occurs.
@@Mayydayy86 You can see at 11:50 that when the background is disabled the enemies are still visible. The effect was most probably done by stacking 6 invisible sprites on the elevator(+the two walls), as the nes can only draw 8 sprites per scanline and the lowest priority ones get discarded
@@Mayydayy86 Nope, they're sprites. Watch the video starting at 11:48. In this segment the emulator is set to show ONLY SPRITES, with the background blacked out. At 11:52 you start to see the enemies appearing below the elevator before they're obscured by it, then reappear above it. Flickering only occurs on the NES when there's more than eight 8x8 blocks of sprites on a scan line (sprites are typically two of these 8x8 blocks wide).
"This elevator is very clever."
Do you want to start a bad horror movie? Because that's how you start a bad horror movie.
Ahh yes
De Lift
The Hellevator
All elevators come from Hell
I asked an elevator mechanic if he liked his job. He said it has its ups and downs.
My pick for best looking NES game would have to be Ninja Gaiden 3: The Ancient Ship of Doom. The use of black backgrounds as a shader for the terrain are so clean, and stack with the environment animations (running water in 3-1A, spikes visibly retracting into the floors and walls, the sand in 2-1A) to create an incredible looking aesthetic.
The hud elements gradually cycle through a rainbow of different colors as you play too!
For a 1983 piece of kit, the Nes had some whopping games.
Yes, but these games didn't use the stock NES tech. The enhancement chips did a lot of the heavy lifting.
@@nebularain3338 *RTX card intensifies*
@nemo pouncey 15/7/1983
@@nebularain3338 You are partially right, there we no additonal processing in any part, the Mapper only provide Access to Extra RAM (Both VRAM and Workram) and lots of Bankswitching, but the PPU with is palette of 52 Colors, 25 Colors on Screen or the CPU was never boosted in any way, in fact in the END all the Data lands in the 2 KB!!! of VRAM in the PPU that displays it all, thats the reason why mappers are so easy to emulate on flashcard the simply have to feed the CPU and PPU with the correct data but inspite of the SNES Chips they don´t have to emulate any real processor functions
I knew this comment would initiate some debate lol.
Street Fighter 2010 (not the Street Fighter arcade ports as in Street Fighter 2, etc); but the SHOOTER Street Fighter 2010 (which was also made by Capcom) on the NES with its graphics had some effects that were reminiscent of 16 bit even before the SNES came out and/or got off the groudd. When I was playing Street Fighter 2010 on the NES, it felt like I was playing an arcade game.
Great game with some nice and varied visuals!
"it looks 16 bit" well, it looks like those 16 bit games that looks 8 bit...
@Dean Satan right? people say "look this 8 bit game look 16". but nah, they dont, sprites are too small, less detailed, but the color is a dead giveaway, its kinda like those ps1 games people swear look like ps2 games, but clearly doesnt.
@@marcosdheleno when i saw those ps1 graphics for the first time in 1995, i swear they looked like ps2 graphics.
@@johneymute but there was no ps2 in 95. so how would you think it looks like a ps2 game?
@@marcosdheleno no there was no ps2 in 1995, HOWEVER if i compare the ps2 graphics with when i saw those ps1 graphics for the first time, it looked like ps2 graphics to my perception,why?
Because in 1995 i never realized that those graphics might,ve be kubistic.
@@johneymute but that's my point, you didnt think it "looks like a ps2", because there was no ps2 to compare with it. you may have thought "this looks amazing!" or something like that.
but there's no reason to think a ps1 game looks like ps2, specially when it was almost half a decade before the ps2 even existed!
I am so glad that you covered _Recca;_ everything about it is truly marvelous. I hope that it gets a release on the Nintendo Switch Online service one day. It sure could use more quality games here in the West, and both it and _Crisis Force_ would be perfect for it.
Especially since the rewind would come in handy. Not to mention how much better the emulation will be compared to the 3ds. Because the song called HYDE plays the sample incorrectly for some reason.
I know you know this, but you are making this sound far too easy. I’m guessing these techniques weren’t rare because they were arcane; they were rare because they were hard. The 6502, with its bare minimum of registers, just wasn’t designed to use interrupts for this sort of process juggling. I’m in awe of these early game programmers - you do a nice job giving them a shoutout when you can. Too bad there’s so little documentation from this era of who did what.
Atari 800 has 6502 and hardware support for line interrupts and nearly every game with decent graphics does this a lot. 1979 hardware.
Nes/famicom gets comparable abilities only with more advanced mapper chips.
Most of the time it's harder to come up with a nice looking effect than it is to program it, banswitching like in batman and crysis force or split scrolling like GI Joe or Recca for example are just writing a few numbers to certain locations.
This isn't an in-depth technical video. It's to give an overview for people who may not be hardcore coders, and so making it sound easy also makes it more understandable.
Eh, I disagree. The amount of registers on the 6502 isn't an issue with using interrupts like this, you just push them to the stack when you receive the interrupt, and pull them back off when you're done. This adds a little bit of overhead of course, but worst case scenario you miss hblank and have to wait an extra line before you start your writes. The only thing more registers would help with is allowing you to pre-load more values to write during hblank, but this isn't necessary for anything other than swapping colors mid-frame.
Various Memory Mappers/add-on chips built in to cartridges would add advanced Interrupt timing mechanisms that the original cartridge hardware and console don't include support for.
Without this capability it becomes very difficult to concisely time when events should occur. This is why you mostly see the advanced graphics tricks being done on the cartridges that include them.
I love your videos because you actually explain why and how the relevant game mechanics and effects work like they do, which is so much more interesting and respectable than most other content that simply shows a game and says "wow this looks impressive" lol
One reason why I only get a console near the end of its generation is because by then there's not only a ton of games in the library (and a ton available used for cheap), but the newest stuff takes full advantage of the system. Early adopters really only get games that look/play last gen.
i love when you do these type of vids. always fascinating to see how devs pushed the limits.
every game pushed the limits of the NES,... the NES was basically a blank slate of pixels for games to fill, most of the system was in the games themselves.
The $2001 register GI Joe writes to has a way to turn off sprites. I'm pretty sure the sprites first get turned off behind the elevator, then the game just clears the background as well when it casts the shadow
How do the sprites at the edges that make up the gears of the elevator stay on? That's what confuses me.
To me it seems the register writes to $2001 only disables the background, the Sprite enable bit is not touched. The wall sprites are still visible in those scanlines too.
The sprites probably vanish behind the elevator using the priority bit in OAM, maybe even with a sprite masking technique, using additional sprites with a higher priority in OAM.
Not sure if the wall sprites being masked behind the elevator gears is also achieved that way.
That makes sense actually. What I'm thinking is happening there is that the elevator is large enough to cover a single 8x8 or 8x16 sprite, and that the game cuts all sprites that are behind the elevator while reenabling them just behind these zones with the BG priority bit on to simulate them being behind the BG
Do 16 bit games that look 8 bit
While I can't get to that portion of the game right now to verify, I am fairly certain the purple background in Recca at 25:00 is accomplished by updating the background X and Y scroll positions. Some older games like Rad Racer and Rad Racer 2 do that to accomplish effects like the clouds moving left/right as well as the road curving left, right, up, and down. The nametables in the those has a sky image in two tables and the road sloping in to the horizon in the other two (plus the dashboard). Recca just does it in such a way that it looks amazing.
26:20 It is probably doing a technique known as "racing the beam" in which the screen is actively re-written every scanline, Those 4 pokes to the PPU are likely timed to the 60 FPS operating time of the NES but divided by 4 to make it 15 frames a second.
it actually sounds like a simple 12-byte loop if you ask me.
Most people overlook Track & Field II. It's one of the most impressive looking NES games ever made, especially considering how many different game modes it features.
Really enjoyed this one. Getting clever with the old debugging feature there really adds a bit of extra depth. Check out Elite on the NES for tile swapping taken to an awesomely mental level. There truly was some clever buggers working on the NES.
Thank you!
Are we just gonna forget the Mega Man games starting with Mega Man 2? Those games were GORGEOUS on the NES.
Even though they have bad cases of slow-down and sprite flicker.
I prefer mega drive mega man like wily wars not comparing but just no lag and smoothness
Gameplay wise, yeah, Megaman on nes is awsome. Graphics wise, I’m sorry, but the entire nes mega man series is one of the blandest looking series on the console. Definitely not pushing the limits of the nes. Not nearly as detailed as the examples in this video.
I used to had a Master System when I was young, thus it is my 8-bit reference. When I look at NES games the first thing that strikes me is how much the color black is used and how the color palette is dark. In comparison, Master System games rarely used black and the colors were very saturated and vibrant. I wonder why there is this difference.
The master system can generate more colours and more colours per tile like a sprite can include upto 10 colours where a nes does I think 3 per sprite also a faster cpu . But the nes had advantages in some display aspects due to enhance chips and sound was better for most part
@@blastproces wasnt there 7 colours? Not counting the transparent pixels
The number of bits is only an indication of how many bits the CPU can handle in a single machine cycle. So, to do a 16 bit calculation it needs 2 machine cycles. It says nothing about graphics capabilities. So the simple answer is that MS has better GPU.
The Nintendo's color palette isn't as nice to work with as the Master System's, with a weird color distribution and several duplicate blacks and grays.
(Tangentally, weird color distribution is why Megaman is blue. There were more shades of blue available to work with, so he didn't blend in with backgrounds.)
@@CptJistuce Also, darker colors look more similar.
This limits garishness, and sometimes even allows using one color for 2 different gradients or purposes.
You should have said they installed the Batman chip sideways to get the vertical scrolling 😂
That explanation would have worked on me just fine. :)
As an NES hombrew developer, I approve XD
Recca actually reads from a table and then it also draws the horizontal tiles from a carefully timed interrupt timer. Not an easy task.
The best part about Return of the Joker here is that it has 16-bit versions you can directly compare it to, and it looks better than both of them. Fewer colors, sure, but it uses them much more effectively.
I remember the first time I played Ninja Gaiden IIII was impressed by the graphics, and when I saw the cutscene to act 5 I thought "this is Genesis stuff, nothing to envy".
Those added chips were the reason many carts towards the end of the NES life were upwards of $70 here in the U.S.
Which ones were those? The last NES games I bought new in 1993/1994 were Bonks Adventure, Kirby's Adventure, Adventure island 3, Mega Man 6, Darkwing Duck, and Battletoads and Double Dragon. I paid about $40-50 per title if I remember correctly.
Now Genesis/SNES games back in 1992-1995........woo boy, and people complain about $70 games now. HA! I paid $90 for Phantasy Star IV, $70 for Earthworm Jim 1 and 2, $60 for Sparkster, $60 for Splatterhouse 3, $60 for 3D Ballz, $60 for Sonic 3 and $60 for Sonic & Knuckles, $80 for Shining Force 2, etc, etc, etc
$90 for Super Mario 64 was the last time I paid a high price for a new game that wasn't a LE/CE.
More than that in some cases.
I know this isnt Japan, but from what I understood, the game LaGrange Point cost $120 in unadjusted US dollars after foreign currency adjustments. That being posted, that was the price for a very advanced VRC7 chip that had a cartridge bigger than a typical cartridge. With the inability to use the VRC7 chip in North America both because Nintendo wouldnt allow a third party cartridges, no way to use the sound enhancements that were required, a likely downgrade in graphics when using Nintendo's standard cartridges, and localizing the game for English speaking gamers, it wasnt worth it for Konami to even try to bring the game to North America.
@@Turbotef By that time, the cost of 8-bit hardware was starting to fall. There is a difference in hardware prices for an MMC3 chip made in 1988 and prices in 1992 (seasoned technology by 1992). Combine that with the fact that the popularity of the NES brought on a worldwide chip shortage from 1987 to 1992, so it was more expensive just off of that.
Wow the fact that you dig into the code and test w debugger is the cherry on top. Well deserved sub. Do you have more vids like this?
every game pushed the limits of the NES,... the NES was basically a blank slate of pixels for games to fill, most of the system was in the games themselves.
Some more nes games that do crazy stuff
-Gimmick!, For its realistic physics
-langrange point, for its high quality sound
-pictonary, I can't spoil this one, just see for yourself
-Micro mages, one of the most effectient pieces of coding
-Moon crystal, for its high quality production values
-cosmic epsilon, mode 7 esc visuals
It's kind of amazing that immediately at 9:06 I literally shouted in my mind "PoRk ChOp SaNdWicHes!!!" and it was the first thing he said himself.
One of my favorites for parallax scrolling and other advanced effects was Metal Storm (NES of course). I can never find a video that gives this game love. I always thought it was outstanding.
Dang, the lastest content from Sharopolis is professional and stylish! This is awesome!
An absolutely cracking vid, and an introduction to two mad NES shooters I was previously unaware of! Loving the breakdowns - more, please!
Great video! I think Super Turrican is another which belongs on the list. I was amazed that it could be done so well on the NES!
Good call!
This video came up in the recommendations and I decided to give it a look because I noticed Recca. Ended up watching all the video non stop. Excellent video. Yagawa is known yo be a genius that pushes hardware as hard as he can, NES or otherwise. You also mentioned GI Joe. I always felt it had a certain something that made it top notch in presentation but could never point a finger to why. Liked and subscribed.
I remember being surprised that battletoads was an NES game it looked so good!
24:20 *Don't recite the Deep Magic to me. I was there when it was written!*
The completely random joke at 18:55 had me in stitches
I love how you go down the rabbit hole, figuring out the methods that programmers have used. Breaking that down into a video explaining that to non-programmers definitely isn't an easy thing.
I believe the reason Crisis Force never got an international release is that the the game used the Konami VRC4 mapper, which NOA didn’t allow in NES cartridges due to their policies on third-party hardware.
When Return of the Joker came out and we rented it everyone was blown away.
The music and graphics were great but also it was smooth and little slowdown
Thank you for going the extra mile and breaking down tricks that don't immediately impress. This is all quality stuff, and a leap ahead of what's usually waiting in videos like this.
Obvious suggestion for a future video: Sega Saturn.
I've read an interview with a Lobotomy employee, where they said that the larger the quad in a Saturn game, the more it slowed everything down. Especially in wide open areas.
So what's happening in Sonic Jam's overworld? And how is Sonic R ignoring that handicap? I've also seen claims that games like Shining Force III and Virtua Fighter 2 tap into the sound hardware for extra processing assistance. Is that true? (I've heard it was also done for EA's flight simulators on Genesis.)
Another stunner. Interesting and entertaining. Good job.
This is the content we want to help us revive our love for programming...thanks for putting this together...enjoyed even minute of it
Metal Storm, Castlevania 3, and little samson have to be my top 3 graphics wise
Love Little Sampson - brilliant megaman alternative.
5:47 To paraphrase Weird Al, "My 'tiles' never spin, to the contrary, you'll find that they're quite stationary."
What amazed me the most about Recca was that there was no slowdown.
The impressive part of those backgroud warping effects is that the NES/Famicom doesn't have dedicated DMA capabilities, but instead the best you can get is an interrupt generated by the mapper.
On the SNES you simply load a DMA table and the hardware automatically processes it without CPU intervention.
I remember when I got Batman RoftJ I was showing all my friends how great it looked. After that in the years that passed, I rarely ran into anyone else who played it
Gotta love a well-placed Pork Chop Sandwich reference.
Fenslerfilms: What Grandpa watched online before TH-cam.
#ImAComputer
Stop all the downloadin'!
...you didn't take anything out of our tent, did you??
The concertina effect really isn't complicated at all. Stretching an image (vertically) just means drawing some lines multiple times, while squashing it means skipping some lines. For the background layer, this can be achieved by changing the Y offset on various scanlines.
Here's a breakdown. Let's say the Y offset is 0. To determine which line of the background layer to draw to the screen on each scanline, the PPU simply adds the Y offset to the number of the scanline it's drawing. Therefore, if we now just draw our background layer normally, it means that scanline 1 draws line 1 of the background; scanline 2 draws line 2; scanline 3 draws line 3, etc. Our background layer appears in its original shape.
Now imagine we start manipulating the Y offset mid-frame. For scanline 1, we leave it unchanged, so we draw line 1 of the background. Then, on scanline 2, we change the Y offset to -1. This means that the PPU will draw line 2 + (-1) = 1 of the background layer. For scanline 3, we change the Y offset to -2, so the PPU will draw line 3 + (-2) = 1. Thus, the result is that the first 3 scanlines will all show line 1 of the background layer, making it look "stretched". The opposite effect can be achieved by increasing the Y offset.
The bosses in Blaster Master are beautifully designed.
The master system had some amazing abilities. When I saw two games, Sonic and Robocod, I was amazed
Master System is certainly more powerful than the NES with early cartridge hardware. But less powerful than the NES with later mappers.
In any case Z80 is a better CPU too.
The game back in the day (as the kids say.) That impressed me was ninja gaiden. Although to be fare, over the years I realized it was probably mostly art design. However still awesome, not to mention the music is easily one of the best.
Wow, RECCA really is something. I'm always amazed at how many cool effects you can make with some simple changes to the scrolling
I think the effect at 25:00 was accomplished like this:
there is a pattern in the background that repeat after 30 or so lines. If part of that pattern is supposed to be squished it will skip a line of that pattern, if it is supposed to be stretched it will double that line.
You don't see videos of people going in depth on the technical hows of old games.
Much like someone else said prior, Jon of Travellers' Tales is one great example of going through hoops to overcome technical limitations.
Very nice video! Informative too
This is a great video! TH-cam NEEDS more of this!
Thank you! More to come soon I hope!
So glad this channel was in my feed. I watch many retro game analysis channels and this is one if the most refined. Looking forward to future vids👍
Much appreciated!
Fun fact:
Some of these games came with a special Sega chip called Blast Processor
😂
If I understand this right, the sprites move smoothly behind the elevator because there is no elevator, there is just an elevator being drawn, and so above and below the elevator are drawn as if there is no elevator at all.
Dang that batman game looks stellar, i'm especially impressed they managed to do all that and keep the flicker to an absolute minimum. Simply amazing.
If you scroll the background down as the raster beam travels down the screen, the BG image will appear stretched - like playing back a record too slow. The difference in speeds (scanline speed vs scrolling update speed) determines how much stretching happens. Scrolling up causes squashing. Smoothly varying the amount of vertical scroll delta over the corse of drawing a frame will make a wave of distortion. Varying when it starts relative to the frame over time causes the wave to move vertically.
i know what's going on in the last game with the ripple.
they have an elongated version of that graphic in memory, a couple nametables worth,
it's not only elongated but it's one of those self animating scrolling tile design. (if you design the tiles cleverly, just scrolling them looks like they are animating, that's how some games do waterfall effects for example)
then they render but they squash per tile the animation either by swapping out the colors, or by bringing in different frame/tile from the nametable in memory (true animated tiles like the one in the vertical split shooter),
the left/right scrolling is just your standard mario3 scrolling of the whole tilescreen.
that's basically all that is going on there. it's pretty impressive for sure, that game is so amazing
Late NES releases (post-Super NES releases, so 1991-1995) such as Smash TV, Talking Super Jeopardy!, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Where's Waldo?, Gun Nac, Rockin' Kats, Monster Truck Rally, Magic Darts, Trog!, Bo Jackson Baseball, Wolverine, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Roger Clemens' MVP Baseball, American Gladiators, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?, Pirates!, Darkman, L'Empereur, Eliminator Boat Duel, Home Alone, Sesame Street: A-B-C/1-2-3, Star Wars, Snow Brothers, Vice: Project Doom, Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Space Shuttle Project, Uncharted Waters, The Bard's Tale,Advenutres of Lolo 3, TaleSpin, Tiny Toon Adventures, Barbie, The Simpsons: Bart Vs. the World, The Simpsons: Bartman Meets Radioactive Man, Captain America and the Avengers, Shatterhand, Treasure Master, Tecmo Super Bowl, The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy, Batman: Return of the Joker, Golf Grand Slam, Super Spy Hunter, Nightshade, Kick Master, Wheel of Fortune Featuring Vanna White, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Die Hard, Rampart, Monster in My Pocket, Cyberball, Bucky O'Hare, Cowboy Kid, Dragon Fighter, The Addams Family, Legends of the Diamond, Mega Man 4, Mega Man 5, Sesame Street: Countdown, M.C. Kids, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project, Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters, Hudson Hawk, Sword Master, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero - The Atlantis Factor, Dragon Warrior III, Dragon Warrior IV, The Empire Strikes Back, Wizards & Warriors III: Korus - Visions of Power, Ghoul School, T&C Surf Designs 2: Thrilla's Safari, Paperboy 2, The Mutant Virus: Crisis in a Computer World, Hook, F-15 Strike Eagle, Motor City Patrol, Toxic Crusaders, Advanced Dungeous and Dragons: Pool of Radiance and DragonStrike, Ultimate Air Combat, Race America, Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds, Hatris, Wacky Races, Roundball: 2-on-2 Challenge, Gemfire, King's Quest V, Power Punch II, Darkwing Duck, Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge, Yoshi, Day Dreamin' Davey, The Blue Marlin, Baseball Stars 2, Greg Norman's Golf Power, Defenders of Dynatron City, Capcom's Gold Medal Challenge '92, Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat, RoboCop 3, Might & Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum, Krusty's Fun House, The Blues Brothers, Contra Force, Tecmo Cup Soccer Game, Tecmo NBA Basketball, Adventure Island III, Felix the Cat, the Classic Series re-releases of Metroid, Punch-Out!!, The Legend of Zelda, and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the Konami Classics Series re-release of Blades of Steel, Stanley: The Search for Dr. Livingston, WWF WrestleMania: Steel Cage Challenge, Crash 'n the Boys: Street Challenge, Little Samson, Panic Restuarant, Legend of the Ghost Lion, Swamp Thing, Power Blade 2, Gargoyle's Quest II, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Goal! Two, James Bond Jr., Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, Widget, George Foreman's KO Boxing, Prince of Persia, Best of the Best: Championship Karate, The Jetsons: Cogswell's Caper!, The Great Waldo Search, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, R.C. Pro-Am II, Joe & Mac, Caesars Palace, Tiny Toon Adventures Cartoon Workshop, F-117A Stealth Fighter, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, The Terminator, Lemmings, Overlord, Batman Returns, Break Time: The National Pool Tour, Ultima: Warriors of Destiny, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Hillsfar, Bomberman II, Fire 'n Ice, Alien 3, Zen: Intergalactic Ninja, Mickey's Safari in Letterland, Lethal Weapon, Bases Loaded 4, Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland, Casino Kid II, Rollerblade Racer, Kid Klown in Night Major World, Kirby's Adventure, DuckTales 2, Cool World, Yoshi's Cookie, Jurassic Park, Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team, Mighty Final Fight, Color a Dinosaur!, Bubble Bobble Part 2, The Addams Family: Puglsey's Scavenger Hunt, Mario is Missing!, The Incredible Crash Dummies, Battleship, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Tetris 2, Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing, Championship Pool, Last Action Hero, Cliffhanger, Jimmy Connors Tennis, The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckeroo$!, Wayne's World, WWF King of the King, Pro Sport Hockey, Pac-Man (Namco Hometek version), Ms. Pac-Man (Namco Hometek version), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Ubi Soft version), Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Alfred Chicken, Bonk's Adventure, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II, Mega Man 6, Mickey's Adventures in Numberland, Mario's Time Machine, The Incredible Crash Dummies, The Jungle Book, The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak!, and Wario's Woods.
Nice review ! SAddly the Bucky O'hare game wasn't mentioned - in my opinion most impressive 8 bit game ever ! )
every game pushed the limits of the NES,... the NES was basically a blank slate of pixels for games to fill, most of the system was in the games themselves.
My guess is that the background in the 1992 game is constantly being paused and told to move to the next texture by the CPU, but that the times when it's changed are moving around every frame.
Amazing job decrypting the technics about what's happening in the backgroud to push the limits of the hardware!
The sprites are behind it because there is a setting to place sprites behind the background, but in front of the background color (black). Once they are above the platform, that bit is cleared and they return to foreground. Thats why they are in big black holes, so they aren't covered
Oh man, Return of the Joker and Crisis Force were awesome games I didn't play until much later. Great video, and cheers to Friday!
I'll drink to that!
@@Sharopolis For real!
Needs sword master. That blew me away in 92.
That’s definitely one of the best nes games my mind throws up. There is a lot of bad games in the library some 50 per cent in my opinion
Without looking at the debugging tools I'd guess the enemies in the elevator in GI Joe are sprites that are set to appear behind the background which is why it's black behind them, not rendered at all during the "shadow" and then have their attribute switched to appear in front of the BG when they start moving.
I wouldn't say 16-bit, but these get really close to the best on the Master System, which had a pretty good graphical advantage.
I looked away for a second and thought you opened my Spotify.
I love that you tell us how it's done
Manhattan Project was the one that pushed the NES way past its comfort point. There are certain levels where they shoe horn more foot soldiers on-screen than normal, and holy hell, you can almost hear that poor console having a stroke lol
Today I learned that all that "mapper" business when fiddling with NES emulation, is talking about custom chip stuff. Thanks!
Yea never give it thought until I got an everdrive and found I was missing mappers for certain unlicensed games and such
@@blastproces I'd heard about mappers for decades. I just didn't know they were custom chips.
holy cow, that RECCA background is insane. i'm REALLY curious how that works
Great analisys! Ninja Gaiden 3 also has excellent graphics, animations and great parallax effects...
I recently discovered Vampire / Master of Darkness on the Master System and I was stunned at how good it looks with its limited 8-bit palette, to the point I sent a picture to a friend and asked them which console they thought it was running on, to which they guessed wrong.
I'm so glad the TH-cam algorithm sometimes pinpoints these details
Class game. It’s better than a nes could do but weaker than a genesis it’s kinda like 12 bit lol
Power Blade, Shattered Hand, Vice Project Doom, Mega Man 6, Super Mario Bros. 3, Metal Storm are honorable mentions.
Id never wondered what it'd be like to have the plusnet guy do a pretty damn interesting gaming show, but now i feel like i have a really good idea. Brilliant video!
Tiny toon adventures almost made the cut. Very smooth gameplay
For me the 90's and up to mid 2000's is the most exciting time in Gaming. Especially the PS1 and PS2 era.
I don't know what it was but 1998 was the year when games suddenly, and in general, started to look really impressive on the PS1 and with extreme short loading time.
LAPD Futuer Cop, Medi Evil, Final Fantasy VIII, Crash Team Racing, Gran Turismo 2, just to name a few.
LOL at the retrogamemechanics shoutout at the end. great vid
I cannot confirm this, but the enemy sprites disappearing behind the elevator could have to do with sprite priorities changing exatly where the scanline reaches the elevator and then switching back to its original number. The grenades then would have a higher priority staying in front of screen all the time.
me, before the video: okay another youtuber gonna exaggerate but whatever i'll watch
me about 15mins in: subscribed
Thanks!
Idk if you are going to go over some other games like this. But gradius 1&2 were pretty intense for the nes. Crystalis was another that popped in my head, great games to!
You missed that if you beat RECCA, there will be "second quest" that does even more crazy stuff and it even has entirely new enemies. There's a cheat code to select levels so you can get there easily.
I had batman, loved it, but never knew about Return of the JOker at the time, I think I would have loved that as well.
Crisis Force looks brilliant! A crying shame it was Japan only. And wow, the next shooter looks darn good as well.
At least you called the Nes, 'Nes' once! :p
Anyway, great vid.
Please check out Metal Slader Glory. The graphics shouldn’t be possible even with 1mb (that’s right 8 megabit) of space. But it has large, detailed, colorful illustrations! And it is from 1991, like most of these examples.
It looks amazing, I need to put some time into it. Its not exactly a fast paced game.
@@Sharopolis it's definitely not "fun" if you're not into graphical text adventures, but it is nice if you want to simply gawk at the graphics and wonder "how did they do this?"
Thanks for properly underlining, that most of these better looking games run on clearly more pwerful hardware than the first NES games.
Of older games, I would probably mention 3D World Runner, a Space Harrier clone with Mode7-like ground.
(Yes, there's official Space Harrier port too, but that does the effect much worse)
And if people are amazed by something as simple as fast scrolling, Bio Force Ape.
👉🏻Isolated Warrior
I never knew that G.I. Joe game even existed. Very impressive.
I never had Batman, but damn, those graphics are amazing! Seeing these old 8-bit machines show their true potential always excites me.
As a science nerd, awesome choice using hypothesis instead of theory (which most people misuse) at 6:30.
~16:34 - Sprites can be set to be displayed in front of or behind background tiles, so that can possibly be it?
The same thing happens with the sprites on both left and right edges of the elevator.
That parallex effect shows how less advanced hardware can benefit from more advanced just by giving the inspiration to try and achieve it. I remember when people said it would be utterly impossible to run Doom on an Amiga but challenge was accepted and we got a few Doom like games , very pixellated but they were playable.