retrocomputing, game design, make code go fast
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Games & Graphics 5History & Retro Computing 3Software Engineering 2
What Remains is a narrative adventure game for the 8-bit NES video game console, and was released in March 2019 as a free ROM, playable in emulator. It was created by a small team, Iodine Dynamics, over the course of two years of on and off development. It’s currently in the hardware phase as a limited batch of…
Released in 1983, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) home console was a cheap, yet capable machine that went on to achieve tremendous success. Using a custom designed Picture Processing Unit (PPU) for graphics, the system could produce visuals that were quite impressive at the time, and still hold up fairly well…
Part 1 and part 2 described CHR data, nametable based backgrounds, sprites, and scrolling. Combined, these cover nearly everything a basic NES cart can do without using additional hardware. To go any further will require a quick tangent to discuss, in detail, how rendering happens.
Part 1 discussed the components of NES background graphics – chr, nametable, palettes, and attributes. But this was only half of the story.
In Star Versus’s two player mode, the first thing players see is a menu to select their ships, handicaps, and arenas. Although straight forward in concept, this menu actually maxes out the NES’s graphics in multiple ways. Specifically, it uses each available palette, requires all 64 sprites, and places 8 sprites onto…