Tempest Posted December 17, 2023 Share Posted December 17, 2023 I'm not so sure that old list is accurate. I've never seen any proof that SMB was ever planned for the 7800. No memos, no mentions on internal lists, nothing. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JagChris Posted December 17, 2023 Share Posted December 17, 2023 On 9/7/2004 at 11:02 AM, DracIsBack said: 2. The two systems employ different graphical architecture in which certain games are easier to implement on one system or the other. The NES is more adept at playing tile-based side scrollers. This isn't that the 7800 can't play them (Scrapyard Dog), but it is more work to create on the 7800 whereas the NES hardware was designed with that in mind. The 7800 is stronger at playing games where the display list is manipulated and games where a lot of moving objects shift around on a static screen. That's why few 7800 games have flicker (whereas many NES games do). Also, the 7800 is more adept at games like BALLBLAZER and SPACE HARRIER with its architecture than the NES is. 3. Some strengths are universal: the NES has universally better sound than the 7800 ... also the NES, Commodore 64, 5200, Atari XL etc. Likewise, the 7800 can move around more objects ... close to 100 than the NES. Since links seem to not work anymore and there has been years more experience since they were posted would the 7800/NES side scrolling difference be a drastic one? What's a side scrolling NES game the 7800 would have real trouble with? Castlevania? Also in Dracs #3 I'm pretty sure it's a typo and he didn't mean the NES has better sound than the NES. Or he may mean something else I'm not completely understanding. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JagChris Posted December 18, 2023 Share Posted December 18, 2023 (edited) Harps Curse is a side scroller and it doesn't have blank backgrounds. 1942 scrolls vertically very well and it has water textures scrolling by. Backgrounds are anything but blank. It seems to be matching anything I can remember seeing on the NES but I don't know what's going on under the hood. Is this a Herculean effort compared to the NES? I did notice that Harry's curse switches I to the next vertical area instead of scrolling. I don't know if this is a limitation or design choice. Like say you can do one or the other but not both. Ok Batman Return of the Joker on the NES looks really good. But apparently its using a memory mapper for its effects. Edited December 18, 2023 by JagChris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jinks Posted December 18, 2023 Share Posted December 18, 2023 6 hours ago, JagChris said: Also in Dracs #3 I'm pretty sure it's a typo and he didn't mean the NES has better sound than the NES. Or he may mean something else I'm not completely understanding. It is a shame Drac is not alive to answer. He would have been amazed at all the new 7800 stuff. He was a 7800 superfan and great guy. 1 1 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JagChris Posted December 18, 2023 Share Posted December 18, 2023 He passed? I remember him. I didn't know about that at all. 😔 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn Posted December 18, 2023 Share Posted December 18, 2023 20 minutes ago, JagChris said: He passed? I remember him. I didn't know about that at all. 😔 Was a few years ago now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trebor Posted December 18, 2023 Share Posted December 18, 2023 Saturday, August 3, 2019. It was also the last day he visited AtariAge. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TIX Posted December 18, 2023 Share Posted December 18, 2023 (edited) 18 hours ago, JagChris said: . 1942 scrolls vertically very well and it has water textures scrolling by. Backgrounds are anything but blank. It seems to be matching anything I can remember seeing on the NES but I don't know what's going on under the hood. Is this a Herculean effort compared to the NES? . I did the graphics for 1942, what 1942 has under the hood is Paul Lay, the guy is a wizard (and a great guy), it was his first and last game on the 7800 and he completed it in a matter of months.. sadly he chooses to "leave" the platform soon after 😥 Edited December 18, 2023 by TIX 2 2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JagChris Posted December 18, 2023 Share Posted December 18, 2023 1 hour ago, TIX said: I did the graphics for 1942, what 1942 has under the hood is Paul Lay, the guy is a wizard (and a great guy), it was his first and last game on the 7800 and he completed it in a matter of months.. sadly he chooses to "leave" the platform soon after 😥 Was it the first time he worked on the 7800? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JagChris Posted December 19, 2023 Share Posted December 19, 2023 8 hours ago, JagChris said: Was it the first time he worked on the 7800? NM answer in post my bad. Would have been ice to see wat he could do second time,around. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dark Descent Posted December 20, 2023 Share Posted December 20, 2023 On 12/18/2023 at 12:49 PM, TIX said: I did the graphics for 1942, what 1942 has under the hood is Paul Lay, the guy is a wizard (and a great guy), it was his first and last game on the 7800 and he completed it in a matter of months.. sadly he chooses to "leave" the platform soon after 😥 What a great game. I wish we had carts of it. Too bad he's not around anymore. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Holbrook Posted January 7 Share Posted January 7 On 9/3/2004 at 8:43 PM, SS said: It might have looked OK but it would have sounded awful! Not if it had Hokey 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
christo930 Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 While SMB was a very good game, it wasn't especially technically impressive. SMB3 would be more impressive on the 7800. IIRC, the original SMB is under 64k (48 IIRC). SMB's real strength is the game design and implementation. It had a lot to draw you in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
christo930 Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 On 12/18/2023 at 2:49 PM, TIX said: sadly he chooses to "leave" the platform soon after 😥 Did he give a reason? Seems very strange to drop in and do a game and then drop out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JagChris Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 1 hour ago, christo930 said: While SMB was a very good game, it wasn't especially technically impressive. SMB3 would be more impressive on the 7800. IIRC, the original SMB is under 64k (48 IIRC). SMB's real strength is the game design and implementation. It had a lot to draw you in. SMB 3? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ColecoFan1981 Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 1 hour ago, christo930 said: While SMB was a very good game, it wasn't especially technically impressive. SMB3 would be more impressive on the 7800. IIRC, the original SMB is under 64k (48 IIRC). SMB's real strength is the game design and implementation. It had a lot to draw you in. Yes, the first SMB for the NES was 40K (32K PRG-ROM + 8K CHR-ROM). ~Ben 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SmittyB Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 6 hours ago, christo930 said: While SMB was a very good game, it wasn't especially technically impressive. SMB3 would be more impressive on the 7800. You might not be aware of how much of a compliment this is to the 7800. SMB actually is a very technically impressive game for the NES. It was specifically designed to push the NES / Famicom to its limits as a swan-song before all game production moved to the Famicom Disk System and apart from some simplistic graphics design it achieved that objective. The FDS ultimately wasn't as successful as Nintendo wanted and developers moved to using extra hardware on the cart in the form of mappers. Just about every NES game past its initial Western release including SMB3 relies heavily on that extra hardware and if you were to take SMB3 and strip it back to work on stock hardware you'd just end up with SMB1 again. You'd lose the 8-way scrolling, the music wouldn't have any of the drum samples, the HUD would need to be removed, the tile animation wouldn't work, the graphics would need to be reduced, and with a lack of extra RAM you'd need to limit gameplay to moving right again so as to not keep track of what the player has already done. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 In the case of SMB, the limited scrolling is more of a code/design issue, and not necessarily due to hardware. The SMB level decoder wasn't designed to back track. The levels use a form of run-length encoding. If that were switched to Start/Stop codes for tile runs, then there would be no issue. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SmittyB Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 The stock NES can only scroll left/right or up/down but never both together which is a big part of SMB3. I'm not sure if SMB splits the level into zones like SMW but the format wouldn't be too much of a blocker to scrolling left, but with the ability to break blocks moving left would require keeping track of the state of the level otherwise blocks, power-ups and enemies would respawn. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 The stock NES can scroll in any direction. The cartridge port only really controls whether the 2 available video pages are spread horizontally or stacked vertically. I believe that SMB3 always has the pages stacked vertically... and uses the stock ability to turn off an 8-pixel column of graphics to allow horizontal scrolling at the same time. During horizontal scrolling in the game, you can see the color-attribute artifacts that occur from this configuration. Some reference material: https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=7844 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 I do agree that the 'brick-breaking' ability is also a factor that probably forced right-only scrolling in SMB. Though, there's probably a way to optimally store a breakable brick-map in RAM using a minimal number of bytes. But that would require some extra code... which would bump up the ROM size. SMB currently uses almost every single byte. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SmittyB Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 Fair enough. The point still stands that the NES can't do anything close to SMB3 without extra help, though I was sure mappers are required somewhere for the scrolling to work hence only later games having multi-directional scrolling. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 Mappers are not required for scrolling. But the scanline-based IRQ feature that some provide, does make things easier, especially for doing HUDs at the bottom of the screen. Ironically, the 7800 has a similar feature to this in it's base hardware, the display list interrupt. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2600 Posted January 13 Share Posted January 13 On 12/17/2023 at 10:10 AM, Tempest said: I'm not so sure that old list is accurate. I've never seen any proof that SMB was ever planned for the 7800. No memos, no mentions on internal lists, nothing. That list reads like a fairy tale. Zero shot Nintendo was going to license their IP's to anybody by the time they opted to go it alone with the NES. I would love to see SMB, or even a clone to it (gotta be careful with the eyes of the Big N watching) on 7800. To me the scrolling would not be an issue, the task could only be successful if you can master the game play and control. That is what made SMB so great, the ability to find secrets and do super run jumps all over the place like a maniac. I'm sure 7800 could replicate the looks of the NES game, albeit differently, which is fine. I think the 7800's palette would look better than the pale one NES often had. It's all about the game play though, if it doesn't control like SMB, I wouldn't want to play it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
christo930 Posted January 14 Share Posted January 14 21 hours ago, JagChris said: SMB 3? What I meant was getting super mario bros 1 working on the 7800 would not be that big of a deal. But getting super mario bros 3 working on the 7800 probably would be a big deal. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.