I was wondering what the general idea was when making non-tile based graphics on the nes.. i've seen it on some demos, not so much in commercial games
how is this done?
example of demos that do this? I'm not sure what you would qualify as "non tile based. (if it is what I think it is it's done by writing to chr ram)
Elite draws hidden-surface wireframe 3D graphics. And it needs a PAL system to work, since it pushes so much data to the PPU every frame. Rumor has it that an NTSC version was also made, but I don't know how they could have pulled it off, so I'm not sure about that rumor.
After all, you may say that there is no way to draw non-tile based graphics on the Famicom (unless for non-practical cases such as turning off rendering and output colours on screen through writing to some PPU addresses), as it's a tile-based system. Even games such as Elite draw polygons the graphics still has to be drawn onto tiles to be output to the screen, so technically they're still tile-based graphics (it may depend on your definition).
iirc this demo (blargg fireworks) seemed to do graphics without tiles
http://nesdev.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=4684
link to rom is down though
Among licensed NES games that treat CHR RAM as a frame buffer, I can think of Hatris, Qix, Videomation, and Color a Dinosaur.
Among other Nintendo products, Wide Boy receives tile data from a Game Boy PPU and buffers it in a big CHR RAM.
ok so it just uses chrram as a frame buffer, and writes a different time to each location on the screen?
i swear when i watched the ppu in the emulators they were blank. makes sense though
Well I should really investigate more how Elite and Tank demo works. To me it seems like a completely wasted potential, they are amazing technically but as a game I'm unable to play it more than 3 minutes without throwing my controller.
Also there is the raycaster demo Tokumaru did which should be mentionned.
I admit non-tile based graphics are fascinating, even if I didn't do anything with that.
Bregalad wrote:
Also there is the raycaster demo Tokumaru did which should be mentionned.
I was just wondering if my raycaster would fall into that category, since it doesn't do any CHR-RAM updates during gameplay. Sure, it's still using the tiles to simulate something else, but can we still say it's non-tile based if it manages to fit all possible tile combinations in less than 256 tiles and relies on such a specific tileset?
As far as I know, you're not going to get graphics without using tiles. Sprites are tiles, and so is the background. Now if you can pull off raster effects, I guess you can do some tricks with color tinting, changing the scroll midscreen, etc. but if BG rendering is enabled, you will still be displaying tiles, even if it's all blank. There's no way around that.
Games can always fool you into thinking they don't use tiles. Anything along the lines of what people mentioned, like Elite and the Tank Demo are examples of this. But what they have to do in order to get this to work is copy the graphics into CHR RAM, and arrange the tiles on screen in a way that displays the intended wireframe model. Doynax also made a demo rendering color-filled 3D models that is an example of this.
Some other commercial titles deserve honorable mention: Battletoads, Batman ROTJ, Battletoads & Double Dragon... There are more to add to that. These games managed to pull off amazing parallax effects that seem impossible for a NES title, and make you question whether or not it really is using a single-layer, tile-based BG.
Even if technically you can only get tile based graphics on the NES, if you do either CHR-RAM updates such as in elite, use a set of CHR-ROM tiles to display rendered graphics such as Tokumaru's raycaster or High Hopes, or if you simply do a lot of raster effects such as 3D-Worldrunner or Rad Racer, the graphics should be consider non-tile based.
In other words if the computer have to update each frame in either the pattern table, the nametable, or raster effects in function of what is going ingame, the graphics should be considered non-tile based.
Of course they are made of tiles, but the tiles themselves doesn't directly do the graphics, there is a program handling this.
On an other way, all Battletoads graphics, no matter how many fun parallax effects there is, are tile based. They don't render graphics based on software calculations so this is tile based. Of course there is that backgorund that moves as the camera moves in the Ice Caverns, and the wavy effects in Volkmire Inferno, but that's just effects, they are not a requirement to display what is going on the screen.
Glider also uses bank switched chr ram to have a full screen bit map. Only way to get those backgrounds it has. Still limited by ppu bandwidth so i dunno how useful it would be in other games.
i wonder if there,s a way to convert fotos into 256x240 pixels into nes format backgrounds and dither those colors down into 16 colors to avoid flatty colors to preserve as much as possible of the quality.
also it would be cool to see if the nes can play an animation,sure it will take alot of space but what if we try bankswitching???
sure this requires extraordinairy nes power.
High quality picture conversions and few animations were discussed in
this thread.