koitsu wrote:
No where in any of the developers manual documentations that I have does Nintendo state you should avoid using certain ranges of columns (vertical) or lines (horizontals) of pixels to deal with visual areas which may be hidden by the physical border of certain television sets. This information is considered one of those "tribal knowledge" things when working with either NTSC or PAL.
I remember seeing this post a while back, and it felt off because I'd sworn I'd seen it in the docs somewhere, though when I looked I couldn't find it. When looking through the docs today, I stumbled upon it again.So, to set the record straight (not that anyone probably cares), here's what the Programming Cautions chapter (page 2-24-3) has to say:
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It's interesting to see the extent to which Nintendo followed this guideline within their own products, for instance Super Metroid:
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Clearly a lot is lost if you crop out everything within two tiles of the screen edge: the minimap becomes less useful, you can no longer see all your energy tanks (most crucially, you can't tell if you have one extra energy tank left, or none at all), and so on. Yet, you can still see the most important things, like your actual energy count, which weapon you have equipped, and your ammo counts, the lack of which would make the game much more annoying to play. Whether the design of the game's HUD actually took this into account or was just a coincidence is up for debate, though.