Is there NES restrictions document for designers?

I've been thinking recently to ask my friend to help me out a little with creating graphics for NES and redraw/fix some graphics I've made. I can explain him the restrictions of the NES.

It would be nice to have wiki page with not-very technical descriptions on graphical restrictions on NES that designers can use and reference when there is a questions. Color limitations, attribute table limitations etc...

Did anyone here faced situation like that before? If not, I will try to compile something readable to put on wiki.

I think I've seen the restrictions of the system explained in a concise way targeting pixel artists before, but more often than not, there are additional restrictions imposed by the engine being used, so even the best presentation ever about the console itself probably couldn't be considered the definitive guide for aspiring NES artists.

Related previous topics:

• Please help consolidate all info for pixel artists for SNES (Super NES, May 2017)
  For Super NES, but I include it to ask if something like this is what you want except for NES instead.
• Learning NES Limits, Pixel Art, & wat can & can not be done. (NES, 2015)
• Graphics editor for NES (NES, 2012)
  I still haven't seen a more concise summary of background limits than the one I wrote for this topic.
• NES Palette(s) (NES, 2011)

Thank you tepples and I'm sorry. My search foo failed me this time.

I also just found nesrocks's article from last month.
https://nesrocks.com/blog/nes-graphics/

These are cool! However, contrary to what tutorial 5 says, you can actually have parallax effects with background on top of background if you use the technique demonstrated in tutorial 4 (animated patterns). As long as the background is composed of small, repetitive patterns (as seems to be the case with the clouds in tutorial 5), you can have tilesets with different rotations of said patterns that you can use to artificially scroll the patterns independently from the real scroll.

This technique was heavily used in the games Metal Storm and Sword Master, and occasionally in Battletoads, Bucky O'Hare and others. You can never achieve true multi-layer parallax effects on the NES, but when done right, this trick can look quite impressive!

Nice that you find those

@Tokumaru Yeah, there are many techniques that can be used to break what I say in the tutorials. For example, tutorial 2 says you can only have 256 unique background tiles in the screen at once, but that is not true with mid-frame bank switching. I intend to keep the tutorials going. Next I'll talk a bit about sprites, and then I'll talk about these special tricks.

It took me some time to understand what the NES does, graphically. I think one of the quickest ways is to use nes screen tool and yy-chr and make something. Also, look at games running on an emulator such as fceux or mesen and look into the ppu viewer (nametable, chr) and try to see what's going on. I recommend starting with a simple early game because there may be mid-frame changes that don't appear in the viewer and will confuse you.

edit: that mugen topic sounds like a good read for someone confused about the nes graphics. A lot of info there.

Nice article by Brad Smith about sprites: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/11 ... ts/1582636

I usually try to check out other people's blogs when I stumble across them in their profiles. And it is very nice article, exactly what imagined. Job well done, thank you.

Not necessarily better than what's linked but I've made two.

In a single image:

More technical but hey, why not: https://pixelation.org/index.php?topic= ... #msg115062

Kasumi, that's a really awesome guide. The font is really hard to read, though :/

I wouldn't say it's the font, I think it's the amount of information in such a small space. They are all crucial info to make it work, but it's hard to take it all in at once like that. To me, the forum post is better! It's a great read for clarification.

Thanks Kasumi! I'll check the post later today.

dustmop wrote some good articles, but I don't think they're targeted to artists

http://www.dustmop.io/blog/2015/04/28/n ... cs-part-1/