That BioMechanical Dude's Youtube Channel

Because I'll make more than "Obscure Room" reviews on my channel, I decided to create this thread, where I will notify you every time I upload a new video.
Speaking of "Obscure Room"... I just uploaded the third episode! Sorry it took so long to make. There were some problems with the production(at one point I was cleaning my hard drive and I accidentally deleted the voice recordings for the episode ). I'll try to make these more often(after all, how are you supposed to build up a good audience, if you don't release stuff frequently).

Today's game is... "Castlevania" for the MS-DOS! Yeah, did you know there was a port of "Castlevania" and a bunch of other Konami games for the old IBM PC? Did you also know how horrible most of them are? In this review, I'll take a look at the "Castlevania" port and see why it doesn't hold up to the original.

Here's the link to the video:
https://youtu.be/hL-Vwn0OyMk

Take a look at it and tell me what you think. As I make more videos, I try to improve my skills, so it's very important for me to know what works and what doesn't. Your feedback will be very important.

Also, can you figure out which game I'll be reviewing next? Tell me your guess!

About other types of videos I'll post: one of them is coming very soon. It's a project of mine, that was released on the Famitracker forums a while ago... But this time... it's gonna be in Stereo!

1 error...you state (2:45) that the NES can show 28 colors at once. I believe it's 25. 3 per palette, times 8 (4 BG / 4 Sprite), plus 1 background color.

I would guess your next will be Final Fantasy II.

No, actually. Background palettes don't use transparency and don't share colors. So, you have 4 x 4 = 16 for the backgrounds and 4 x 3 = 12 for the sprites, which is a total of 28.


Nope! I said the game is based on a huge franchise, that was popular in Japan, meaning, it's a licensed game.
The music I play at the end also hints at what it is.

Colors at palette indices 4, 8, and 12 (addresses $3F04, $3F08, and $3F0C), which are 0 of the second, third, and fourth sets of four background colors, are ignored during rendering. Color 0 of the first color set (address $3F00) is used instead. The only way to see colors 4, 8, and 12 is to turn rendering off and point the VRAM pointer at their respective addresses. This is where the 25 comes from.

The above is true of the NES, Genesis, Super NES, and Game Boy Advance. Game Boy Color, on the other hand, actually shows all distinct color 0 entries.

Wait a minute, why isn't everything like this if it's possible at all?

In the case of the NES, it's probably because the Family Computer was rushed.

The Famicom was a "skunkworks" project to one-up the SG-1000. Nintendo was impressed with how arcade-accurate the licensed port of Donkey Kong to the ColecoVision was, and I presume it didn't want Sega (whose SG-1000 console had exactly the same specs as the ColecoVision) to own the market. For more information, see 6502freak's post and the "Mario's Shame" section of this article, where Mario in DK (ColecoVision), third from the left, is the only one that actually looks like Mario pixel for pixel. So Nintendo engineers, pressed for time, didn't implement all features that they could have implemented, such as a VRAM write FIFO or more general DMA or distinct color 0 in each background palette. The Famicom was so rushed, in fact, that launch consoles had to be recalled due to hardware bugs.

In the case of the Super NES, Genesis, and Game Boy Advance, it's because color 0 isn't quite as important on a machine with 4-bit tiles and more than one background layer. Only the rearmost layer's color 0 would make sense anyway.

Still seems kind of odd to just outright exclude it, especially when on the SNES, the most popular video mode generally has a 2bpp layer in the background... I'm guessing on a multi BG layer system, it also has to do with the fact that backmost layers would have to be treated differently then higher priority layers in that they'd actually have to look at what color the first color in the palette is instead of just ignoring it? (Kind of like how the SNES uses planar graphics so that no extra hardware is needed for different bit depths for tiles?) I'm just guessing, because to me, it seems strange that every BG layer system I know of, (obviously the Neo Geo has this behavior) including arcade systems like the Irem M92, CPS1 and 2 and others, have color 0 act as the first color in every palette on the backmost BG layer.

It would have been a nice feature had they had a register that allowed that, sort of a "Kangaroo mode", but that wasn't the case. It's 25. It has to be for sprites to appear behind the tiles of all BG subpalettes.



Maybe. It was probably the cheaper method for sprite to tile priority feature than how the SMS does it (the tilemap entry itself has the priority flag). The PC-Engine does the exact same thing (priority setting is per sprite instead of per tile). One exploit is that you can do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtKUeSeXIOA (@ 6:45 and @ 7:00). The SMS can't do that. All sprites are either above the tile or behind it. It's nice in that you don't need sprites to masks such transition edges on the SMS, but it's less flexible in other areas (NES can have sprites behind the BG and in front of the BG in the same spot/tile).


Since the SNES and Genesis are subpalette systems, how else are you going to get "see through" areas of a tile assigned subpalette other than 1 when the pixel color 0 in that subpalette is shown?

You'd do what the Game Boy Color does. Game Boy Color has eight separate color 0s, one for each of eight background palettes, but it still allows sprites to go behind background tiles. If both background and sprites are transparent at a particular pixel, it uses the color 0 that corresponds to the palette of the particular tile as the backdrop color.

That's what I was thinking. Just because each palette has its own first color doesn't mean sprites couldn't be behind that. It'd be like the Irem M72 and M92's split tilemap functionality, where the first 8 colors (excluding the first color, which is transparent) are behind sprites, and the last 8 are above sprites, (I believe the SNES has something similar for Mode 7?) except that it would be like the first color is behind sprites, and the last 3 are above.

Oh my it souds like Casvlevania DOS is absolutely terrible. But Mega Man (DOS) was even worse !


Actually yes they do, and it's 25.


Just a random wild guess, but what about Dragon Ball ? Licenced games that sucked hard aren't exactly rare

Does A Nightmare on Elm Street suck? It's licensed, it's LJN, and it's so Rare it's AMROM.

Wasn't the famicom ppu chip designed with video overlay in mind, though? If so, then BG layer wouldn't be the farthest layer in such a setup. I know the PCE was designed for video overlay (the outputs on the back are all there for it), and when plugged into the LD player for PCE-LD games, it needs all entries of 0 in the subpalettes to be transparent (as well as the SGX). The Genesis does this too and needs it for both the 32x and the Mega-LD to work properly.

Wow! I did not expect to start a whole conversation about graphics rendering and colors.
OK, guess I was wrong, it is 25 colors. Kind of a bummer, considering you can define more colors. Oh, well...

As for the game, it's actually a pretty good one. As I keep saying, I'll be reviewing retro games games, whether they're good, bad or just OK.

SNES was even more of a skunkwork job than NES, even though it ended up taking a long time in development. From what I read, they kept going over budget.

EDIT: I could imagine the FIFO only being able to write 6 bytes per scanline for the theoretical "perfect NES." The real NES has 2 unused cycles, and 4 extra cycles can be squeezed out by not fetching the 34th tile. Of course every sprite name table fetch has a dummy attribute table fetch, but a "perfect NES" would probably use those fetch cycles to reduce flicker.

There are 16 dummy nametable fetches while sprites are fetched during horizontal blanking. This is enough to handle even an unrolled loop copying data to $2007. An unrolled loop (PLA STA $2007 or LDA a,X STA $2007) takes 8 cycles per byte, which is just over 14 bytes per scanline.

The Super NES could have been the same way: if not all 34 sprite slivers are in range, FIFO writes get committed. This would give something like the CHR HDMA on the Game Boy Color.

I think you and I know this well...


That makes sense. I feel like one big problem about the SNES is just how it seemed Nintendo had been overly ambitious when designing it. I mean, why include an affine BG layer when you don't even have scaling sprites? When you're using "pre rendered" (different sized sprites are swapped out instead of one sprite being scaled) sprites for a launch title, you're in deep trouble. Possibly even a better example are the SMW bosses that use mode 7 for them and have the background be made of sprites. I mean, that's a pretty odd and limiting way to go about something like that for a title the system was built in mind for.

You know what? 64x64 sprites may kind of serve as a sign to what power the SNES was originally supposed to have, as I'm assuming it was originally intended to be able to back something like that up.

Because the background covers more of the screen than sprites do.


Perhaps the idea was that mode 7 would be paired with sprites scaled by some other process, such as a coprocessor. I've demonstrated real-time shrinking of a 32x48 pixel sprite in software at 15 fps on an NES. It's vblank limited and could thus probably be even faster on the Super NES.

Also, affine transformations of a single plane are tremendously simpler and cheaper than affine transformations of multiple planes.

I think the biggest reason affine sprites are so expensive is the fact that a PPU could only access 1 pixel at a time, instead of the usual 4 pixels at a time.

The biggest problem with this though is the fact that it uses vblank time to draw it, and you need multiple copies of objects scaled at different distances instead of just one.


Which really begs the question as to why games like F-Zero and Super Mario Kart have everything pre rendered... I mean, even if you didn't have enough time to decompress the graphics, you're still saving way more space by having one frame at full resolution, and it looks a hell of a lot better.

Having 64x64 sized sprites still doesn't make any sense though. For reference, the hardware behind these games use 64x64 sprites:




I guess it looks at one pixel, uses matrix transformations to place it in the right spot, and then looks at the next pixel and does this over again? Wait a minute, if the SNES has a linebuffer, how would this even be possible? If the object was flipped upside down, it would load from the top, and then try to put it at the bottom, but this would be beyond the line buffer, unless it would somehow be able to hold the information, which at that point, you might as well be using a framebuffer. With normal graphics, it would just load the top, then place it at the top, which would be inside the linebuffer. Wait, this is obviously done for Mode 7 somehow... I'm dumb.

It fetches pixels in the order they are drawn onscreen.

So it basically does reverse of what I just said. Yeah, I really am dumb...

NEW VIDEO

[2A03] Arumana no Kiseki OST

This is a project, that I did on the Famitracker forums a while ago. It's a 2A03 Cover of the "Arumana no Kiseki" soundtrack, which was released for the Famicom Disk System and, like many other games on it, utilized it's sound chip. The soundtrack was composed by Kinuyo Yamashita, who also composed the "Castlevania" soundtrack. The cover was reworked a bit and is now in Stereo. Is my cover faithful enough to the original? Is it any good? Tell me what you think.

Link to the video:
https://youtu.be/dphJRtoN4Bc

Being a fan of Arumana (Almana) no Kiseki, I'll chime in with my opinion. Your cover arranges the FDS channel in a way that is unlike how Konami handled their other FDS->NES conversions (ie: slow-fading narrow duty-cycle leads are not really in Konami "style", IMO.) That said, you converted the timbre of the FDS channel to 2A03 very faithfully, especially on the stage 1 tune and boss 2 tune. I like it!

Well, yeah, I wasn't really aiming for technical faithfulness. I don't think a casual listener will notice that, anyway. (In fact even I barely notice any of the minor differences )


Thanks! I think the "Level 2 and 3" theme also has really faithful leads, but that's just my opinion.
Fun fact: The first track I did for this project was actually the "Level 5" theme. It's my favorite track in the entire soundtrack. Anyway, I really like how the lead at 04:54 sounded in the original and when making the cover, I dedicated both square wave channels, to achieve that timbre. Unfortunately, that meant, that the counterpoint melody had to be completely removed, so the track didn't sound all that great. After posting it on the Famitracker forums, the guys there agreed, that it would sound better with the counterpoint melody, so I added it in. Too bad the lead doesn't have the same timbre, but what can you do?

I haven't heard it, but I wonder if you could reduce the counterpoint melody to an overlay that interrupts one of the square channels for a frame or two.

I have discovered this method myself a while ago, but I don't think it would work here. The notes in both the lead and the counterpoint melody are pretty long, so I think if I use this method, it would change the feel of the track, not to mention, the notes play at different times, so it would also just make things messy. I am going to use this for a future project, though.

NEW VIDEOS

I'm currently working on the next Obscure Room episode. In the meantime, I decided to upload some of my Famitracker covers on Youtube.

[MMC5] Duke Nukem 3D Theme
This is one of my older ones, but I still think it's alright.

[2A03] Jazz Jackrabbit - Diamondus
As the title suggests, this is a 2A03 cover of the Diamondus theme from the classic MS-DOS game Jazz Jackrabbit!

[2A03] Jazz Jackrabbit - Tubelectric
A 2A03 cover of the Tubelectric theme, again from Jazz Jackrabbit. This is one of my favorite tracks in the entire game.

Arumana no Kiseki - Level 5 Modern cover
This is a cover of the Level 5 theme from Arumana no Kiseki, made with MIDI instruments and Synthesizers.

I hope you guys enjoy these. Tell me what you think of them. Are they faithful to the originals? Did you like the Modern Cover and would you like to see more of those? Let me know what you think. And for those of you, who haven't seen Obscure Room, you can check it out here.

Thanks!

What DAW/Software do you use?

Have you made any original songs?

The NES covers are made with Famitracker. The modern cover is made with OpenMPT, an open-source tracker.

I haven't released any original works. Recently I've been getting into composing and so far I've made two pieces, which are... alright, at best. The more I compose, the more I'll develop my skills and at some point I might make something worth uploading.

I might try a few original songs this year. And at least 1 awesome cover song. 8^) I wonder if they're going to have another FamiCompo this year?

Sorry for answering late.
Anyway, I think they might. They had one last year and I'm sure they'll want to keep it going. I might actually enter with a few covers or even some original music. ^_^

I would like to point out two things about your Castlevania review.

1. The EGA may have greater overall resolution (320x200), but the NES has an advantage in height (256x240). Of those 240 vertical pixels, the action portion of the screen is using 176 on both systems. Unfortunately, the NES is using 256 horizontal pixels but the EGA uses 320 horizontal pixels, giving the latter graphics something of a stretched out feel, even when correcting for aspect ratios.

2. Performance is atrocious on real Tandys of the time (1990) with Tandy Graphics.

The 320x200 pixel mode of the CGA and EGA is underscanned, meaning it has visible borders on all sides. It has a 7.16 MHz dot clock, same as the Atari 7800 and equivalent to half a color burst cycle or three NES/SNES master clocks per dot. This means the pixel aspect ratio is 6:7, and the active area is the same as 240x200 NES pixels.


MobyGames screenshot of Castlevania for DOS. Aspect ratio is wrong, but it shows the use of 8x8 pixel tiles and 24x16 pixel metatiles.

The 24x16 pixel metatiles would be equivalent to 18x16 pixel NES metatiles, so yes, somewhat stretched.

And the performance of any EGA scrolling engine prior to Id's Commander Keen is likely crap.

Hm... Interesting. When I usually compare resolutions, I judge by how much details you can have in the graphics, although the height advantage is something to consider, especially for action games. Nevertheless, my criticism was that the people, who made the DOS version, didn't design it around the EGA's restrictions and didn't take any of the advantages it had to offer. The action portion of the screen remains the same, sure, but directly porting a game from one system to another doesn't always work out and this game is proof of that. Changes have to be made. Though this could be Konami's fault. From what I've heard, they wanted the PC ports of their games to be exactly like the originals, disregarding the differences between systems... Then again, had the developers informed Konami of the EGA's specifications, they might have agreed to let them take a few liberties, especially considering that when they were being developed in-house, most of the Konami ports make good use of the hardware they're running on. But who knows? I don't really know what happened, during the making of this game, although I suspect it was a rushed job, like the other DOS ports.


That's sad to hear, considering that only Tandys have the three-voice audio.


More or less. Duke Nukem did a good job with its scrolling, even though it was chunky. Again, probably because of the speed and because the controls are much more responsive.

PENTASOUND Cover!

The Pentasound Covers take just as much work as a regular cover. So for all the people following this thread, here is the latest cover, in case you don't follow the Pentasound thread. Oh, and if you're wondering what Pentasound is, here's some information.



I finally finished the Mission 1 Theme from Double Dragon! I decided to make it more like the Arcade version. This would also make sense, if the MT Computer, which uses the Pentasound chip, was an actual computer, because if Double Dragon came out for it, it would've been an arcade port. I think this cover shows off the Pentasound chip's capabilities more than the Vampire Killer cover.
You can listen to it here!

Is this cover good? What are your thoughts and criticisms for it? Which version of this theme do you prefer, in general? The NES version or the Arcade version? Let me know.

Thanks!

Very enjoyable sir. I tend not to think analytically or critically, I just enjoy things.
I will say I like that tolling middle voice note that starts to occur at :14 or so.

I like it too. It's one of the elements in the original arcade version of the song, that didn't make it to the NES port. It was kind of jarring, when I heard it for the first time, but now it's grown on me.

NEW VIDEO - CHOUJIN SENTAI JETMAN REVIEW!



I have finished the latest episode of Obscure Room! This time I'll be reviewing, Choujin Sentai Jetman, a Famicom game, based on the Super Sentai show of the same name. It was made by Natsume, who also brought you Harvest Moon, Power Blade and Shatterhand!
So, if you like Power Rangers/Super Sentai or just want to know about another obscure retro game, check out this review here!

If you like Obscure Room or my channel, in general, here's something you can do to support it: if you have friends, that also like retro games and video game music, please tell them about my channel. It'll help me out a lot and I'm pretty sure they'll enjoy my videos.

Tell me what you think about this video. What can I improve in the show? Can you guess which game I'm reviewing next? Let me know.

Thanks!

I MADE A TWITTER ACCOUNT!

Well, it finally happened. I made a Twitter account. It's mostly based around the channel, but I'll be posting some other stuff, as well. Right now it's pretty empty, but there will probably be a lot of stuff in the future, so follow me, if you're interested. https://twitter.com/BioMechDude

RETRO COVER - [VRC7] BLOODY TEARS!



I just uploaded my VRC7 cover of Bloody Tears from Castlevania II: Simon's Quest! You can check it out here!

What do you think? Is this cover good? Have you ever thought what it would be like if most NES games used the VRC7? Let me know.

Thanks!

RETRO COVER - THEME OF SOLID SNAKE!



This is my cover of the epic Theme of Solid Snake from Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake! You can check it out here! This is one of my favorite video game themes and I think the cover turned out pretty well. What do you think?

RETRO COVER - DAREDEVIL!



Daredevil Season 2 is out, so I decided to make a cover of the main theme, to celebrate the occasion. You can check it out here!
What do you think? Is this cover good? Let me know!

NEW VIDEO - DARK SEED REVIEW!



"What is that?" you say. "Another review? Impossible! The last one took four months! This one just took... one."
That's right! While it wasn't as fast as I hoped, I have finished the latest episode of Obscure Room! This time I'll be taking a look at Dark Seed, a point-and-click adventure game, featuring the artwork of H. R. Giger, who designed the Xenomorph from the Alien movies! I hope you enjoy this review!
You can check it out here!

What do you think? What could be improved about this show? Let me know!

RETRO COVER - ONE NIGHT IN NEO KOBE CITY(SNATCHER)!



Snatcher is a great cyberpunk adventure game by Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima. The PC Engine and Sega CD versions (others too maybe) featured this really awesome opening credits theme. After a whole week of hard work and headaches I completed a 2A03 cover of it. I think this might be the longest song I've covered. You can check out the cover here!

What do you think? Is this cover any good? Let me know!