tokumaru wrote:
Yeah, that'd be cool! The Master System also does it like this. The SMS has some advantages over the NES, but also has some dumb stuff, such as h/v flipping of tiles implemented to the background, but not to the sprites. That's just stupid.
Oh, yeah. I cannot think of one single game that doesn't use the horizontal flipping. Platformers use it to draw the player in only one direction and flip it horizontally to the other. Top-down games can have 3 direction, and the fourth (left or right) mirrored from its counterpart.
Dragon Warrior games and Just Breeds are the only exeptions, where playable characters always holds their weapons in the right hand and shield in the left, so just mirror the sprite would fake that (as it does in anyother game).
BG flipping can be usefull, but definitely less than sprite, since you'll benifit to do advanced shadows effects on tiles that looks similar but reverted.
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I don't know... Even if we had a super fast CPU, with low color resolution and bad scrolling there is little more we can do. A better PPU could result in much better graphics, using the same CPU for game logic. With a better CPU, you could use much more time with tricks that would seem to improve the graphics, but not nearly as much as the better PPU. And after wasting so much time with the graphics, you'd pretty much have the same time for game logic as we do know. For some reason, PPU upgrades make more sense to me.
That's what Nintendo have thinked when designing the SNES. The upgraded the CPU by about 2 (can have either M12/8 or M12/6 speed, instead of M12/12 like the NES). The PPU and APU are about 100 times better than NES's, allowing relocatable Name Tables and Pattern Tables in a 32kb VRAM, up to 4 scrolling independant planes with up to 1024 tiles, possible mirroring, and priority bit. It also allow transparency between planes or with a fixed color, and windows clipping. When less than 4 layers are used, 4BP tiles can be enabled for the first 2 layers, allowing much better graphics. (and that not to mention mode 7). The APU is very powerfull and really cannot be compared with the NES' in no way, it is just so different.
If no priority bit is here on NES, an alternate was would be to have clipping windows like the SNES. Set the left side and right side, and clipping is done. That wouldn't be usefull to have priority background in levels, but that would be very usefull for RPG with windows : You have to manually hide sprites that are under the windows. Sometimes, sprites are just on the border and it looks bad because they either "enter" in the window, or are sometimes clipped just outside the window and look even worse. Window clipping would fix it. Unfortunately, it would be needed to do stupid timed code / timed IRQs to change the registers mid-frame, so it would definitely be better to have priority bits.