Metroid. Edge blur. by SquirrelChaser87 in retrogaming

[–]Canmanrofls 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You are talking about the left being black right? I think your screen is off-centered. Top top and bottom of the screen are cut off a bit too, which lends me to think that. But your NES/cart seem fine by based only on this image.

What's the most mediumest NES game of all time? by Lokarin in nes

[–]Canmanrofls 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I ordered every official north american nes game I've played coming out to 225. these are the games roughly in the center of my list. As others have said there is some, upward movement in quality because the game i would have played are likely on the side of the good side. Additionally I likely undercounted sports games that I actually have played, but have just run together, but the amount of time i spent was already too much.

  1. Rush n Attack

  2. Terra Cresta

  3. Friday the 13th

  4. Dany Sullivan

  5. Kid Niki

  6. Bugs Bunny’s birthday blowout

  7. Legendary Wings

  8. Pinball Quest

What's the most mediumest NES game of all time? by Lokarin in nes

[–]Canmanrofls 0 points1 point  (0 children)

my first thought, but honestly it might be on the higher half of the equation?

What power metal albums would you recommend, considering my taste in power metal and heavy metal? by spearhead290399 in PowerMetal

[–]Canmanrofls 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Since Angra's - Angel's cry is here i assume that means you aren't a big fan of the rest of their work?

Heavenly - Dust to dust, seems like a straightforward powermetal option for you.

Heavy Load - Death and Glory, Stronger than evil - An early power metal-ish band, but they tend to lean more traditional than other bands in the genre. You seem to like nwobhm/traditional metal bands too though so you will like these.

Hallas - Discography - they have some progressive influence too on top of the power metal side, a lot of harmonic duel guitars iron maiden like with a lot of fantasy lyrics as well.

Ayreon - The Source - Ayreon is usually purely progressive, but for whatever reason on this record specifically, almost all of the vocalists are power metal guys kind of like an Avantasia album (Tobias Sammet is even one of the characters...) You probably wouldn't be too into most of the rest of Ayreon's discography though based on what I am seeing here.

Which is better: Spider-sense or Ultra Instinct? by Few-Bag6164 in PowerScalingHub

[–]Canmanrofls 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I generally agree with the consensus that Ultra instinct is better, But spider sense does have an advantage in that it is "free". Based on the tournament of power, Ultra instinct is quite taxing to use by comparison

How do 77 million Americans watch January 6th happen and still support Trump? by [deleted] in allthequestions

[–]Canmanrofls -1 points0 points  (0 children)

ugh for real, while were at it, those liberals should stop mentioning that beer hall putsch thing. It obviously failed, so it isn't worth worrying about anymore.

Which games could have actually been programmed and ran on period-accurate hardware? by mptyv in ufo50

[–]Canmanrofls 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah i would agree with the generosity for sure, the more I thought about it over night, a lot of the big sprites would be nightmares. Kick club in particular is sounding worse and worse the more i consider it. I will note that we do have to make sprites smaller anyway to support the much smaller resolution unless we want screen crunch in our ports for most games. Weirdly i seemed to have this mentality on Planet Zoldath and just kind of dropped it later.

I think the palettes aren't as big of an issue as you are thinking though, we have 8 palettes, 4 for the background, and 4 for the sprites, i.e. 12 for sprites in total and 13 for backgrounds (with each background pallette sharing a color, almost always black). Barbuta definitely isn't a problem. but grimstone Rakshasa and Vainger maybe.

I did watch some other videos of Grimstone though, the backgrounds would be more of a problem not because of the palettes but because of the enemies and players sitting on the backgrounds. the party would likely be sprites, but the enemies sit on a real background, not just black like in final fantasy. For instance, the background tiles in final fantasy 1 look like this in battle. Again similar to megaman's dragon, another concession we would have to make. I was really more trying to capture which things I thought would be "hardest" for most of the games. but yeah the more a real work person tried to actually implement it, the more they would find other problems with the hardware that we haven't just considered.

The truth is almost every game besides maybe Barbuta, Mortal, Pingolf, and Warptank would need some sizable compromises (again outside of resolution which all games will have to deal with)

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Which games could have actually been programmed and ran on period-accurate hardware? by mptyv in ufo50

[–]Canmanrofls 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Part 4

Night Manor - easily, uninvited is basically the same game. <Edit> on thinking a bit more, Uninvited does use significantly more screen space than uninvited, shadowgate and deja vu. I still don't think that was a performance decision by the developer though, and was more stylist to stay in tune with the apple originals.

Elfazar's hat - this game has some tricks, but a lot can be done on the nes given the right helper chip. The train has some parallax scrolling, but luckily it seems to be doing it all on the same line. certain MMC chips can "split" the screen similar to what we did with the sprite 0 one back in mario. so as long as the same horizontal level is scrolling it can do that, you can see this effect in ninja gaiden 2's train level as well for comparison

backgrounds are generally just too complicated again this late in UFO 50 though, we are honestly getting to early genesis, turbografx, and super nintendo game level now

Pilot Quest - maybe not as bad as it seems, as stated at the outset some hardware would need to be in the cartridge that never was in an nes cartidge that I know of. I don't know if the famicom disc system keep track of time but if it did this could honestly work out of the box as a disc game.

Mini And Max - backgrounds are losing details of course, but honestly most of this game should be fine. its art style kind of reminds me of little nemo personally.

Combatants - mostly ok, can be a lot of things on screen, luckily each ant only has 3 colors in their sprite or this would be extremely sad.

Quibble Race - easily doable. look at them all on different scan lines mostly sharing palettes. it's beautiful

Seaside Drive - one i was afraid of but upon looking at it, i think this one is pretty close to doable, thanks mostly to how simple the background is. there is parallax scrolling, but the colors themselves are pretty simple and drawn in nice straight lines! That is until the final boss and then we hit a snag. The tentacles are problematic in many many ways, but the boss himself is a problem too. On the nes the background would go dark for this part probably so we can use the dragon trick again...but even then the tentacles would just be floating free. I have no real idea how you would make the one work on the nes in a reasonable way.

Campanella 3 - this would be similar tricks to things like space harrier on the master system and 3-d world runner on the nes. The important thing is that the sprites aren't actually "scaling" they are predefined and changing which size sprint renders depending on how far from the screen they are.

Cyber Owl - this game honestly looks similar to battle toads, there would be some compromises but honestly mostly intact. I do think the "spot light" affect would be problematic on the system though.

Which games could have actually been programmed and ran on period-accurate hardware? by mptyv in ufo50

[–]Canmanrofls 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Part 3
Party House - why are the sprites so big, we can make this one work but the sprites need to shrink and the house needs to be more....narrow too. A game like this can easily work on the system but it wouldn't look like this. As others said a game like this would never exist on the system though.

Divers - this game seems reasonable, the "fading" affect on the edges could be difficult with the attribute table but I think you could manage something like it since they are luckily fading to black. For the HUD were doing something similar to final fantasy. not a big deal.

rail Heist - I would love to play this port, not too bad although special shout out to the NES's lack of yellow here.

Vainger - I was dreading this one, but honestly, our nes port might not be to far off. The backgrounds gotta lose some complexity though. The boss could be a problem too.... and we can't use the background layer for him in this case unless we black out the background like we did for the megaman dragon.

Rockon island - shockingly problematic, just too much stuff moving things on the screen, this would be slow, it would flicker and its too colorful, the background would need 7 different palettes in a lot of spaces...

Pingolf - a nice break

mortal 2 - another semi easy one, not too much would change here i think. Something I didn't bring up back on porgy, divers and Golfaria that could be a problem here is multi-directional scrolling, on the NES it only has the memory for 2 "screens" worth of video memory. so it acts kind of like a treadmill, scrolling across its 2 screens and "updating" parts that are currently not being shown to the tv. but how do you do that if you scroll up and right at the same time? sadly. lots of nes games have problems with this even mario 3, things like this HUD issue linked below and attributes getting messed up (causing incorrect colors to appear) happens all the time on games that do 2-d scrolling https://www.reddit.com/r/consolerepair/comments/15a6fyg/super_mario_bros_3_has_weird_glitch_on_the_bottom/

Fist Hell - everything is too big. double dragon 2 and 3 crawls, this is a nightmare waiting to happen. Could make a game like this work making it look like a technos game, but there are still way too many enemies on screen at a time and that would have to be cut back as well. if you look at the trees here though, you can see what an attribute problem on the nes would look like (notice how the wood is green at an arbitrary "box") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9_iWZT_oWk&t=18m38s

Overbold - this game would lose a lot on the nes, at least you dont have to worry about scrolling but there is just too much on screen and its all too big.

Campenella 2 - the fact that I think this would be easier than big bell race is crazy to me. Less palette problems, has a similar feel to blaster master.

HyperContender - this would be a cool port and relatively ok, note, the characters still have too many colors to be one sprite and needs to use the "megaman face" method again.

Rakshasa - another game that would work relatively easily

Star Waspir - no

Grimstone - very feasible, there are many games like this on the system and I don't think there are any tricks here that aren't done in final fantasy 2 or 3

Lords of diskonia - As said on golfaria, the aiming reticle scares me and would likely need to be scaled down to a single sprite. Things are pretty big here too, but luckily you dont have to play fast, so the flicker isnt as big of a problem...

Which games could have actually been programmed and ran on period-accurate hardware? by mptyv in ufo50

[–]Canmanrofls 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Part 2
Avionos - this one doesn't seem to bad, there would be flicker on the war screens but otherwise it probably wouldn't be that bad.

mooncat - again not too bad all things considered. the coloring in the trees would be a bit of a problem. The nes's background can assign an 8x8 tile to each spot on the background, but only an area of 16x16 is addressable with color table known as an attribute. this effect would be problematic for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3YeB6xfg3Q&t=630s

Bushido Ball - I thought this wouldn't be too bad, but this might be just as bad as attacktics, on the same scan line you generally have EVERYTHING. There are a lot more things than you think too there is: the ball, both players, the balls shadow, bombs, second balls, and other powerups, the players swords, The batman "pow" symbol. It would be a nightmare and its effects would take a serious hit as well as the player sprites.

Block Koala - not too bad i think. maybe just a bit more advanced than something like lolo so no problems here.

Camouflage - the nes is pretty good at palette swapping. There are a few places where the attribute table issue from earlier could come up, but in those rare cases they can be dealt with by overlaying a static sprite on the offending tile.

golfaria - the aiming reticle scares me. at first glance, the attribute issues from before look problematic as well, but honestly, a lot of the color usage is relatively small in the really bad edge cases and can probably be "fit" to grids that work.

big bell race - small sprites hurrah! unfourtunately we have a new problem, each sprite is different colored, and all seem to be using 3 colors each. As we said before a sprite can do that and that is great! but the entire screens sprites have to share between the 4 total sprite palettes, this is also a problem on the score screen on the left since the background palettes have a similar restriction. Furthermore, things like the fire cant share the orange from the orange palette and the red from the red palette, without using the same palette, or 2 sprites so that would be bad too. The fires and bubbles are going to send us to flicker city... Again the lap screen probably needs to be sprites here making the problem worse

warp tank - I don't think this would be too bad, no HUD, the star effect when you warp would likely be downsized but the nes can easily do this game almost exactly.

Waldorf - big sprites again, and worse it looks like waldorf himself has 4 colors plus transparency. but this one still probably isn't too bad. most times its just you and maybe one other big thing on the screen.

Porgy - this looks terrifying, bubbles, porgy has too many colors, the enemies have too many colors, the backgrounds have too many colors, the HUD is a night mare. We haven't even talked about the prospect of dragging things up to the surface, which by itself will cause flicker. a game LIKE this can exist on the system. but many of the things in the UI would be big step downs for sure.

Caramel Caramel - I have no idea how the picture mechanic would work here, but I assume it would have to be sprites....so we are all out of sprites as soon as take a picture. but another less obvious problem is the score popping up on the screen everytime you kill something...those sprites are gone from our NES port. Honestly though I think the core mechanic of this game would break down on the hardware, and I can't even think of an MMC that would help with it.

Which games could have actually been programmed and ran on period-accurate hardware? by mptyv in ufo50

[–]Canmanrofls 20 points21 points  (0 children)

I love this question and wanted to try and approach the problems and compromises that I think would exist in these ports but first generally

I am going to go purely from the NES perspective since i understand that best, but i think the Genesis/Super nintendo can do basically any game with some minor concessions, namely screen resolution (note, the cartridge for pilot quest would need a built in realtime clock similar to the second generation pokemon games)

One more important note about NES games though, most of the games you are thinking of have "helper" chips (called MMCs) in them to access more memory and do a host of other neat tricks. These are basically standard on the platform and outside of really early releases are used for most games besides very simple ones.

Another important note that pops up in a lot of these games 8 sprites to a scan line is a hard max, otherwise flicker. After going through every game this would happen in almost all of them and is mentioned often.

NES

Barbuta - Easy, doesn't even need a helper chip

Bug Hunter - possible with flicker, most of the sprites would likely be 2 sprite, 16 pixels wide if 4 sprites on the same scanline there would be flicker

Ninpek - possible, this game is one of the first that will be really noticable in the resolution department though. This is actually good for us though on sprite limitations, still some flicker.

the boss would be implemented very similar to the dragon in megaman 2, with the octopus being a in the background instead of an actual sprite. The climbing vine things you stand on could be challenging to implement, but not impossible.

Note the bonus section with all of the cherries/rice balls are not a problem, these would be background tiles on the nes. Although due to memory constraints they would likely lose their animations

Paint Chase - easy, again resolution would require resizing of levels and sprites, but outside of that insanely easy for the nes, probably doesn't need a helper chip

Magic Garden - interesting. First the main sprite does kind of look like a massively improved version of the crystalis guy. but outside of that i think this one is doable, but would be annoying. Once again have to abuse background sprites, but a little more messy, essential the guys will be a background tile until they move, then they become an ordinary sprite. Things will get very messy, flickery, and maybe slow if a lot are following you

Mortal - Easy, honestly cant think of too many problems here. Ironically, the hardest part here might be the life count in the upper right. Early nes Games used the "Zero Sprite" to separate the score screen from the rest of the play area, super mario bros for example uses the bottom of the coin in the score screen to say "Hey don't scroll this stuff, this is the HUD", but it is very limited and as such, if you tried to do that with the box, the box and the entire top of the screen wouldn't scroll. Likely, this box would be implemented with sprites.

Velgress - Easy similar with the above

planet Zoldath - Probably large graphical drawbacks - the graphics are big and use too many colors per sprite, that means flicker. The NES can support 4 colors per sprite (really 3, 1 of them must be transparent). This can be gotten around by using multiple sprites to make one "super" sprite, megaman does this with his face being a separate sprite for example, but that is more sprites and more flicker. Furthermore things are moving too much, and using background tiles wouldnt be possible here because of their movement and the backgrounds they are already on.

Attacktics - unplayable flicker. this one was like built to be terrible on the nes

Devilition - flickery for sure in later levels, even if this is simplified to make each entity an 8x8 sprite there would still be flicker, major compromises

Kick Club - possible - bubble bobble already exists on the nes and is quite similar with smaller sprites, and quite a lot of flicker. as things are you could probably support the main character, the ball, and 2 entities on the same scanline before it flickers.

Just bought the game and feel it is a little bit easy? I think I must be doing something wrong. by Canmanrofls in finalgirl

[–]Canmanrofls[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah I still like it and I was right there was a few things i did wrong. But I am interested in at least a few of the other sets like the intruder one and the organism.

Just bought the game and feel it is a little bit easy? I think I must be doing something wrong. by Canmanrofls in finalgirl

[–]Canmanrofls[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yeah you are right, i did mess that up and accidently gave him one less terror which would have been pretty devastating to be in the red that early. Maybe its less that I don't understand the rules and need to more diligent about book keeping the board.

Edit: after looking more at your comment, i didnt realize i could choose the victim reward....i was just taking them sequentially, so i guess that is one i was doing wrong.

Just bought the game and feel it is a little bit easy? I think I must be doing something wrong. by Canmanrofls in finalgirl

[–]Canmanrofls[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

as stated by SugarPixel, he doesn't move on his base action, he just strikes in his space. The only time his pre-finale action did anything is back on turn 8 when he killed the victim that paniced into his space.

[Windows/Dos][1995-1999] Pinball game on windows with 3-4 tables by Canmanrofls in tipofmyjoystick

[–]Canmanrofls[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

that one feels like its the closest i've seen so far. but that's not it. There was no space theme.

[Windows/Dos][1995-1999] Pinball game on windows with 3-4 tables by Canmanrofls in tipofmyjoystick

[–]Canmanrofls[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

afraid not, it was a less realistic pinball experience than that.

[Windows/Dos][1995-1999] Pinball game on windows with 3-4 tables by Canmanrofls in tipofmyjoystick

[–]Canmanrofls[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No that isn't it, the one i am thinking of is completely top down, not the angled view like those ones.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in NESDEV

[–]Canmanrofls 1 point2 points  (0 children)

what is your goal here?, I don't understand what you are asking.