Hey, I'm brand new here at the forums and at spriting. I'm going to be working on an 8-bit game, so I just have a question regarding the graphics that I hope you guys have an answer to.

So, I chose my 8-Bit pallet (256 colors - kinda cheated and got it off of wiki =P), so I'm pretty sure that's the main restrictions on an 8-Bit Game...correct me if I'm wrong.

My question basically is: is there any other limitations on 8-Bit graphics? Maybe limited amount of colors per certain amount of pixels? Or other things? I'm not too sure. I've done my searching, but can't find my answer, so I figure I should just ask a spriting community. ^_^;

Thanks so much for your time.

~Jonathan

Edit: One other thing. If you know of the sound restrictions on those games too (maybe only can use midi?), please let me know.

By the way, I apologize if this is in the wrong board. I thought that asking a question about the graphics would be best in the support board. =P


Edited by The Instinctive - 19 January 2009 at 9:47am

Well, the title did say "Nintendo," but I should have clarified NES in my post. :P

greenraven, you're my favorite member so far. Haha. But please, continue to offer your advice now that you know it's gonna be as close to NES game as possible.

If you're working on gameboy advance or DS, they both support 256 color sprites and tiles. But it's a pain to program (namely for vram allocation) and sprites end up taking a huge amount of memory considering the platform.

Typically, you would get 256 colors for the menu screens at best and the sprites would be in 16col x 16palettes, meaning that every 8x8 tile on screen can use a 16-color palette slot.

As for sound, these have left-right digital channels (if I recall, they are 16bt 44Khz max). They also have the  legacy sound synthetiser from the gameboy, it mainly produces different types of noises.

They do not support midi natively. In order to have midi, you can either use the nintendo sdk (I think they have a midi interpreter.player) or code a midi player yourself. This implies decodeing the midi stream, generating sounds and sending them to the speakers. It's almost as much effort as doing a mod player, so people just use mods instead, it's way nicer anyways.

Funny you should ask, I've programmed these for ages :)
Keep in mind that all the information I gave you is already public knowledge. I can't talk too much about the specifics, I'm under NDA,

good luck with your project.

this image from Pixelation's mockups pretty much says all you need to understand about NES's graphical restrictions.