8-Bit Question (Making Nintendo Game)
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7717
Printed Date: 10 September 2025 at 6:50pm
Topic: 8-Bit Question (Making Nintendo Game)
Posted By: The Instinctive
Subject: 8-Bit Question (Making Nintendo Game)
Date Posted: 19 January 2009 at 9:44am
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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 |
Replies:
Posted By: greenraven
Date Posted: 19 January 2009 at 10:20am
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Depends on what you're trying to emulate, really. Atari, NES, Gameboy? -------------  "pwnage comes with patience, practice and planning." ~ Jalonso 
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Posted By: The Instinctive
Date Posted: 19 January 2009 at 10:28am
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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. |
Posted By: greenraven
Date Posted: 19 January 2009 at 1:20pm
Oh I feel stupid for not looking at the title closer.  And I'm your favorite so far? Aw shucks.  You're probably going to have to take a closer look at NES sprites to get the feel of the kind of graphics you should aim for. In general they tend to be a bit blocky, and each sprite should have no more than 4 colors.  (First 3 NES, last 2 SNES) And for the music, if you're trying to create authentic NES sounds, limit yourself to simple midi sounds. Beeps and boops, basically. ------------- "pwnage comes with patience, practice and planning." ~ Jalonso
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Posted By: Bwian
Date Posted: 25 January 2009 at 1:35am
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Originally posted by The Instinctive 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 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. |
Posted By: Bwian
Date Posted: 25 January 2009 at 11:33am
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I forgot, for the bg tiles, you can select one palette out of 16 for every 8x8 pixel block But I seem to recal that sprites can only refer to a single palette slot for all of it's tiles. |
Posted By: Metaru
Date Posted: 25 January 2009 at 11:44am
this image from Pixelation's mockups pretty much says all you need to understand about NES's graphical restrictions.  ------------- I ate leel's babies |
Posted By: Bwian
Date Posted: 25 January 2009 at 1:12pm
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Right, for the snes depending on the graphic mode mode 0: 4 colors per sprite mode 1: 8 colors per sprite (expanded internally to mode 2 format) mode 2: 16 colors per sprite mode 3: 128 colors per sprite (or 256 if you are in mode 7) |