The NES that never was article

[Flake]

http://www.duelinganalogs.com/article/t ... never-was/

Really interesting article about the color palette for the Nintendo and examples of what classic Nintendo sprites could have looked like if the developers had been able to use the entire palette at any given time.

My only complaint is that the article doesn't really go far enough in exploring either the technical limitations of the NES or what their competitors did to overcome them (like the PC Engine) but it is still a great look at an aspect of our hobby that doesn't get focused on the same way the playing or collecting does.

[Firebrandx]

While it looks nice, the whole point the author is trying to make can be said of any system and is therefor moot. For example, you could do the same article on "what if the Genesis had 16 million colors?" or "what if the SNES had 1080p resolution?"

[AppleQueso]

While it looks nice, the whole point the author is trying to make can be said of any system and is therefor moot. For example, you could do the same article on "what if the Genesis had 16 million colors?" or "what if the SNES had 1080p resolution?"

I think I agree with this, honestly. "What if this console could do a thing it couldn't do?" isn't particularly interesting to me.

From the title I thought it was going to be about some sort of prototype famicom with interesting features/specs that weren't there in the final version.

[Flake]

I think the article focused a bit more on the lack of color variation because it was a system limitation that heavily informed game and art design. We all know the anecdote about how originally Keiji Inafune wanted Megaman to be red but the greater availability of blue shades pushed him to choose that instead.

I am not familiar with any other system of that era that had such a wacky limitation as 4 color palettes for all sprites (with one color being transparent) - I know the TG16 did not have that limitation the article even references how TG16 developers did not know what to do with those extra colors. I do not believe the Master System had this particular palette limitation either but correct me if I am wrong, anyone.

What I found striking about the articles was the 'what if' quality the re-imagined sprites had. If the NES had been able to do more colors per sprite, it may very well have pushed development of the Genesis and SNES in much different directions, kind of like how the new slate of consoles has to emphasize expanded network, storage, and controller features because of how hard it is to achieve a significant delta in graphics between console releases.

[AppleQueso]

Honestly I don't think the color palette was the big limitation so much as the small PPU pattern tables, available PPU object attribute memory, and 8-sprites-per-scanline limits, among other things.

Very severely limited the size and number of objects you could have on screen.

Also worth noting, the Master System/Mark III came along a good 2 years after the Famicom came out and boasted higher specs in just about every category. Very much a more advanced system.

[Snatch1414]

As was mentioned above the SMS had some better specs so it might've been fun to I guess maybe rebuild those sprites with the same capabilities as the SMS, but as was also mentioned the SMS came later. Oh well, blame the editor for the deceiving title.

[Hobie-wan]

I am not familiar with any other system of that era that had such a wacky limitation as 4 color palettes for all sprites (with one color being transparent)

Commodore 64 sprites were 3 color plus transparency if normal res or 1 color if high res. Obviously the 2600 is older, but one was limited to a single color on sprites until someone figured out a trick to change the color in time with the TV scan refresh. Of course this worked reasonably well for giving walking figures a different colored head, shirt, and pants. Another odd limitation that seems mostly a NES thing is the sprites per line thing. That of course leads to all the flickering if you're playing a horizontally scrolling game if things get busy and I imagine that's why a lot of the non ported shmups seem to be vertical.

The 16 bit stuff of course allowed for larger sprites which let you have more impressive bosses than the NES tricks of scrolling part of the screen which left you always fighting bosses in the dark or against a blue sky.

[AppleQueso]

funfact: if you're wondering why nobody ever found a workaround for the sprite limit, flickering *was* the workaround.

[Flake]

funfact: if you're wondering why nobody ever found a workaround for the sprite limit, flickering *was* the workaround.

I absolutely love the brute force, 'make it till you break it' mentality developers had towards hardware back in the day. It's like they deliberately found the most convoluted way to accomplish all their goals - and it almost always worked.

[AppleQueso]

funfact: if you're wondering why nobody ever found a workaround for the sprite limit, flickering *was* the workaround.

I absolutely love the brute force, 'make it till you break it' mentality developers had towards hardware back in the day. It's like they deliberately found the most convoluted way to accomplish all their goals - and it almost always worked.

And yet, a lot of the solutions were surprisingly elegant too! You had to do this ridiculous stuff a lot of the time, 'cause a lot of this stuff was often designed with absolutely no way of knowing what developers would need for their ideas.

Atari stuff especially, that thing was basically only made to do Pong and Combat, and the amount of stuff the developers managed to pull off with that thing is absolutely amazing.