What happened from the NES to today's gaming?

[Hblade]

Ok, I thought about something. Most of our images are 60+kb and even 300 KB. Think about this:

The classic Nintendo's cartrages only held about 100 KB, or 200 KB for the bigger games. Now... for a very complex game with nice programming, it was small in file size. Most NES games range from 40 - 78 KB... for 1 game! now look, our images are even much higher then that.

So somewhere along the line I think we messed up because even 8 bit images can get up to 400 KB. Meaning today's images are even more complex then an entire game.

What happened along the lines of the NES to today? I understand about the color differences and stuff but look at blue ray, 1 video is likr 4 GB but why? Just because it's HD? No, as a matter of fact, I had a video that was 1 hour and 46 minutes long and in 1080P 1920 x 1080 resolution and it was only 600 MB.

[Hblade]

Ok, very nice answere but the question I was trying to ask was (and you already answered it, I'm just telling people that didnt get it) Why were the image and game sizes so much smaller back then, and now look. We're not that much different. Take rpg maker for example, or even game editor! 2D games are getting up to (and I made one this big in Game Editor) 230 MB... O.O Dude a 2D game back in the NES days would be like... 63 kb, but now it's 230 MB, (or 230,000 KB (I think) ) I'm too tired to do the math >.>

Anyways he answered my question. But what I dont get is why 32 bit graphics and applications take SO MUCH CODE to run.

Also, the NES had 1.73 MHZ of processing power... and 63 bytes of Ram, and it still played smooth.

[DST]

The differences between NES games and todays games:

1. Sprite Rules. The nes used very small sprites, which had to stay inside very strict guidelines. Mario was very very 'square'. There wasn't much change between running mario and still mario, size-wise. This sounds unimportant, but its not. This is why mario had such great collision/reaction control. They allowed for very little artistic freedom, and games that went outside these guidelines had very poor collision/response. Try Rygar or Strider to see what i mean.

2. Color rules. The nes only allowed 3 colors per sprite. (3+transparent). This means sprites were much much more difficult to design, as mario needed several sprites to make the entire character. Colors had to be designated on each sprite, for instance, if a blue actor had a red hat, the hat sprite had to load a different color palette.

Same goes for tiles....3 colors each, and an entirely new 3 color palette for each one that had any other colors. Make the comparison for yourself...we can have millions of colors in ONE sprite, they had....3. Also, no antialiasing. Binary transparency only.

What points 1 and 2 mean is designing one animation for a character was an all day job, whereas we often do it in 5 minutes. That's the price of the super-efficiency the machines had.

3.Assembly. (i think that's what they used). This means they could break apart a byte and use it as they wanted. Somewhere here i have a post about that, and everyone told me i was full of it, and in modern systems, i am. A byte takes up even more cpu than an int nowdays, because 32 bit systems use a mangled int when trying to use only one byte.

What i mean is, if you have one byte, that's 8 bits, and bit 1 is canjump, bit 2 is big/small, bit 3 is fireflower/invincible, bit 4 is running/walking, etc. etc. we can describe mario in one byte!

In GE however, we'll use one 32 bit int to describe canjump alone!

This is true for most of how their script worked. It was exponentially simpler and smaller than what we use. It was probably exponentially more difficult to program as well.

5. Sound? ha. We commonly use a single .wav sample the size of an entire NES cartridge! And games like star wars, blades of steel, etc. that did use sound samples often had to put in extra memory just for those samples, which were very, very low quality.

6. Rules. That's what it all comes down to. They had to program by a specific set of rules. There wasn't much freedom, either artistically or in the design of workflow. You couldn't just load an actor and change animations when you wanted, because loading all those animations would take up too much memory. Instead. it would have to load all the necessary graphics for the level you're on, and dump them at the end so it could reload the next set. Most games had 1 or 2 fonts at the most. And you couldn't resize them.

You also couldn't choose the timing as you wanted - how many ms of delay you could have in a timer wasn't free like it is. It had to work within the timing of the machine. Notice how to prevent mass collision calculations, most games had your character get knocked BACK when hit, and temp invincibility. This was to prevent collisions for a second while it did the other work.

Same thing with enemy collisions....enemies never hurt each other, this would take too much cpu. And you never hurt enemies with touch alone,...it was either you or them. Mario could have two fireballs + his feet to attack at once. That's a maximum of 4 collisions at any given time! (2 fireballs + feet + hurt collision).

Contra limited the spreadshot bands to what was it...5 per wave? That's 7 max collisions at once (if you were shooting a big boss, feet on the ground, and you got shot at the same moment). Enemies had 'hearts' to shoot at....so most collisions wouldn't hit anything, and most of the actual collisions would involve only the heart actor.


Rules. It's all about rules. They were very good at hiding those rules, its true, but they had to abide by them. Trust me on this one...its hard enough making games with modern, easy rules. You wouldn't want to make games the way they had to!
Not only because of the amount of work involved, but because of the incredibly tight design limitations. There really wasn't much variation from one game to the next in the actual engine. Making something unique and explorative....was hard.

[krenisis]

i take my hat off to DST that was one of the most insightfulll and detailed post i seen

[Fuzzy]

Yeah, I had an explanation ready too, but DST took the wind out of my sails.

Thanks DST... you jerk!

jk.

I havent much to add. DST did an excellent job.

As well, the colors that were possible were quite limited. Rather than having a range of 256 reds, they only had 5. And 5 greens, 5 blues and 1 transparency(on or off). 16 bit color, right?

They really mashed things together too. They might use one bit out of one variable to control several things. If you remember the negative warp levels in super mario brothers, its a good example. The bit that controlled if the water was turned on also caused the fish to turn into turtles. It also controlled if mario used the swim animation or the walk and if he could stomp kill or not.

[Hblade]

I'm pretty sure that 16 bit color is "256" colors, and 8bit is the one your looking for

Anyways, thanks guys for all the replies. Maybe we can make a game in Game Editor with such... low colors cause some nintendo games, (Take megaman for example) look pretty good O.o

[DST]

NES Specs:
CPU: 1.7897725MHz
Total Colors: 52
Colors/sprite: 4
Max Cart size: 512k
Max sprite size: 8x16
Max sprites: 64

[krenisis]

i also do want to point out though there was a 3D game for nintendo .The game was called World Runner i doupt any one would remember it.If i find photos of it online i post it here.But when super nintendo came out there was no attempt to make 3D games even with advanced graphics engine and more powerful processor.What surprised me was when the developer of snes CD-ROM was turned down but Nintendo.Sony picked up the project and called it Playstation and the rest is history.

[superman123]

i found it

it uses 3-d glasses! which sounds suprising for a nes game

[krenisis]

yes u did find it...That was the time where i was upset with super nintendo i felt like they were saving making 3D for next system so people can buy it.Its trick video game companies do where they say cant do certain things because the hardware is not strong enough but really is because they want to sell the next system.I give you a perfect example there used to be on the black market nintendo cartridges that held 20 to 50 games on them.So when nintendo claimed it didnt have enough memory etc. they werent being so truthfull.But with sega as thier only main competition they were ahead of the game.Now we have awesomely powered video game systems but now it takes 4 to 6 years to make a game mainly because of 3D graphics.I be honest and i know most people will disagree but i miss the days of super nintendo and sega genisis while they cannot do what systems now can do i feel like overall games where more fun to get into and play.Now the controllers feel cramped and the games once you beat them most of the time you dont want to play them over again.But in the old days of super nes and genisis to me was the golden era of games i really those days..i forgot to include turbo-graphic16 which was good also.

[superman123]

look at what i found

that is so cool
i wish we all had one

[DST]

The trick is to keep the values synchronized.

Good luck with the color squares though.

[Hblade]

Nice job DST.

[DST]

thanks, Hblade!

[Hblade]

To - Fill in the squars - so to say, jsut use a half / half background :3 For example: you have the grided thingy, make the grids black and put a sort of tanish background behind the grid to make it look as if it's tiles, then put a sky-like background for the sky :3