-
Originally a thought experiment inspired by Valve’s steam controller UI, LotusText is a demo ROM that experiments with alternative text input for the NES. Typically, text entry on vintage consoles uses slow, boring interfaces that require scrolling back and forth across the alphabet to type one letter at a time. LotusText instead maps each symbol […]
-
Part 1 and part 2 described CHR data, nametable based backgrounds, sprites, and scrolling. Combined, these cover nearly everything a basic NES cart can do without using additional hardware. To go any further will require a quick tangent to discuss, in detail, how rendering happens. RENDERING Scanline based rendering, with a pause for vblank Like […]
-
Check out some behind the scenes photos of the hardware that makes Star Versus run, over at Batsly Adams’s blog.
-
Gameplay in Star Versus is rotational in nature. Objects keep track of the direction they’re facing, and move that direction at each step of the engine. This situation requires a bit of trigonometry, most of which can be pre-calculated for efficient runtime performance, though some cannot. In particular, a couple of gameplay elements need to […]
-
In Star Versus’s two player mode, the first thing players see is a menu to select their ships, handicaps, and arenas. Although straight forward in concept, this menu actually maxes out the NES’s graphics in multiple ways. Specifically, it uses each available palette, requires all 64 sprites, and places 8 sprites onto the same scanline. […]
-
Part 1 discussed the components of NES background graphics – chr, nametable, palettes, and attributes. But this was only half of the story. For starters, there are actually two nametables [1]. They each have their own attributes for determining color, though they share the same chr. Cartridge hardware determines their position, either side-by-side or stacked […]