SMS VS NES

[Thenewguy]

However, the master palette of the NES is generally better than the 6-bit RGB of the SMS

I don't agree. Without tricks the SMS' pallet has more useable colours in it, whilst the NES has a bunch of redundant blacks and greys (and I've read that Nintendo actually told developers not to use two of the greys), and the SMS has a more consistent pallet which represents all colours fairly, whilst the NES has a pallet of shades slightly biased towards certain colours (whilst having 10 shades of black which are indistinguishable from each other, there is no good yellow in the entire NES pallet).

The timing based emphasis trick is nice, but do we know how useable this trick actually is in-game? I think Final Fantasy might have used this trick, but it was only a minor effect which flashes before battles, it didn't really add new colours in a useful way during gameplay. Also I've looked through all the new colours and there still isn't any decent yellow, it just now has a whole mass of sludge yellow.

you have 8 3 color palettes to work with too, so more flexibility there

I thought it was 4 3 colour pallets for tiles (+ transparency),and 4 3 colour pallets for Sprites (pretty sure that's what Tomaitheous said) can you designate any number of the 8 to either tiles or sprites then? IE use 6 pallets for tiles and 2 for sprites (19 colours onscreen across all tiles)? if not then I don't see how thats more flexible, NES has to split its tile pallet of 12 colours into 4 groups and then choose which group each tile uses, whilst on SMS, even if you simply choose one pallet to use specifically for tiles and 1 pallet to use specifically for sprites you get 16 colours to use for tiles wherever you want on the screen, more colours in one pallete than all the NES sub palletes put together anyway.

I think there's something about sprite swaps though? with NES you can just designate different pallets to different sprites and it automatically makes a selection of different coloured enemies?

Also note that, since only 2-bit graphics are used, you can fit double the animation/graphics in the same amount of ROM (uncompressed) as you would the SMS's 4-bit graphics

Wouldn't this just mean you need bigger cartridges for SMS (ie more of an economic issue than graphical) and you say that SMS cartridges are cheaper to manufacture anyway due to lower pin count and the NES games always using cartridge mappers for things like scrolling.

Maybe you could draw the tiles so they can be flipped and re-cycled for different environment elements?

the NES has sprite mirroring, further cutting space for animation (without software flipping/decompression)

Do SMS games tend to use software sprite flipping or extra sprites? If it was done by using extra sprites then there seems to be no reason to me why they couldn't have different animation dependant on which direction the sprite was facing (ie if the character swings his left arm in front one direction it could be behind the other)

It seems that if it were done it software it would only be an issue early on, with subsequent games re-using the sprite flipping coding.

I was also wondering about the dynamic tiles, couldn't you at least draw the tiles in a certain way, and then animate them by flipping them? this could work for things like water perhaps?

Either way Jurassic Park shows that dynamic tiles were quite do-able on the SMS, it has them all over the place.

are there any other possible applications for tile flipping?

Kamahl seems to think the SMS is better for parallax style effects too, and I've seen talk about SMS tricks mentioned on other forums -

"easier to set up scanline interupts".
"the SMS allows you to decide how to use VRAM, and you have some control over where things like patterns and name tables are stored in VRAM, allowing for some nice tricks."

There's also mention of 2X sprite scaling, but apparently its not that useful as you have to scale all sprites or none (this is apparently used for the status bar of Earthworm Jim).

[Kamahl]

Kamahl seems to think the SMS is better for parallax style effects too

I don't think it's better... IT IS BETTER. There's no "I think" when it comes to hardware capabilities, it either can or it can't, and the NES can't without extra hardware (talking about linescrolling here, like in darius).
Well... maybe with some crazily timed code, but that would be a complete PAIN.

[Black_Tiger]

Either way Jurassic Park shows that dynamic tiles were quite do-able on the SMS, it has them all over the place.

Phantasy Star also had animating tiles on the world map and I'm guessing that the giant animated enemies were also tiles.

[blobolonia]

I am intrigued by the possibility of using both palettes and tile flipping to create mirrored structures with the same lightsource. Either that, or just have the lightsource be straight above.

Then there is the old Mega Man 2 / Metal Man gear animation trick, where two 1bpp frames are sandwiched into one frame and displayed by adjusting the palette. There should be enough free palette entries in the SMS to run a few of these concurrently.

[Tom M.]

Both consoles suffer from insufficient hardware sprites capabilities... C-64 can draw more sprites than both of these consoles but they are low res.. and that's why all the NES and SMS games flicker as hell when there is something going on the screen. And that's why Speccy owns them all. Software rendering was the only clever option with these early mid 80s poor VDPs...

[Black_Tiger]

Both consoles suffer from insufficient hardware sprites capabilities... C-64 can draw more sprites than both of these consoles but they are low res.. and that's why all the NES and SMS games flicker as hell when there is something going on the screen. And that's why Speccy owns them all. Software rendering was the only clever option with these early mid 80s poor VDPs...

The Speccy and C-64 aren't consoles.

[Kamahl]

And that's why Speccy owns them all. Software rendering was the only clever option with these early mid 80s poor VDPs...

Seriously? The Speccy? Games running at 15fps? That's your idea of owning?
Come on...
I like the Speccy as much as the next guy but let's be serious here.

[Thenewguy]

C-64 can draw more sprites than both of these consoles but they are low res..

Kind of, its not so much more sprites though, the problem is that NES/SMS sprites are much thinner so every character is always made of 2-3 sprites next to each other, whilst most C64 games use 1 horizontal sprite per character, as C64 sprites are actually 3 times wider than NES/SMS sprites (and a little taller too).

Also If C64 goes for NES/SMS style numbers of characters and flicker, then you can use all of the extra sprites you've saved as high resolution overlays, so C64 can have similar numbers of characters as NES/SMS which are a mixture of high and low resolution, or it can have loads more low resolution, 3 colour characters, or it can have loads more high resolution, single colour characters depending on whats needed.

that's why Speccy owns them all. Software rendering was the only clever option with these early mid 80s poor VDPs...

Speccy software sprites are at the other end of the spectrum to SMS sprites though, there's tons of them, but the quality is very low (1 colour unless you want clash), albeit I guess with the attribute method you're talking about multi-colour hi res sprites but that's at the cost of smooth movement.

There are too many things to take into account really , kind of hits home just how ridiculous those old magazine tech comparisons actually were

[Tom M.]

Of course, you can't take that ZX Spectrum argument too seriously. But it has its point. Think about it.

And don't believe this is all hardware sprites, it is not I am sure:

[Kamahl]

C64 games use software sprite multiplexing to get extra sprites, it draws 8 per-scanline, not total (well... not really per scanline, you can waste 1 scanline to reset sprites, getting an extra 1-8 each time you do it).

[evilevoix]

I voted SMS now I wana take my vote back. Look at how good Mega Man is the music, Duck Tales, and so on. It just has better support and just better output.

[Crackdown]

I like many other people here in the UK thought the NES was jun

All my schoolfriends and I used to love deriding the machine with its horrid colours, flicker and kiddy games. Especially to the one person we knew who owned one.

The SMS had arcade conversions, very good ones too, and back then this is pretty much all we wanted to play. I guess thats why the SMS outsold the NES by such a massive margin here.

[Bastardcat]

(Got a hold of a laptop, finally! So glad to be getting to go home tomorrow.)

SMS may have had more arcade ports, but when you got into other genres you were seeing a lot of either downgrades of 16-bit titles like Sonic, or "Me too!" titles, which were intended to cash in on the popularity of their NES counterparts.(How else do you explain that Golden Axe game that is a blatant Legend of Zelda clone?)

[StarMist]

But I can easily think of 50 NES games I'd love to play and replay -- I could literally write them down stream-of-consciousness style -- and could comfortably come up with another 50 with a little bit of thought. I just don't think the SMS has that depth in its library.
.

A bit late now but I'd really like to see such a list from you, both sets of 50 if you don't mind. My memory's a bit more stubborn so it's going to take another day or two from me but I'll put a thorough comparison of my system likes. (I know you're dying to see it).

I voted SMS now I wana take my vote back.

Shame on you, you know better.

[NeoZeedeater]

(Got a hold of a laptop, finally! So glad to be getting to go home tomorrow.)

SMS may have had more arcade ports, but when you got into other genres you were seeing a lot of either downgrades of 16-bit titles like Sonic, or "Me too!" titles, which were intended to cash in on the popularity of their NES counterparts.(How else do you explain that Golden Axe game that is a blatant Legend of Zelda clone?)

To be fair, the NES itself had its share of clones of more popular NES games. Popular stuff getting copied happens on every system. And the SMS' biggest rip-offs like Golden Axe Warrior and Master of Darkness are from the console's later years in the 16-bit era. 1980s releases on the SMS were rarely rip-offs of other companies' games.