digipres.club is part of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon.

Administered by:

Server stats:

262
active users

Learn more

I'm hacking on Jurassic Park (SNES) (for the usual reasons) and it turns out this is one of the weird games that stores your health not as a number that goes down from some maximum, but as a number that counts up

it's also running in a Fun video mode: 512x224!
This gets stretched out to the normal aspect ratio (8:7) but it does mean the game is effectively running with pixels that are twice as tell as they are wide.

The game doesn't look like it's using super-tall pixels, though. These look pretty square to me.

This is for a funny reason...

If we look at a screenshot without aspect ratio correction, you'll notice that EVERY PIXEL IS DOUBLE WIDE.

So they set it up so that every pixel is double-wide, then set a high-resolution width of the screen (so it runs at 512 instead of 256)

Doesn't this seem like just running at 256x224 with extra steps?

it's actually to enable a trick to get pseudo-transparency. The backgrounds & sprites are double width, but the UI isn't, because it only appears on odd-numbered columns of the display.

A zoom in

on a relatively blurry CRT this effect probably looked halfway decent

This fucker seems to encode each portrait with a separate palette. That's especially annoying because ALL THESE PORTRAITS ARE GREYSCALE

you're not my dad, don't tell me how to live my life

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I'M NOT LEARNING 65C816 ASSEMBLY JUST TO FIGURE OUT HOW THIS GAME DOES TEXT BOXES

@foone are you sure about that?

Affectionately

@foone
I don't know the details but forgive me that seems like exactly what I'd expect you to do.

@lritter IT'S LOOKUP TABLES ALL THE WAY DOWN

@foone a common misconception. it's only 2**31 lookup tables the way down.

@foone

Narrator: Foone later created a 63 post thread about learning 65C816 assembly, with screenshots, source listings, and ridiculous criticisms and occasional praise and introspection about the language.