Games That Push the Limits of the NES With Extra RAM

the NES again why not there's just so much to talk about when it comes to this 8-bit Leviathan and I'm on course for another technical troll through gaming history this time I'm going to look at some games that pushed the limits of this here system with some clever hacks outside of the box thinking usually involving extra Ram let's start with rad Racer released in 1987 by squaresoft yes the RPG people but this was before they hit big with the Final Fantasy formula this is an old school arcade racer clearly inspired by what Sega were doing at the time especially outrun which this pretty clearly plays homage too what makes this game stand out against the competition now he's just how fast and smooth it is and just how convincing that's undulating track looks at least in comparison to other NES racing games those Hills are especially impressive getting that to work so well can't have been at all easy for a coder nasia gabelli the iranian-american game developer who found himself working on the game Foursquare in Japan the NES isn't that well suited for this type of game especially one with the more impressive features that this has but it does manage it thanks to some very clever hacks let's take a look into the NES Graphics memory to get a better idea of what is going on using the mess and emulator we can take a look at what is called the name table as the game is running basically this is where the background Graphics are stored in the nes's memory yes it all looks a bit weird it's not clear how this becomes what we see on the screen what is all this stuff well this weird triangle is key this is the road and it seems that it behaves like a concertina or maybe a slinky if you want a slightly more up-to-date reference something you couldn't squash and stretch what we are seeing in the name table here are the sections of the slinky the coils is only when they're squashed together that this makes sense if it makes any sense at all with my analogies in fact the track is made up of a load of separate thin strips that move together to create the left and right curves and the humps and dips that make the hills the NES has built-in Hardware scrolling that allows backgrounds to move either horizontally or vertical scene in many many games at Super Mario Brothers being one example but the NES also allows for thin strips of the background to be scrolled individually useful for all kinds of effects that's what's happening with the bends in the road as this simplified view here shows the position of the strips are being altered as the stream is being drawn it's the hills here though that have got to be the most interesting too give the impression of geography the road or the track is squeezed and stretched and the Horizon moves up and down the thing is though for this to happen it's the vertical position of the background that needs to be altered as the screen is being drawn this is something though that the NES is not supposed to be able to do Nintendo didn't really consider it when they were creating the console but there is a hack that does allow this I'm not sure when or how this was discovered I don't know if rad Racer was the first game to do this but it must have been one of the first coming out as it did in 1987 and it's got to be one of the most original uses of it too by sending the correct pattern of data to the graphics chip the PPU it becomes possible to de-stretch the slinky squeeze the concertina and reposition the graphics vertically later games use this trick a lot to Mario 3 did it to enable the fixed status bar at the bottom of a four-way scrolling Playfield for example but well I've got to admire the weights used in this game so cleverly there's more I could say about red racer but I do want to keep this brisk and well there is one other hack that I need to mention before I move on and that's to do with how the screen is laid out internally the pattern table that we've already seen has enough space in it for four screens of background Graphics but the NES only has enough RAM enough memory in it to store two these can either be stacked on top of each other like this or put side to side that's chosen by the programmer creating the game the rest of of the space just mirrors these two screens usually it's just the same thing repeated screens stacked on top of each other are great for vertical scrolling games you can move up and down in the space but also this is what rad Racer uses most of the time for drawing its concertina road but this is the clever part it switches modes for one part of the track to the horizontal stacking that allows this bit at the bottom which is wider than the screen to scroll and change shape without glitching without using up lots of system resources for a lot of NES games the internal screen layout is literally hardwired in the cartridge but not rad Racer yes this is more enhancement chip stuff extra circuitry in the cartridge which increases the capabilities of the NES sometimes in quite subtle ways like this which brings me on to rad Racer 2 the us only sequel I don't know why it never saw the light of day elsewhere but well some do say it's not quite as good good as the original I don't know is it seems okay but it's maybe not quite as sharp as the first game it does have a new updated game engine though if you want to call it that with some more clever tricks the squashy stretchy road is still there but not the bit where it changes screen layout mid frame instead here the cartridge has extra Ram in it which allows for four full screens of Graphics to be stored in the pattern table this means you can have Graphics that are both tall and wide at the same time the road can be the tall stack of concertina sections that you need but also you can have the wide track at the bottom and now a much wider set of horizon Graphics 2 allowing for more detailed clouds and cities and what have you relatively speaking the graphics are a bit of an upgrade over the original if nothing else but there is another fairly well-known game that I want to talk about that also makes use of extra Ram in this way but I'll get on to that in a moment moment first a word from today's sponsor Nord pass business what is Nord pass will it say secure way to remember passwords instead of sharing data through less than secure means it saves time and energy and just makes a lot of sense to do it this way it's safer and it's easier just how much time do you waste on searching for passwords and credentials for all your various services do you have passwords on sticky notes pasted around the office or in Excel documents on shared drives how much easier would it be to have all these in one secure place well that's what nordpass business can do for you you can also add card details to Nord pass letting you make those secure purchases without tracking down whoever happens to be in possession of the necessary piece of plastic or having insecure copies of the info written 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are on in the memory two screens high and two screens wide with four-way scrolling the player can wander around these levels at will but why do it this way lots of other games manage four-way scrolling without the extra RAM and with levels larger than two by two screens well there are two reasons firstly if you try and do four-way scrolling without extra Ram to expand the pattern table it's possible but you will end up with a glitchy looking loading Seam for a good explanation of why this happens well let's take a look at Retro Game mechanics explained video on this very subject which I will link to in the description he explains it's better than I can but there's also another reason why Gauntlet does things this way another clever hack let's take a look at the pattern table again this is supposed to be just the background what if we look close so we can see a lot of enemies too ghosts and what have you all over the place in most games anything that moves especially enemies are drawn with Sprites moving objects that are laid over the background but the problem is the NES can only draw a limited number of them a total of 64 8x8 pixel objects on the screen at any one time and just eight at most on a single line that's not enough for all the enemies in Gauntlet especially when you consider that most of them are made up from multiple eight by eight blocks the solution draw the enemies with background Graphics tales doing it this way has many limitations there's a reason most other games don't do it like this but it works well enough for drawing lots of things on the screen as long as they don't need to move much in each frame and you can handle the fact that you can't draw anything else underneath them the NES only has one layer of background Graphics to work with so nothing can overlap so that's a clever hack in itself but it also explains why Gauntlet needed to go with the extra RAM and the bigger pattern table usually large scrolling levels require you to continually update the background Graphics off camera so to speak you load the graphics data into the memory before the player hits that point in the level we can see Happening Here in Kirby's Adventure but because Gauntlet is having to constantly update the backgrounds with enemy Graphics the NES doesn't have enough bandwidth enough loading time per frame to load in the level Graphics as well instead you've got a bigger pool of memory built into the cartridge and you can load in the whole level at once and you don't need to worry about the level layout when the game is running the only downside is that levels can only be two by two screens in size but that seems to be enough if things are redesigned a bit yes it's well thought out and it ends up being one of the best homecoming versions of this game and maybe no surprises it was published by tenjin a subsidiary of Atari who created the original link clearly had the skills to make the best of this it's definitely not a straight Port of the original arcade game but well maybe it's better for it anyway let's move on and take a look at another game that also uses background Graphics to draw lots of stuff on the screen yes indeed it's the unforgettable battle toads a game that has been memed to death but hey despite the weird obsession with this game that's taking hold in certain quarters of the Internet it's really it's not a bad game is it I'm sure you already know this game and if not well you're probably one of my relatives who due to fully sit through all my videos despite having no idea what I'm on about hello mum if you're watching yes Battletoads it's absolutely screamingly hard but it looks fantastic and it's technically very impressive there's loads of stuff I could talk about in this game but the thing that I really want to discuss is a level six karnath's layer yes this snakey platforming challenge thing is what interests me that snake is just way too big to be drawn with Sprites it takes up far too much of the screen but it also seems to move very quickly faster than what the NES should be able to handle with background Graphics especially given the four-way scrolling of the screen that's happening as well So What on earth is happening well it turns out it's more hacks to give a very convincing illusion the NES can only handle updating about 30 background tails per frame though that is usually enough for most games to allow for scrolling here it looks like there must be far more tiles update than that but in fact it is an illusion The Head and the tail of the snake are drawn with Sprites so let's get rid of those and now we're just looking at the background Graphics underneath and if we look at either end of the snake we can see that they're in fact just four tails at each end that are being updated they're either added or taken away at each end and that only occurs every four frames that's all it takes for the snake to appear to move across the level just those eight tails in total but what about the body of the snake that looks like it's moving pretty quickly the segments slide making the snake look like it's moving very fast but this is actually a pretty simple repeating pattern the body of the snake is made up from just a handful of individual Graphics tales that are reused all over the screen to make up the whole thing this is why tail-based Graphics are useful you can draw lots of things by just reusing the same few Elements by updating the few tails that make up the snake every frame with a slightly shifted pattern you can make it look like the whole thing is moving without having to move around more Graphics data than the NES can handle to make this happen though this game still needs extra Ram but it's not used like it is in Gauntlet it doesn't contain the background layout instead it's used to store the actual tails that the layout is built up from battle toads and a few other games in fact use a ram chip in the cartridge to load the Tails into meaning they can be altered and updated on the Fly rather than the ROM chips that are standard in most NES games and can't be updated in the same way as well as the snake level these same technique is also used on the final level to make this Tower rotate again just a few tails in the ram being updated to make it look like the whole thing is moving the ram is also used in a different way throughout the game to deal with the Sprites for the battle toads themselves the graphics data for the main characters is streamed into the graphics Ram as it's needed which allows for the complex animation that this game uses whilst still having a lot of variety in the enemies and other objects on the screen there's so much going on in battle toads to make all these graphical effects happen but there is another game that I want to look at that does do something similar with ram for quite an interesting reason let's move on to solstice foreign [Music] Adventure game of the type that home computers were absolutely filthy with in the 80s at least here in the UK but they were never quite so common on consoles about half the output of the British video game industry was solely this type of game for about 10 years after the massive success of night law on the ZX Spectrum but anyway weird National obsessions aside this is one of the better examples of this type of game and when we take a look under the Bonnet we might see why this sort of thing wasn't attempted too often on the NES moving from room to room here in this game has a slight but very noticeable pause as the graphics for the next room are assembled this was a pretty common problem on games of this type but if we take a look into the graphics memory once again we can actually see what's going on behind the scenes let's step through what's going on in the pattern table frame by frame starting with a completely blank screen as we enter the room the room itself the walls and the floor that appears pretty much instantly in one or two frames if that's all it took well you'd never notice the pause at all but the other objects in the room things like platforms and stuff you can interact with that takes quite a bit longer and you can see them here being drawn bit by bit why does this take so long what is going on well it's all about the tails the blocks of pixels that the graphics aren't made up out of the type of isometric Graphics that this game has don't work so well with Tails because most of the time they just aren't going to fit well into eight by eight pixel blocks everything is diamond shaped or parallelograms as opposed to the squares and rectangles of most 2D games to get around this Solstice uses once again Ram in the car Outreach to make a sort of frame buffer where you can just draw whatever you like without having to worry about tile boundaries you could try and do this without using Ram games like snake Rattle and Roll do do an isometric Viewpoint with pretty fine shapes stored in a normal NES ROM cartridge but that does have some limitations for a game like solstice unless you store every possible combination of every background object against every other object in every possible position in a massive ROM file it's not going to work the best way to do it is to use Ram where you can combine the different elements on top of each other as you need to but as I said this game also does something interesting with the player Sprite too if we take a look at it in isolation we can see that it gets masked off bits disappear off our guy as he moves around the room if we put the background Graphics back on we can see that this is happening when the Sprite goes behind objects in most NES games 2D games they can rely on the nes's built-in at Sprite priority mechanism to do this kind of thing you can basically set Sprites to be either over the top or behind the background that's what's responsible for that memorable moment when Mario drops behind the scenery of stage three of its Super Mario Bros 3 to find the secret warp whistle that bit works because the background fits nicely into square Tales of pixels but it won't work here where you have the complex shapes of the scenery objects over the background details but because the character's Graphics are stored in Ram it is possible to edit the Tails needed to chop itself and make it look like the little wizard shadax that's his name goes behind as well as in front of things this is definitely an underrated game with an absolutely fantastic soundtrack courtesy of game music legend Tim Fallin yeah it's definitely worth having a go at if you like this sort of thing but guess what it's not the only game to do with this sort of sprite masking no another underrated game does it too another game from rare but not quite so well known this time it's pinbot hey surprisingly authentic pinball game based on the very real pinball table by the same name from Williams it has incredibly detailed graphics for an NES game and it isn't quite isometric but it does have a similar problem to Solstice and the same masking trick is used to make the ball look like it's going behind the various obstacles on the table of course to do this it requires more extra Ram in the cartridge allowing the game to redraw the ball Graphics as needed if I like disable everything but the Sprites you can see this in action too but there is quite a bit more to this game's hacks than just that yes it does do some trickery to allow the screen to have a vertically scrolling Playfield with a fixed panel at the bottom the scoreboard status bar thing but that's not the best bit though because this is the only NES game to make use of a combination of both Graphics RAM and ROM well okay the only game except for high speed another pinball game from rare released a year later based on the exact same game engine anyway these two games combine the two different types of memory for two different purposes we've seen RAM used to draw the ball in fact all the Sprites in this game are stored in Ram but the background Graphics the pinball machine that's all stored in graphics ROM why well because ROM data can be swapped around much more quickly than Ram it's all about Tails once again by default the NES can handle 512 unique graphic Tiles at once in Old School NES games like say Gallagher this was the maximum for the whole game usually 256 towels for the background elements and another 256 for the Sprites this time went on though developers started to break out of this restriction and add extra graph effects in banks that could be swapped in and out you could have a different bank of tails for each level giving more variety but also you can't even go as far as swapping out banks in the middle of drawing a frame allowing for more unique tails on the screen at any given time the NES can display a maximum of 960 background tails on the screen at once and 64 Sprite tails however you cut it with the original 512 tile limitation you're going to have to reuse some of your Tails if you want to fill the screen games like Kirby's Adventure increase the amount of Tails available by swapping to a new set mid screen allowing for this status bar at the bottom to be made of a different set of Graphics than the play field pin button the sequel high speed that we see here goes a bit further than this and it swaps out its background Graphics tail set four times as the screen is drawn as this is done in 256 tail chunks it gives potentially 1024 unique background tiles on screen at once plus another 256 Sprite Tails too it doesn't use the full amount available but it does mean that it can display more detail than as far as I know any other NES game was ever able to tell this pinball table can be so detailed it's using way more Graphics data than any other game to draw the background in fact we can see the whole table that it's stored in the ROM here unlike most games that create larger levels out of repeating elements this is just one large image in effect and whilst we're here this is the equivalent image for the original pinbot game and it actually maybe looks a bit nicer some games did use this sort of technique to display some static screens Smash TV did it on the title screen but even that only used 756 Tails I don't think anything else on the NES had such dense Graphics in the game itself so that's why there has to be both Graphics RAM and Graphics ROM you can't realistically do the Sprite masking thing that the ball needs with ROM graphics and you can't load the data into RAM fast enough to give yourself those extra Tails using both means you can do both things so I think now the end is upon us I didn't intend it when I started this video but this whole thing ended up revolving around Ram didn't it in fact I didn't even mention it before but even the original rad Razer that I talked about at the beginning has extra Ram in the cartridge it doesn't do anything massively exciting with it it's used in the same way that it is in a lot of games allowing different graphical elements to be mixed and matched together in a way that's hard to do with ROM Graphics anyway though that is enough of that thanks to Norwood past business once again let me remind you to have a look at nordpass business in action right now with a three-month of free trial here at nordpass.com forward slash shuropolisbusiness with the discount code shura Police business so I will sign off now and say as I always do thanks so much to my generous patreons you guys are great your help is much appreciated and if you too would like to join them there is a link in the description so thanks for watching if you've got this far and you haven't subscribed well why not do that now and maybe hit that like button as well and I will bid you goodbye and say I'll see you next time folks foreign

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 72,752

Keywords: NES, N.E.S., Nintendo, Sharopolis

Id: bfJzJOQqsDk

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022