Things now possible with Mode 13

Topics related to the API, programming discussions & questions, coding tips, bugs, etc. should go here.
Post Reply
User avatar
D3thAdd3r
Posts: 3221
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 10:00 am
Location: Minneapolis, United States

Things now possible with Mode 13

Post by D3thAdd3r »

I like investigating what is possible, even if I don't plan on making the game. It's fun to see a general overview of how well a game could work out. With mode 13 there should be lots of opened doors so I wanted to ramble about different ideas. I'll dump them all here.
punchout_mode13thoughtexperiment.png
punchout_mode13thoughtexperiment.png (5.16 KiB) Viewed 7945 times
Really big sprites in this one, but this is about the biggest enemy boxer and little mac is in an offset position so it's about worst case. With the idea of allowing unneeded video ram(like ram_tiles_restore, sprites, etc), this one could work. The frame would need to be entirely redrawn every frame. There is really no option for all that sprite data but to have it on the SD card or SPI ram. The only issue there might be speed which things can be copied to ram tiles. Still pretty cool, and maybe even possible with a short enough screen.
mario_fullram.png
mario_fullram.png (8.17 KiB) Viewed 7941 times
This one pretty interesting too. This is an artificial screen that should have every unique tile found in the game for the day time scene(harder than other scenes) and way beyond real worst case. I figure we need about 40 ram tiles to represent sprites for the player and enemies to avoid any real flickering. That might leave us with about 40 more to work with. The image shows unique tile in red once, then in white where it gets reused. Obviously there are too many unique tiles, but the decisions can be made what should go into flash. The '?' blocks should be flash, even though they are slightly different colors in different scenes, just make them the same color every where. Some graphics can be modified by just a few pixels to eliminate the sky color and then can be universal flash versions as well. If you look closely you can see the clouds I put at an offset from 8 pixel boundaries. Here we could leave the ram tile indices in vram, then update a parallax scrolling cloud over those ram tiles every frame. Just that would make it more visually impressive than the original. So this is a pessimistic graph, really you could have invisible objects(like are common in scrolling games to control different things) that when they reach the scroll window dictate what to swap in an out of ram tiles.

That's all I have for now, but I think there is a lot we could do here.
Post Reply