The NES that never was

There is an interesting write up that I stumbled upon via a podcast and it tells that how if the NES were to display more of its color palate this may have extended the life of the console vs the megadrives onslaught.

I am not verifying or agreeing, because I am not a programmer, but thought it was interesting:

http://www.duelinganalogs.com/article/the-nes-that-never-was/

 

I'm not sure it would be that simple in practice, because if you increased the color depth, you'd also be increasing the amount of data that the NES's CPU would have to move around under tight time constraints. Isn't that why Color Dreams ended up trying to invent some sort of ludicrous system-on-a-cart for their "Hellraiser" game, to get around that problem?

 

that attachment was as far as i know more of a way to make cheap carts.
The consumer would buy the attachment ONCE and then they would buy like $20 gamepaks. The aladdin deck enhancer had most of the guts to run an NES game and then docked with the gamepaks.

i think only dizzy was ever released that way for it.

 

The problem with what this guy proposes is on the NES it takes 2 bits per pixel of graphics data allowing for those 4 different colors per tile. If you wanted 54 possible colors at all times, now you need 6 bits per pixel, three times more memory for that data. Memory wasn't cheap. It really would have hurt titles that used CHR-ROM rather than CHR-RAM as again, it would triple the cost of memory.

There are plenty of ways to propose adding additional capability to the NES. Plenty of ways to make it better than it was. But they all add cost and costs needed to be kept low. The SNES was actually pretty extravagant but it too had to keep costs down which is why the CPU seems under powered compared to its great graphics and sound chipsets.

And I should point out that the Sega Genesis had this "palette problem" in the article, more so than the NES in my opinion. The Genesis could only display roughly 64 colors at a time in practical circumstances, maybe more if you use raster effects like for water line effects. This is why Mortal Kombat looked so much better on SNES. If Sega had just done something as simple as giving Backgrounds and Sprites separate 64 color palettes for 128 total colors the difference might not have been so jarring. I really believe Sega should have done this as I don't believe the logic required to select between two 64 color palette sets nor the cost of memory was too much for what it would have offered.

The SNES is harder to say was a bad choice on the part of its slower CPU. While a faster CPU would have been nice, it could have driven up the costs quite a bit. One thing I will complain about with the NES that I really think would have been nice if they had added, built in scanline IRQ. It is such a useful feature, I really think it should have been built into the system. But the Famicom was designed in either 82 or 83 so how could they know.

 

Actually the Mega Drive was limited to 64 colours at once until they found a way of displaying 128 colours at once. There are a number of games that use this feature from Japan and even a few Mega CD FMV games from the states that use it. I'm not sure of the programming skill needed to pull this off but it was indeed possible for a Mega Drive to display 128 colours at once with no extra hardware.

Yakumo

 

15 colours (+1 transparent colour could have been possible) which would have taken 4 bits per pixel, although if it had to be backward compatable with the NES then it could have added 3 extra shades (or colours) per pixel if it use planar mapping. As the NES used tile maps and sprites the PPU would have had to work harder rather then the CPU as the NES still only has to update the name tables. The extra pattern and attribute table could have been cleverly mapped as it would have needed an extra 4K and it would have not been too much logic to map the higher part or larger RAM in and out. However the FC lasted well until the very early 32bit era so would have adding more colours really made an difference? Making and Fabbing a new PPU was probably not going to be worth the cost of a NES/FC plus, even if it was designed so that games could be backwards compatable and use the extra colours if it was there.

Although does remind me of the worst computer upgrade ever with the Kaleidoscope for the Sam Coupe, which was meant to increase the colours of the Sam Coupe from 512 to 32768... except it didn't as all it did was dim the screen and to even get a reasonable amount of colours on the screen you had to change palettes on the fly and to force the Kaleidoscope to dim a certain ammount, which meant you were limited to what you could really do...

 

This is a trick, in practical use it is still limited to 64 (actually 61) colors in use at once. While you can make more colors appear in a single frame either by raster effects of "Shadow and Highlight", in the end you still only have four 16 color palettes. To give you an example, Mortal Kombat. You have 2 different characters. That means right off the bat 2 palettes are spoken for. That leaves only 2 more for everything else on the screen. The HUD, and the level background and blood sprites. This is why in Mortal Kombat 1, Jonny Cage will throw a gray blob that is supposed to be the green force ball. You can see it with other characters, their projectiles share the same palette as the character that spawned them.

What Genesis really needed was two separate sets of four 16 color palettes, one for the background layers, another for sprites. That would have given 128 colors at once (actually 61 for background plus 60 for sprites giving 121 total) which would have allowed for games like Mortal Kombat to be more vibrant, that force ball wouldn't have looked so wrong. It definitely would have helped with ports, but even games specifically designed for the system could have looked better. I'm sure the Sonic Team could have appreciated having more colors. But back to ports, I really wish they had more colors for Lords of Thunder on Sega CD. The soundtrack was remixed and sucked terribly but that can be corrected, but the color inferiority to the PC-Engine is striking.

I don't think they need to go as far as PC-Engine which I recall has 512 colors in use at once, or even as far as the SNES with 256. I think 128 would have been "enough". I'm not sure if there was any technical/hardware way that the Sega CD could have achieved what I described but it's really sad that it did not expand the colors on screen by expanding the palette.

 

That NES articles a load of "what could have been fluff" even had the NES had more colours, the Genesis/MD still had a much faster processor and enhanced sound.

That 128 colour trick is also FUD from magazine in the 90's, most games never go beyond 61 colours. And yes I'm also aware of the Shadow and Highlight tricks to increase colour counts but its real usage is very limiting outside of tech demos.

You also can't get around the colour limits with palette swaps tricks neither as it just ends up dumping garbage in the active display.

The issue with the genesis palette is'nt actually the amount of colours that can be displayed at once, its actually down to how many master palettes the Genesis/Megadrive has, which is only 4 which limits overall colour usage and application.

This thread explains it much better if you read through it.

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?20499-The-Colour-palette

 

It's pretty cool that, despite those limitations, the Genesis was still capable of some really colorful, beautiful graphics. Not quite so much for the NES.

 

Both the NES and Genesis have their better and worse looking games.

 

The SNES was meant to be backwards compatible,it even does have 4x16 colour modes and runs the double clock of the NES. Its CPU is said to run up to 8 MHZ but Apple allowed only 2.8 Mhz in the IIGS because early Macintoshs ran at 8.0

 

I remember an article in an old gaming magazine that described this. It was done via separate cart that contained the extra hardware needed to make this work and then the game were attached to the pass through upgrade cart. It was by an unlicensed 3rd party company and not related to Aladdin Deck Enhancer which contained only the graphic (CHR) common to some of the games.

The only game I could remember related to the unreleased expansion pak was Hellraiser I think.

 

I only skimmed that topic, so I'm sorry if this was brought up, but the Genesis master palette is actually a tiny bit larger than it seems. Shadow and Highlight mode can actually enable the genesis to display shades not normally present in the master palette. If you already knew this, I appologize, but every time I see someone talk about S&H mode, it seems like they only speak about expanded sprite/obj/bg palettes, and never the fact that it also expands the master palette very slightly. I've seen 15-step white-out homebrew demos showing this very trick off.

As for the 128-color and 256-color stuff - that's an oft-repeated rumor birthed from several magazines at the time. While, true, several games do display more than 61 colors at once without resorting to scan-line interrupt palette swaps (ala the water in Sonic), such as, off the top of my head, Vectorman through S&H mode, that's not what magazines were referring to. Rather, they were being fooled by good old fashioned NTSC color bleed and dithered sprites. I'll say this - if you haven't played a Genesis through a composite connection on a CRT with nasty NTSC color bleed, you'd be shocked how convincing the effect it. While I certainly like the sharpness of RGB or even S-video, I find myself using my genesis with composite out just because the dithered effect works so incredibly well on such a TV. It's extremely convincing, and seeing these genesis games with the illusion of 3 times the amount of color on screen, with correct-looking transparency (which was even beyond the limitations of the SNES' transparency due to the nature of the way the dithered trick worked) is pretty impressive. But, to return to the point, no Genesis game is going to be pumping out 128 colors at once without a simple trick like interrupt palette switching, which isn't what most people visualize in their head when they hear "128-colors at once."