NES Limit Pushing Games Mystery Edition

[@menhirmike]

I am really enjoying these actual deep dives into HOW those tricks are done, rather than "just" showcasing the games!

[@f.k.b.16]

I'm glad he explained the glitcy sides of the screens (like in SMB3). I always wondered why black bars hiding it weren't a thing but now I see it's not that easy.

[@stevethepocket]

@@f.k.b.16 Not being able to hide those edges is exactly why the Commodore 64 came with a built-in command to hide the leftmost and rightmost tiles entirely behind a slightly thicker-than-usual border. Of course, in their case, they had no choice, because smooth scrolling _had_ to be done the hard way even if it's just in a single direction.

[@Wr41thgu4rd]

If you enjoy these kind of vids displaced gamers is worth a quick view.

[@menhirmike]

@@Wr41thgu4rd For sure, also Retro Game Mechanics Explained (RGME)

[@JaredConnell]

​@menhirmike it's funny, I looked up the channels that you and the guy above you mentioned and I was already subscribed to them both lol. Any other suggestions for channels like that? I love those detailed explanations of how older hardware and software worked!

[@jasonblalock4429]

The Kunio-Kun series really is underappreciated, in terms of how much they could do with the Famicom/NES hardware. Their engine probably had the best live physics on the FamiNES as well.

[@BdR76]

Thanks for answering my "Resue" spotlights question 😄 Looks like the real trick is using black as a foreground color and different colors as background/transparency pixels. Cheers, Bas (from the Netherlands)

[@taewyth4161]

at 1:22 concerning Infogrames' "r", Infograme's name is a contraction of the french words for computing (informatique) and softwares (programmes) hence the "r"

[@Tolbat]

yes yes the world is done with French thanks no thanks

[@DJ_POOP_IT_OUT_FEAT_LIL_WiiWii]

@@Tolbat you have issues with French?

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@DJ_POOP_IT_OUT_FEAT_LIL_WiiWii I don't know what French is, but I've got a translator that only translates into an incomprehensible dead language. Every time I say "hello" to it, all I get out is "bonjour".

[@DJ_POOP_IT_OUT_FEAT_LIL_WiiWii]

@@anon_y_mousse so what? hi?

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@DJ_POOP_IT_OUT_FEAT_LIL_WiiWii Well, now I know that you're not a fan of Futurama.

[@SmeddyTooBestChannel]

the embassy sniper effect is what I was assuming internally, but it sounded too complex to be really the answer. that's absolutely insane they got it to look so good.

[@hgbugalou]

Rescue The embassy mission was on of my favorite games on the NES. It being so short is likely why not many people know about it, but it was still really fun with great music. It would really be a great speed run game too. I still hum the first phases music to myself anytime I'm using a flashlight. 😂

[@heavysystemsinc.]

Id enjoy seeing a breakdown of Sword Master, which has huge sprites and totally does a convincing job of making you think the nes has two independent background layers that can overlap while parallaxing. The first stage has trees in the foreground overlapping slow moving mountains in the distance. Looks super nice.

[@DenkyManner]

I got an NES in 1990 with Turtles, it never occurred to me it wasn't popular in the UK until people online said it. You could get the games everywhere, toy shops started stocking them as they felt the pressure to, and the 10 Choice machine made it into lots of pubs. I think the truth is it took off later, but it did take off

[@Cooe.]

I mean it wasn't a straight up sales failure or anything but it definitely got absolutely ROFLSTOMPED by the Sega Master System in that market. 🤷 The NES was to the UK what the Master System was to America. A widely available and supported piece of hardware but one that was still by FAAAAAAR the sales minority in that market.

[@fattomandeibu]

At the time it was relevant, it was outsold by the Master System by a ratio of 10:1, with the Master System. It wasn't until it hit bargain bins after both the Mega Drive and Super Nintendo arrived(and NES game development stopped) that they started selling more than miniscule numbers, but that was under heavy discounts, often under £30, a la the Jaguar. Just go look up the gaming charts of the day, which are based on games sold, you'd rarely see a NES game on there unless it was like SMB3 or something.

[@customsongmaker]

The UK had more gaming computers in the 80s, with cheap cassette tapes, while American children were still using green-screen Apple II at school. So Americans were far more impressed by the NES compared to what they had seen before. The marketing in America was important, with Mario on TV constantly, but the games were more important. Side-scrolling Super Mario Bros was something we had never seen, not even in the arcades. Arcades had Rampage and Pole Position, but not a sequential adventure with a story like Super Mario Bros. Add Zelda, and the NES was the invention of the video game. Arcade games were different, and Atari consoles were just cheap versions of arcade games. Computer games involved reading and typing. Video games were new - like an album from your favorite band, a video game was something you could spend time with at home over and over. You experienced it and discovered it personally, but you could also share the experience with friends. From 1987 to 1990, Nintendo was the only video game console that mattered for most Americans. That was only 3 years, but if those were your formative years then that seems like your entire childhood. For me, I was right at that age. Before, there was only Atari with games you played for a few minutes and got bored. Then there was Nintendo, from Super Mario Bros to Super Mario 3. That is the period of time that represents video games in my memory. Then I didn't own another game console until I was an adult. By the time I was 12, I felt too old for a childish Super Nintendo when I could play Mortal Kombat in arcades and a PC at home with Wing Commander or Monkey Island on CD-ROM. I saw Sonic the Hedgehog at a friend's house, it was flashy but unsatisfying. Where's the challenge, where's the gameplay? You're watching Sonic zoom through a loop, you're watching Sonic bounce off of springs, but that's just watching something happen outside of your control. Same for Donkey Kong Country - great graphics, but it played like molasses. The next time I got into video games was Final Fantasy 7 and Castlevania Symphony of the Night and Parappa the Rapper. The few years between NES and Playstation were like an entire lifetime of separation in my memories. I've since played plenty of Super Nintendo games and all the other ones I missed at the time, but I'll always prefer Super Mario 3 over Super Mario World. Zelda 2 will always be better than the SNES Zelda. The first time I played Super Mario 64 was on the Wii, and it was great. But similarly, even though it was an "old retro game" that I downloaded in 2006 for $10, it had only been 10 years since its original release. And again it was like a lifetime had passed since that era. We experience the passing of time by how much things have changed. If you look at the road behind you and still see the same things, you haven't gone very far. But if you look back and you're very far from where you came, then you know you're in a different place. If nothing changed in your life over the past year, you don't feel like any time has passed. But if you experience a busy weekend full of new things, last week feels like last year. Playing 20-year-old NES games on the Wii felt like a visit to the distant past. But today I played Wii games from 18 years ago on the Switch, and it doesn't seem like that long ago. Last year I played Lost Odyssey again, I think it came out in 2007, and I kept thinking that there hasn't been any improvement at all since then in RPGs except slightly better graphics. It's been over 7 years since Breath of the Wild, and that was the best game ever made in some ways. But even that wasn't quite as good in some ways as Morrowind from 2001. The rate of change in video games has slowed and almost stopped. Otherwise it would be impossible for the Switch to last 8 years. And what's the best selling game on Switch? Mario Kart 8, the same game from Wii U. 60 million people are playing technology that was already mediocre in 2012, and it doesn't even really matter. Kids are still playing Minecraft instead of PS5. By comparison, imagine anyone playing Atari 5200 instead of a Dreamcast. The same number of years have passed, but there's no comparison in terms of the space between. There's no new technology changing video games anymore, the next big thing will have to come from creativity and imagination.

[@fattomandeibu]

@@customsongmaker The next evolution is already here, and has been since the '90s in VR. There's 2 main things that are stopping it from happening; first and most importantly, hardware good enough to do it well is way beyond what an average could be reasonably expected to pay, and secondly, the cost of making such a game would cost hundred of millions of pounds, if not billions of pounds. It'd be like the Shenmue debacle(Shenmue would've had to have sold 3 copies for every Dreamcast sold to just break even) all over again, maybe even worse. Maybe someone somewhere will take that risk someday, but it would probably bankrupt them, even if successful.

[@tech34756]

​​@@fattomandeibuI'm sceptical VR will replace 'traditional' gaming unless maybe we get some Red Dwarf style 'Total Immersion Video Games' with Groinal Attachment. VR headsets can be bought relatively cheap (Meta Quest 2) and anecdotally back in the PS5 shortages sold quite well. VR also has other shortcomings such as motion sickness and requiring space to make the most out of it.

[@DarkPuIse]

MMC5 was definitely advanced, but I'd argue it's not the MOST advanced mapper chip that the NES ever had. As you pointed out, the Japanese version of Castlevania III, Akumajou Densetsu, used its own different mapper chip - Konami's VRC6, which also added sound channels. But if that weren't fancy enough for you, Konami's successor to that chip, the VRC7, was used in a Japan-only game called Lagrange Point. More sound channels, you say? No, not at all - try an entirely different sound chip altogether, based on Yamaha's YM2413 - the same sound chip that powered the Sega Master System. FM Synthesis? On MY NES (well, Famicom)? It's more likely than you think!

[@garyliddon]

If you have an MMC3 you can use a floating scanline interrupt to do 8 way scrolling in horizontal mode without colour glitching. It's tricky and when it works no one notices :D Krusty's Fun House on the NES uses this technique

[@Larry]

Could you look at Hard Drivin' on the NES too sometime? I think that might be interesting to cover.

[@Sharopolis]

I was going to put that in this video but... mind=blown. If I ever work out what it's doing I'll put it in a video!

[@merman1974]

Rescue was released on home computers as Hostages. Those versions had similar spotlight effects. Randomly shooting windows is a bad idea - look for the outline of the terrorists and shoot them, to clear rooms for your troops before they abseil down and break into the embassy. That swimming event in Crash & The Boys is technically clever. Also interesting to see the difference in the mapper used by the Japanese version of Castlevania III. I've not played the NES version of Jurassic Park, but I am a big fan of the SNES version.

[@penuts17]

Hooray! A new limit pusher vid! Some of the best stuff on YT

[@thecunninlynguist]

Never thought about crash and the street boys pushing the limits

[@JohnnyWednesday]

That is why you fail

[@Pawnband]

seeing those extremely fast cpu instructions reminds me that the NES cpu, while primitive to us future people, is an amazing piece of technology.

[@BainesMkII]

It's not that the water "rises" in the swimming section, but rather that the city scape "sinks"; the game is trying to fake the city scape receding into the distance as the race progresses.

[@bluedistortions]

Yeah not sure how that got misinterpreted

[@jamisreebirzick5872]

One interesting way to hide the scroll glitch is used in The Incredible Crash Dummies, which masks it with sprites. It uses 13 sprites, with 8x16 mode and not needing to mask the 32 pixels reserved for the HUD area.

[@hotconductor4749]

Thank you for doing videos like this. As a long time player I am familiar with some of the tricks employed to execute parallax scrolling etc but all of these were new to me. Incredibly interesting. Cheers friend!

[@barahng]

Lmao I really did not expect a Bernard Manning reference in a video about NES hardware.

[@82fdny97]

I loved Rescue the Embassy Mission. Remember seeing a pic of the sniper Mission in a magazine and thought it was amazing

[@LordmonkeyTRM]

Its always a good day when Sharopolis posts.

[@orderofmagnitude-TPATP]

Rescue i discovered about a month ago under emulation....i think its pretty damn cool

[@frishdawgz]

Keep em coming bro. this is quality content

[@turbinegraphics16]

Pretty advanced, I can imagine what homebrewers could do if they took advantage of these chips.

[@Hologhoul]

It's a nice tribute to those talented devs, highlighting these clever tricks.

[@orderofmagnitude-TPATP]

Well...."now in the 90s" by Dylan and Jared is gone; allz I got is gamesack by mr redifer, injured by the loss of dave white- and my precious sharoplis.... Now let's enjoy!

[@thecunninlynguist]

may i recommend Sega Lord X?

[@orderofmagnitude-TPATP]

@@thecunninlynguist yes watch him... but he repeats a tonne of subjects and content

[@thecunninlynguist]

@@orderofmagnitude-TPATP so does game sack?

[@Cr4z3d]

Wait, they ended Now in The 90's?

[@thecunninlynguist]

@@Cr4z3d yeah. jared released a vid on it yesterday. from what it sounded like, the ROI wasn't what it could've been

[@goranisacson2502]

While I am in no way a hardware guy who knows much of programming, I know enough to catch the gist of it and be impressed by what these old-school people could do with what is to me, "ancient" tech. Knowing what goes down behind the curtains of my childhood experiences is always neat, evem if I don't always catch every detail among the technical talk and the accent :)

[@chriskelly9133]

You forgot to mention how Gauntlet II could play raw PCM (not DPCM) samples without halting the game, unlike most NES games. That ability is pretty sick for an 8-bit game if you ask me.

[@mattjazzml]

Great video. Looking forward to more.

[@AfterBurnerTeirusu]

Lol I once bought a Grelims 2 cart from a garage sale, and it booted into Rescue the Embassy mission. Some a-hole had swapped the pcbs.

[@3rdalbum]

That Jurassic Park NES game looks an awful lot like Power Pete for the Macintosh - or rather the other way around, since Power Pete was two years later. Interesting!

[@MrMegaManFan]

Short answer - enhancement chips. Long answer - a cool new Sharopolis video.

[@MaxAbramson3]

I had a sega master system and knew that it was more powerful, But didn't realize that it didn't need all of these extra helper chips. It's pretty impressive what Nintendo's developers had to do to get the name 3D effects.

[@grype83]

My mother bought me Rescue from Woolworth for $5 when I was a kid. It was too hard for me to beat back then, id get through the first stage every so often but then would get stuck on the sniping mission. Once in a blue moon I'd make it to the point where you break into the building through the window. That game intrigued me so much back then, I couldn't tell if I thought it was good or sucked lol. definitely a cool concept and how it's pretty much a handful of mini games is cool, not something I'd see much of on the NES back then.

[@CalvinTennessee]

I can’t believe you didn’t cover Batman: Return of the Joker.

[@GerardMenvussa]

2:22 So simple but so clever 🤯

[@keaton718]

Must have been nice back in the day to buy hundreds of NES games and become familiar with all the graphics effects, and then seeing new like this that shouldn't be possible based on what you've seen so far. With gaming today anything is possible, it would take photo realism or virtual reality to wow anyone today.

[@mrflamewars]

All hail the excellent NES cartridge mappers - made the "Regular Nintendo" capable of much more interesting and varied gameplay and visuals than it would have been without.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

Okay I may understand that as a hardware developer it is a relief to concentrate on digital logic and not to have to deal with controllers and lethal voltages (external PSU), digital rights management, low noise analog audio, and video RF output. Did the FFC check cartridges for radio emission? So this is kinda Sega power of tower or the expansion boards in an apple2 . Every chip in a cartridge increases the cost. ROM + mapper = double cost.

[@JMFSpike]

Master System is underrated, but the NES is definitely the superior console, and it's due to more then just the library of games. There is also the fact that the NES controller has 2 more buttons, and you can pause a game without having to get up. Really stupid idea to put the pause button on the console itself. Not trying to hate on the Master System, but from an honest and unbiased perspective, there is just no way in hell you can say that Master System is the superior console without some serious cherry picking. But I do love the Master System, and if not for Nintendo's shady business practices, the two consoles may have been damn near equal. Just think, we could have had an 8-bit war that was very similar to the 16-bit one.

[@CoolDudeClem]

No, the Master System had more colours, more RAM, a faster CPU, and it could do things that the NES would need enhancement chips for. The only thing a stock NES did better was sound, but then again the Japanese Master System had FM sound built in which was much better than the silly high pitched PSG the western MS had.

[@mario4everd]

​@@CoolDudeClemthe sad thing is not many master system games took advantage of fm. Its a pretty small library that did it

[@ryansteele2111]

Love these explorations! Thank you!!!❤

[@ianf123]

I would respectfully disagree that these techniques (splitting the screen) weren’t “discovered till late in the system life”, I would say they weren’t deployed. This was a standard technique for the 2600 (“Racing the Beam” etc.), but it’s often an arms race so they got away with less spectacular until later in the console’s life. Still cool.

[@mikeburgess6153]

Wasn't rescue called hostages on other formats?

[@BdR76]

Yes "Resue" is the NES conversion of "Hostages" on the Amiga. Quite an odd choice for conversion imho, because the game was designed specifically for the Amiga/home computers, using bitmap graphics, mouse input etc. Same goes for North & South and Shufflepuck on the NES

[@soundspark]

"smooth, non-glitchy scrolling" - Notices glitch at the right at the water level as it starts changing before the end of the scanline.

[@ugarit5]

Jurassic park games push limits on nes,snes and n64. Also,the gameboy version of the crash boys game looks interesting too

[@willrobinson7599]

Rescue the embassy mission I played on the amiga where it was called hostages, great little game. As u say the nes wasn't that popular in the uk think was was more into the cheaper home computer games at the time rather than 35 quid for a cart , not exactly pocket money lol Nes had so many games that used neat little tricks 😊

[@AlessandroCussino]

Nice analyses 😉👌

[@f.k.b.16]

First I've ever heard of "Crash and the Street Boys"... I really like Super Dodgeball so this game looks like a great time! Too bad it never made it to the states or elsewhere.

[@Dwedit]

It's a localized version of a Kunio-Kun game. In the US, the Kunio-Kun franchise was best known for River City Ransom, which didn't redraw any characters (unlike Renegade which did redraw them). Also check out the Basketball game, it has **three hoops stacked on top of each other**, and you can make shots that go in all 3 of the baskets.

[@f.k.b.16]

@@Dwedit will do! Thanks for the suggestions!

[@drcouzelis]

Crash and the Boys Street Challenge had an official release in the US. My brother and I used to play it a ton :)

[@WelshProgrammer]

When every man and his dog are making games, you have to make yours standout from the rest. Doing that on what we now consider extremely constrained hardware required some mind bending tricks, undocumented features, opcodes and assembler programming wizardry. Making use of every available byte and register to get the job done. If there's a will, there's most probably a way.

[@carn9507]

I always find it weird when I hear the NES wasn't popular in Britain. Cos I been in Britain my whole life and the NES was a big deal when I was a kid. And Super Mario Bros 3 was a huge thing in my school. There was even a poster of it in the dining hall and one in the library. :) I remember getting my NES and a few months later I had saved up for SMB3 (largely by selling off some of my packed lunch each day) and for a lil while I was the cool kid. :D Never knew anyone with a Master System. Most of us usually had 8 bit computers like C64, CPC and Speccy. :)

[@danpae288]

Pure nostalgia.. NES forever

[@SweetStevieAaron]

I like that you like the NES and research this stuff unlike Brits who claim that they lived through it when very few did. We still loved our Spectrums, C64s and if we were rich, Atari STs and Amigas. I still liked the bigger name games at the time but felt that there were so many crappy platform games, I would never have got one. I do remember the day I got a SNES though. Happy times.

[@josephpurdy8390]

The extreme limitations on memory. This severely limits how much interactivity a player can engage in. Inputs and outputs were already demonstrating this. A larger more immersive game could be handled with the existing technology. This issue was tackled with hard drives, and discs later on.

[@bitwize]

Infogrames, dba Atari, have recently learned some respect for the brand and have put out some really good products as of late. Does Crash & the Boys use a scanline counter?

[@LavaCreeperPeople]

Cool

[@BeefJerkey]

Infogrames (which is so awkward for me to try to say) gets away with calling themselves Atari now because they own part of the company and decided to drop their old name.

[@Tolbat]

How? They added lots of hardware to the game. The NES could use the carts in magical ways.

[@Megladong]

Subbed. Good job.

[@vidarlystadjohansen9829]

love this stuff

[@grandmasterthefuriousfive7487]

Nice

[@ZipplyZane]

Surely the character at 18:26-28 isn't supposed to be naked. So what are they wearing?

[@BenMorse0]

4:10 but it doesn’t jump around?? In game it’s smooth. I don’t know why you would say that

[@bluetooth2677]

There was this cop gane for NES I loved. You would drive around a City chasing criminals. Anyone know the name?

[@zephryn6502]

Motor City Patrol possibly?

[@napoleonfeanor]

It didn't sell much worse than the master system in the UK. In Germany, Nintendo was more popular but Sega did well,too

[@patsk8872]

Nothing for Solstice opening music? Some emulators even choke on it

[@googleevil]

3 eyes story. Something gatory:)

[@Mr.1.i]

My mate had 1 his parents had split up and his dad had a top job so he could afford the games he use to clock mario 1 2 and 3 in about 2hours

[@computer_toucher]

You pondering how they do these tricks remind me of pondering how certain demoscene effects work, now that I'm watching this waiting for the Revision 2024 oldschool demo compo on their livestream :) edit: OMG there's even a NES demo!

[@fearlessjoebanzai]

What's "Castlevania 3"?

[@turrican4d599]

Rescue ist Hostages in Germany.

[@Autotrope]

But can it run lemmings

[@faenethlorhalien]

The "r" in Infogrames is not wrong. The origin of the word is NOT info-games. The "grames" there is the French bit that in English you would have in words such as "grammar" and "grammatical", meaning "letter". Ancient Greek stuff. Wrong? Not. Weird as all fuck? OH PLEASE YES.

[@mickhasenfratz8109]

😴 "Promo sm"

[@forbiddenera]

This is why software sucks today. Because no one needs to think about this stuff or solve problems without the web, juwt include 1000 nodejs libraries and 30 vulnerabilities and get er done

[@forbiddenera]

13:04 nope. Dive into the disassembly and I'm still here. ❤

[@_zoinks2554]

Imagine playing "muh Speccy" instead of the NES. Also "Rescue : The Embassy Mission," is absolute ass. What is wrong with you?

[@sheepthehack]

I wrote a lot of assembler on the WII, PC and original XBOX.. reverse engineering games to create trainers.. it was great to see the old NES assembler.. i also coded SOME on the snes and megadrive.. just FYI the megadrive hardware was designed by the devil.. coding for it was a nightmare in a handbag!!!! great vid.

[@beatchef]

I'm in England and I had a NES growing up. It was heavily pushed and discounted in Dixons when Zelda 2 and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles came out, as I loved Turtles my mum got it for me for Christmas. I had two friends that had NES too.

[@popejoeii]

Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles? Not Ninja Turtles?

[@beatchef]

@@popejoeii It was Hero Turtles in the UK, even on the box for the NES video game. They redubbed the cartoon theme tune too

[@popejoeii]

@@beatchef Wow, that's crazy. I had no idea. Are they still Hero Turtles, or did they eventually rebrand?

[@goranisacson2502]

​@@popejoeiiThey're the Nonja Turtles these days, and have been since Turtles 03 I'd say. It was just that during the 80's there was some kind of moral panic going on that made it so that some thibgs were VERY naughty and dangerous and couldn't be shown for kids- among them were ninja, and nunchucks. So Ninja Turtles became Hero turtles, and Michaelangelo, in some places, couldn't be ahown using nunchucks (because they could easily be purchased or even made by kids on woodwork classes, and people didn't want to encourage that). The past is a foreign country, some times...

[@hoobaguy]

​@@goranisacson2502ahhhhhhh.... the Thatcher years.