Display bitmaps on the NES


Uncategorized / Saturday, May 8th, 2021

Work has started on adding the NES/Famicom in 8bit-Unity.This system has a rather unique way a using colors: it is somewhat reminiscent of the C64 (blocks of 8*8 pixels share 4 colors), but instead of choosing from 16 colors you chose from 4 palettes of 4 colors. In theory this sounds fine, but in practice you quickly end-up with disjointed colors between blocks when using more than 1 palette.So when converting bitmaps, it seems that most programmers just use 1 palette. I have tested that approach on the Goblin Tech Demo, it doesn’t look too bad I guess…Of course, charmaps will not have this issue since the blocks are designed to fit exactly the 8×8 pixels available.

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