A friend of mine rented Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when it was new, and we gave it a try. It was certainly different than any of the other games we had played on the NES. Try playing Contra or Punch-Out and then switching over to a game that demands patience like this one does. […]
Have you ever played The Terminator for the NES? Landing is difficult. Jumping is inconsistent. Sometimes you appear to land but fall through the ground! Sometimes you fall off the edge of a platform while running even though you swear you pressed jump before you got there. Sometimes jumping to the first ledge works but […]
NES Strider feels janky. We’ve known that since it was released. But how bad could it be? … Oh! Absolutely terrible! Jumping, running into a wall, and falling – simple things in any other game seem to be half-baked in Strider. The physics are worse than you could possibly imagine. Why do you slam your […]
Strider for NES is quite possibly the most requested game for the Behind the Code series. It feels like it will fall apart at any moment. Random sprites appear in random places on the screen as the frames roll by. What the heck is happening? A minor bug somewhere? Oh… it is MUCH worse than […]
I’m sure I’m not alone in my affection for the indie platformer, “Celeste”. Released in 2018, Celeste’s mix of easy to learn but difficult to master platforming, its driving soundtrack, and its timely narrative made it an indie darling that is still popular today. To wit, ROM hackers w7n, Morshu, StudsX, karmic, and Eden GT […]
Sprite limitations and flicker define what the NES is. They are a part of history. This video dives into Object Attribute Memory – OAM – to explain why the system is limited to eight sprites on a scanline as well as how both sprite limitation and sprite priority are used by programmers to add some […]
It’s no secret that the Sega Genesis has been receiving a slew of modern releases these past few years, but the NES is no slouch either. Perhaps the best example of how strong the NES homebrew dev scene is right now, can be seen in St1ka’s (that’s me) latest video. In this video I analyze […]
Retro Gaming is a funny thing, we’ve seen romhacks, homebrews, FPGAs and emulators, so you’d think we’d have exhausted all options by now. Turns out that’s not the case, because a new scene cropped up right under our noses: HD Graphics packs for NES games. That is to say, you take the original NES rom, […]
The NES needs a clock in order to function. Both the CPU and PPU use clock cycles to perform their duties. These chips run at different speeds, but each speed is derived from the same source – a 21.47727 MHz crystal on the NES motherboard. How do these components work in tandem? This video dives […]
Unique graphics. Giant sprites. No flicker. How on earth does this game work? The MMC2 chip contained in Punch-Out’s cartridge allows the NES to switch between two pairs of tiles for each half of the pattern table. While the MMC1 already allows bank switching for graphics, the MMC2 allows the switch to happen in the […]
