This has been a really big year so far for Tetris on the NES. Players have found ways to provide controller inputs at speeds the programmers of the game didn’t anticipate. A technique called “rolling” has allowed players to move pieces at such fast speeds that they can progress beyond level 150! Unfortunately, this might […]
While I was working on the previous episode of Behind the Code and researching Jekyll’s walking speed in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the NES, I noticed that the frame rate was rather odd. Turns out it is REALLY odd. If you’ve played the game, you may have noticed that the speed is inconsistent. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Have you noticed that the sound effects in the PSP version of Castlevania Symphony of the Night seem a little… off? I’m not talking about the voice acting or the music, here. The sound effects are supposed to have that echo… that flanger effect to them, and the PSP version of SotN doesn’t quite sound […]
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 […]
