C64 <=> NES tile conversions - impossible?

[Cybergoth]

Hi there!

 

I'm thinking about this problem for a while now, but usually come to the conclusion that a port in either direction would suck, because the resolutions are differing too much.

 

The NES has 32 tiles across, 8 pixels wide, making a screen of 256 pixels horizontally.

 

The C64 has 40 characters across, 4 (fat) pixels wide, making a screen of 160 (fat) pixels horizontally.

 

 

If you take a character based screen like Jumpman for example, that uses 38 characters horizontally, I see no way of properly converting that to the NES, without ruining the layout. You only have 32 tiles on the NES, so in each line you'd have to get rid of 6 characters.

 

I think that had to be done for the Coleco version as well, so that is why it should feel different from the C64/A8 versions.

 

I'm not saying that it has to be necessarily worse than the original, but I have a feeling that a single screen character based level layout is doomed to suffer in the process of a C64 => NES conversion and vice-versa

 

It's probably easier to handle when converting some horizontal scrolling screen, but I fear the differences will be pretty obvious in a static situation.

 

Or am I missing something?

 

Greetings,

Manuel

[Rybags]

For a single-screen platformer, there could always be the scrolling option on NES.

 

Only 8 character cells missing, so it wouldn't be too annoying - and with it's extra fire buttons you could always have means to manually scroll so you could peek at parts you would normally see on the '64.

 

I guess going the other way, you have the choice to go chunky, or hires with decorative border or just score and other information in a vertical window.

[vdub_bobby]

For a single-screen platformer, there could always be the scrolling option on NES.

That's what they did with NES Lode Runner. And it sucks. It makes the game much, much harder since you can't see the position of all the enemies all the time, so you can't plan good routes; you can't plan as far ahead. You have to play the game a lot differently and it isn't nearly as much fun.

 

For most single-screen platformers I don't think it would be a good design choice.

[Pixelboy]

On the NES, I would try to design a display engine that can do 6x6 blocks, which means you could cram 16 6x6 blocks within a 3x3 square of 8x8 tiles. It would be complicated to manage at run-time in terms of collision (especially for a platformer like Jumpman) but I do think it's possible. With 6x6 blocks, you could have a 40-block-wide playfield.

[happymonster]

A lot of c64 games (loderunner included) were converted or also appeared on the ZX spectrum which has a screen size of 256 x 192.

 

That could be used as a base for level maps and combined with the c64 gfx to create the new NES gfx.