Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Rotating 2 Backgrounds at One Time

Most people don't know this but you can actually rotate 2 backgrounds at one time on the Snes. How? It's really simple. There is a Mode named Mode-2; it has 2 backgrounds with 16 colors per tile. However instead of all the tiles being scrolled together, each vertical column is scrolled seperately. The offsets of the tiles for bg1 are stored in the bg3 tile map, on the 2nd row of tiles with a byte value of #$20 stored inbetween each offset. (I don't know why it is this way)

If offset the first collumn by zero; second by one, third by two, etc, the screen looks screw like a parallelegram. Then you can use the H-DMA to controll the horizontal bg scroll and decrement it every 8 lines, and it appears as if the screen was rotated 30 degrees. Then you can do it with every other tile instead, and decrement the horizontal bg scroll every 16 lines instead. Now it looks like it was scrolled 15 degrees.

I have a demo to show you, but I don't think this website has anyway of uploading it.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Who am I and what are my goals?

I am a Super Nintendo homebrew developer as you can clearly see, but unlike other homebrewers my goals are much much bigger. Other homebrewers' goals are to try to emulate what the best programmers did back in the day, my goal is to surpass them. You simply can't get any progress done trying to emulate what others already did, especially stuff they did long long ago. You need to do things that people never did before, or else there is no fun in homebrewing at all. You may think the Super Nintendo homebrew development scene is great and making progress, I beg to differ. I beleive that it will never get passed it's infancy until people start trying to do new things. You never know what you can do unless you try, so never assume something can't be done before you even tried to do it in the first place.