3 ms·

The X-Men one is really cool, but I don’t get “The message is disguised via a secondary lettering set which shared the same white color as the main text.” The s

by raldi 5y ago

The X-Men one is really cool, but I don’t get “The message is disguised via a secondary lettering set which shared the same white color as the main text.” The screenshots seem to show the opposite: identical lettering, different color.

adamrezich 5y ago
that sentence is stating that normally the "hidden text" is white, the same color as the main text. the very next sentence: "Killing 30 special enemies in a stage causes the hidden text to be displayed in red, as shown below (the counter that keeps track of how many special enemies you've killed is stored at $513 in NES memory)."
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  To elaborate on this a bit in case it's still confusing for anyone: Until the mid-1990s or so, memory was too expensive to routinely store RGB values [1] for every pixel on consumer-grade hardware, so sprite/texture/etc. assets effectively contained a narrower type "pointer to color" instead of a wider type "color", typically translated on-the-fly by the video hardware by way of a small and fast palette RAM. This meant that by altering the underlying array of actual colors, an impressive breadth of animation and "compression" tricks could be achieved with little CPU time and no manipulation of the underlying pixel data (which, for NES and arcade games, was often stored in a dedicated ROM directly read by the video hardware). The classic example is a halo of torchlight cycling through a handful of red/orange/yellow values, but it's been used for a vast spectrum of effects by a bunch of extremely clever artists, programmers, and artist-programmers. [1] It happens to be the case that Famicom/NES color is fundamentally based on the phase encoding of composite video and so doesn't strictly map to a single definitive RGB color space, but the basic principle otherwise applies.

3 ms·

The X-Men one is really cool, but I don’t get “The message is disguised via a secondary lettering set which shared the same white color as the main text.” The s

by raldi 5y ago

adamrezich 5y ago
that sentence is stating that normally the "hidden text" is white, the same color as the main text. the very next sentence: "Killing 30 special enemies in a stage causes the hidden text to be displayed in red, as shown below (the counter that keeps track of how many special enemies you've killed is stored at $513 in NES memory)."
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  To elaborate on this a bit in case it's still confusing for anyone: Until the mid-1990s or so, memory was too expensive to routinely store RGB values [1] for every pixel on consumer-grade hardware, so sprite/texture/etc. assets effectively contained a narrower type "pointer to color" instead of a wider type "color", typically translated on-the-fly by the video hardware by way of a small and fast palette RAM. This meant that by altering the underlying array of actual colors, an impressive breadth of animation and "compression" tricks could be achieved with little CPU time and no manipulation of the underlying pixel data (which, for NES and arcade games, was often stored in a dedicated ROM directly read by the video hardware). The classic example is a halo of torchlight cycling through a handful of red/orange/yellow values, but it's been used for a vast spectrum of effects by a bunch of extremely clever artists, programmers, and artist-programmers. [1] It happens to be the case that Famicom/NES color is fundamentally based on the phase encoding of composite video and so doesn't strictly map to a single definitive RGB color space, but the basic principle otherwise applies.