Karakuri Babble is a daily column by the editors of i360.com, usually on topics tangentially related to anime and cosplay.

In the past we have endorsed many things; in the future we shall support many others.

As should be obvious to all, I'm something of a geek. Part of that implies a ridiculous fixation on authenticity. And for this reason, and this reason only, NES-style Touhou videos irritate me enormously.



Here's a really lovely rendition of Touhou 6 in the 8-bit style -- but it's not something that would have been possible on the hardware. Too many sound channels at once, too many sprites, too many sprites per scanline, and possibly too many colors on screen at once. Here are your numbers: 4 sound channels, 64 sprites, 8 sprites per scanline, 4 colors per sprite. A clever programmer could get around most of these rules, but only to a point, and I'm pretty sure this goes beyond that.

It's a really nicely done, stylish Touhou clone -- but it's not a Famicom game, and a lot of people are being misled. The same goes with a lot of the chiptunes on YouTube. I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that some of them are using more than two triangles. (For example.)

By contrast, here's Recca Summer Carnival '92, probably the pinnacle of NES STG development. It's programmed for absolute, cruel, unrelenting speed, and it achieves it at the cost of near-constant flicker. You can see that it's impressive, but it's not anywhere near as smooth as the Touhou clone, and you can hear how the sound effects frequently cause the music to cut out.

words from chris, 2009-09-29 23:21:44, los angeles