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[Dragona Akehi]

I won't disagree with you there. But they aren't "hack jobs"; that term is for the E-Card "rereleases". Ugh. They sucked.

 

[DDayton]

I liked the eCards, actually... I wish they had simply put out dozens of dinky games on cards. That would have been interesting...

Heck, they could have built an Atari 2600 emulator into the eReader, then licensed out obscure 2600 games for a "Retro Classics" line -- where each game would have fit on a single card.

(Yes, I know.. I'm in a REALLY small minority, here.)

 

[Dragona Akehi]

The ECards sucked because they didn't reprogram shit. No multiboot, and the games were terrible looking, due to squishing everything. At least with the NES/Famicom Mini line, they resized things in a much more subtle manner.

 

[cvxfreak]

I just hated the thought of sliding cards at all.

At least NOJ hasn't completely dropped the thing, but NOA should have taken a nod and bundled it with a game of some sort to make it more mainstream, in Japan's case Animal Crossing e+.

But I don't like the peripheral much in general. =/

 

[DDayton]

At least with the NES/Famicom Mini line, they resized things in a much more subtle manner.

I'm starting to think you are using different NES Mini games than I am. I didn't notice any difference between the eReader games, the Animal Crossing download games, and the NES Classics games. All looked identical, aside from the different in game options menu.

 

[Dragona Akehi]

Sprites have not been touched in any manner. This makes things much easier on the eyes (and the nostalgia). The ECards have everything squished, the Fami line has the backgrounds reduced. There's nothing more annoying and ugly than seeing DK look fatter and like crap in the DK ECard. It really annoyed me.

The Animal Forest NES Link suffered from the same problems...

 

[DDayton]

Sprites have not been touched in any manner. This makes things much easier on the eyes (and the nostalgia). The ECards have everything squished, the Fami line has the backgrounds reduced...The Animal Forest NES Link suffered from the same problems...

I'm getting more and more confused...

First, the NES Classics Super Mario Bros. is identical to the Animal Crossing download of it... with the garbled sprites. The NES classics series appears to use the exact SAME line melding trick used by the eReader releases and the AC downloads. From what I've seen, all 3 versions of games work by "squishing" together lines on the screen in a regular basis.

What in the world do you mean by "The Animal Forest NES Link suffered from the same problems"? The game was ONLY playable on the GameCube, and played in full screen, full resolution.

 

[Dragona Akehi]

NES Link = NES to GBA link mode to download the game I meant.

The backgrounds were squished in the Classics and EVERYTHING is Squished in the Animal Crossing downloads. I had AC for a long time and believe me I remember this very well. I also have ECards and an EReader (basically got it cheap and I'm a collector). There is an astounding difference.

Sprites on the Classics ARE NOT SQUISHED. THEY ARE ORIGINAL SIZE.

Sprites on the ECards/NES download to GBA ARE SQUISHED VERTICALLY. Making them fatter/wider and much uglier.

 

[DDayton]

Sprites on the Classics ARE NOT SQUISHED. THEY ARE ORIGINAL SIZE.

If this is true, then what in the world is going on with Mario's nose in Super Mario Bros. in the NES Classics series?

I mean, maybe there's some other word you have for it, but it sure LOOKS like a squished sprite to me...

(makes a mental note to go d/l SMB again and run it side by side the cartridge version)

 

[cvxfreak]

I certainly noticed a difference between the NES Classics and the e-Reader, but I'm not quite sure WHAT made them different, but Dragona's response makes sense.

 

[Dragona Akehi]

It isn't, I compared. Mario's nose has always been huge in the original, to emphasize his moustache. If of course that's what you're referring to.

The sprites are technically smaller than their originals, therefore Mario's nose has an extra pixel, or it looks it to you. However, he isn't vertically compressed like the NES download. The proportions are correct, which is what I was driving at.

The whole sprite proportion thing is most apparent with Donkey Kong (DK is uuuugly), Ice Climbers and Tennis. Even Balloon Fight looks nasty due to the squish.

 

[Nintendo Ate My Children]

I did a quick comparison on the two games I have for NES classics and the e-reader or Animal Crossing versions: Excitebike and Super Mario Bros. On the e-reader Excitebike, you can see the removed lines problem clearly on the time on the bottom of the screen. This is not present on the NES Classics Excitebike. On Animal Crossing Super Mario Bros, the missing lines are noticeable on the score, time and level information at the top of the screen, and around Mario's mustache. It almost looks like he doesn't have one. On the NES Classics version, the upper screen is perfect, but you can still see some distortion around Mario's mustache, but not as severe as the Animal Crossing Advance Play version.

 

[Dragona Akehi]

That's because Mario's sprite was resized, but keeps the same proportions. I really hated the Ecard renditions because of the line resolution problem, I was originally looking forward to them.

Balloon Fight is probably THE worse because the timing is different. (Or so it seems to me.)

 

[DDayton]

It isn't, I compared. Mario's nose has always been huge in the original, to emphasize his moustache. If of course that's what you're referring to.

The sprites are technically smaller than their originals, therefore Mario's nose has an extra pixel, or it looks it to you. However, he isn't vertically compressed like the NES download. The proportions are correct, which is what I was driving at.

The whole sprite proportion thing is most apparent with Donkey Kong (DK is uuuugly), Ice Climbers and Tennis. Even Balloon Fight looks nasty due to the squish.

I'm going to have to go out and buy DK or Ice Climbers now, just to see this. Urrgh.

However, I still don't see what you are driving at -- maybe I'm just horribly missing your point. I have the NES Classics Super Mario Bros. When Mario grabs a mushroom and becomes two sprites high, I can clearly see pixel distoration in his facial region, as if two lines were being squished together. I saw the same distoration in the AC download.

Are you saying that the AC downloads had the sprites compressed while the background imagery wasn't? Or that the AC downloads had ALL sprites compressed (given that the NES sort of built everything out of redefined character sets and didn't handle sprites in quite the same way that prior systems did), and thus all graphics in the game were mangled?

(Edit: Wait wait... would I be right in saying that, from what you've observed, scan lines are MISSING in the eReader/AC versions [thus "squishing" sprites], while they are merely "combined" in the Classics series?)

 

[Dragona Akehi]

AC Downloads and the ECards had EVERYTHING compressed. The Sprites, The Backgrounds, the whole bit. In some cases it LOST lines of resolution. (Like "Score" wouldn't read properly.)
Therefore while Mario was technically "twice the height" like "normal" he's alot wider than before and looks asstasstic.

In the Classics version, that slight "distortion" you're seeing in Mario's nose is the fact that the sprite was about twice the size for TV resolutions. The GBA is that much smaller and therefore needs a smaller sprite: that leads to slight image distortion, because in my opinion, whoever resized Super Mario's Sprite left in an extra pixel. (The one all the way to the bottom of his nose.) HOWEVER his proportion is IDENTICAL to the NES sprite. Which is the most important thing.

Proportion drives me batty if they're not correct. Hence my absolute astonishment and joy at seeing the NES Classic Line doing the right thing. (tm)

edit: they also PROPERLY reduce the background. Text is NOW READABLE unlike before, among other things. Therefore I think the Classics line is definately worth getting for cheap: they actually worked on these things to make them aesthetically pleasing.

 

[Nintendo Ate My Children]

IGN on Famicom Mini Vol .3:

Each of the new batch of games in this Famicom Mini series were featured as Famicom Disk System games back in the day, and the games themselves play as if they were played on the Disk Drive. Which means you'll see a lot of "Loading" screens throughout the gameplay.

I'm hoping that Nintendo takes the loading screens out for the NES Classics versions of Metroid, Castlevania, and Zelda II.

 

[Dragona Akehi]

AND PEOPLE SAID NINTENDO NEVER HAS LOAD TIMES.

 

[Alcibiades]

AC Downloads and the ECards had EVERYTHING compressed. The Sprites, The Backgrounds, the whole bit. In some cases it LOST lines of resolution. (Like "Score" wouldn't read properly.)
Therefore while Mario was technically "twice the height" like "normal" he's alot wider than before and looks asstasstic.

In the Classics version, that slight "distortion" you're seeing in Mario's nose is the fact that the sprite was about twice the size for TV resolutions. The GBA is that much smaller and therefore needs a smaller sprite: that leads to slight image distortion, because in my opinion, whoever resized Super Mario's Sprite left in an extra pixel. (The one all the way to the bottom of his nose.) HOWEVER his proportion is IDENTICAL to the NES sprite. Which is the most important thing.

Proportion drives me batty if they're not correct. Hence my absolute astonishment and joy at seeing the NES Classic Line doing the right thing. (tm)

edit: they also PROPERLY reduce the background. Text is NOW READABLE unlike before, among other things. Therefore I think the Classics line is definately worth getting for cheap: they actually worked on these things to make them aesthetically pleasing.

should I play them with a GBA SP, or with the GBPlayer?

 

[DDayton]

In the Classics version, that slight "distortion" you're seeing in Mario's nose is the fact that the sprite was about twice the size for TV resolutions. The GBA is that much smaller and therefore needs a smaller sprite: that leads to slight image distortion, because in my opinion, whoever resized Super Mario's Sprite left in an extra pixel. (The one all the way to the bottom of his nose.) HOWEVER his proportion is IDENTICAL to the NES sprite. Which is the most important thing.

The only problem I have with this theory is that it implies that they reprogramed the entire game, as opposed to using an emulator. If the games are running under an emulator, you wouldn't "resize" a sprite manually. Graphical weirdness would be entirely due to the way the emulator is compensating for the difference between the television resolution and the GBA resolution.

Again, correct me if I'm batty, but everything I've seen so far indicates that the NES Classics games are running under an emulator which squishes every __nth line together so as to compensate for the difference in size. Perhaps they did a better job determining where to squish lines, but I still see the squishing... the Goombas appear to be off, bricks seem squished, and minor graphical oddness exists. I'm not sure how the game could be proportionally more accurate than the AC/eReader version, as both dealt with the same problem. I suppose they could have set the emulator to "not" adjust the size of the moving sprite images (as some of the public domain GBA NES emulators can do), but then you'd have overlap at points.

Grunt. We need screen shots at this point. Heh.

 

[Dragona Akehi]

Either, since it doesn't matter. The GBP only renders the GBA resolution anyway. I like the look of the SP more, but I sure can't complain how nice some games look on the GBP. (Especially when the SP is charging. )

 

[DDayton]

Wait... weren't Zelda II and Metroid rereleased in Japan as cartridges? They could have used those versions for the Famicom Mini series, but that might go agains the Disk System nostalgia, I suppose.

 

[jooey]

Wait... weren't Zelda II and Metroid rereleased in Japan as cartridges?

just zelda 1.

 

[FortNinety]

I read somewhere that all the NES Classics games are the NES games emulated with every forth line of information to squash the image.

 

[Dragona Akehi]

The only problem I have with this theory is that it implies that they reprogramed the entire game, as opposed to using an emulator. If the games are running under an emulator, you wouldn't "resize" a sprite manually. Graphical weirdness would be entirely due to the way the emulator is compensating for the difference between the television resolution and the GBA resolution.

Again, correct me if I'm batty, but everything I've seen so far indicates that the NES Classics games are running under an emulator which squishes every __nth line together so as to compensate for the difference in size. Perhaps they did a better job determining where to squish lines, but I still see the squishing... the Goombas appear to be off, bricks seem squished, and minor graphical oddness exists. I'm not sure how the game could be proportionally more accurate than the AC/eReader version, as both dealt with the same problem. I suppose they could have set the emulator to "not" adjust the size of the moving sprite images (as some of the public domain GBA NES emulators can do), but then you'd have overlap at points.

Grunt. We need screen shots at this point. Heh.

I don't think so. They shrunk the sprites for the Classics yes, which is why there's some slight (very slight at that) descrepencies. When you make a sprite smaller, you're losing information. That's why Small Mario's shoulders aren't as defined as the NES' but look much better than the squished version on the downloadable one.

However, it isn't as dramatic as the background. Definately not. The Bricks are off definately: they are part of the background! It took me awhile to get used to them. (However to show the entire screen like the TV did, and not cut part of it out like Mario DX, it was necessary to squish part of the bricks).

Proof of this resizing is: look at a super mushroom that makes Mario into Super Mario. Compared to the bricks, it's much bigger; it's the original proportion. It isn't just a programming hack!

Also, because of the resizing of the background (like the bricks and whatnot) some of the old tricks you could do in SMB, are now near impossible. Such as when you duck and slide under some bricks (it's alot harder to slide under bricks), and stand up and them jump: remember how you could break the block in the middle instead of the one on the bottom? It's so insanely harder than before due to the programming.

The sprites are resized, the backgrounds are also resized to take advantage of the GBA widescreen.

I don't mean to get into an argument, but my point is that the ECards ARE HACKS and the NES classics aren't since they took time to "Fix" the resolution problem.

THE END.

 

[DDayton]

THE END.

Drat. You used the smiley. I am powerless to resist!

(In all seriousness, I'll take another look at these things over the weekend... I get what you're saying, but I don't think it's quite what happened... although I am curious to figure out exactly what changed between all these copies... and to see what kind of emulator Metroid in Zero Mission used.)

 

[Dragona Akehi]

To be honest I haven't touched the Metroid 1 ROM in Zero Mission yet. I guess I don't miss it too much. I'd guess it was the AC version.

Seriously though if they did just "hack it" for the Classics, I'm terribly impressed because they saved the integrity of the proportions which was SORELY lacking in all the ECards, and AC. I really think they must have done some spritework, at least on a rudimentary level.

Backgrounds I think would be easier to line smush and then go back and fix major problems like Text. (By changing font.)

How's that for a compromise?

 

[snapty00]

For the NES Classic line, the ROMs themselves are basically identical (with a few minor changes, although they're still within the limitations of the NES and could be extracted from the GBA cartridge onto a real NES if someone really wanted to do so). It's the emulator itself that's resizing certain sprites while allowing others to remain their original size. That's possible to do with a PC emulator, too, although there's obviously little reason to do that on a PC.

For the NES Classic series, the emulator has been told to leave the actual foreground sprites alone, while the background tiles have been disproportionally resized (which gives them the "squashed" look).

However, the way in which the sprites are resized is done on a game-by-game basis. Tile resizing was done for The Legend of Zelda, for example, but that alone was not done for Super Mario Bros. Both the sprites and the background tiles were resized in Super Mario Bros. for GBA. Some games require entire resizing to work properly on the lower-resolution GBA screen, while others look and play better with only resized background tiles.

Because of the resized tiles, one oddity you can notice in The Legend of Zelda is that the background tiles (e.g., the green, rock walls of the overworld) still act with the collision-detection logic that they had in the original NES version. In other words, the collision-detection programming still assumes that the background tiles are their original size, which can make the collision detection initially seem slightly awkward if you're accustomed to the original NES version.

 

[Teddman]

I'm fine with these things... just the Dr Mario one bothers me. With the GBA power, I could easily porting the N64 Dr Mario over.

Ditto. Or why is there no true GBA version of Dr. Mario?

 

[jarrod]

Best of all games like SMB, PacMan, Ice Climbers, or in fact any of the 2 player games has 1pak multiboot so that you can play with a friend on one cartridge. Even better you can remove the link cable and then have that game stored in your cart-less GBA's RAM (minus the sleep function) and play as long as you like.

Better even, all of them feature wireless multiplayer with the adapter too.

Hopefully We'll see The Lost Levels, Kid Icarus, Ghosts'n Goblins and Adventure Island (cheap knock off that it is) in round 3 here next spring...

 

[bob_arctor]

My GBA wishlist:
Bionic Commando, Rush N Attack, Section Z, Rad Racer and of course, one of my personal favorites:

 

[brandonnn]

Close, but no. It was the original MSX game.

ClosER, but no -- it was a port from Sharp's X68000.

 

[Dragona Akehi]

Better even, all of them feature wireless multiplayer with the adapter too.

Hopefully We'll see The Lost Levels, Kid Icarus, Ghosts'n Goblins and Adventure Island (cheap knock off that it is) in round 3 here next spring...

Now that I wasn't sure of. Even sweeter.

 

[LakeEarth]

How are you guys getting the Animal Crossing version of Mario Bros? Action Replay?