The single background plane in Mode 7 is handled much differently than all other screen modes to allow these features to work. This was used to create the pseudo-3D effects seen in a lot of racing and flight games for SNES. It was shown off in most of the promotional material for the console, Mode 7 was the first time that a home console was able to apply transformations to an image in real-time, allowing scaling, rotation, stretching, and skewing in the background plane. Mode 7: This was one of the main features of the SNES.
The first uses a full 256-color sub-palette, and the second allows for a 16-color sub-palette.
Luckily, because all of those can go onto a second layer, designers are free to place foreground objects in front of the background without breaking the illusion. That said, it’s still only two layers, so the artist and developer might have to rely on some raster-line tricks in order to create greater depth in a scene. This means that layered elements are more readily available for designing backgrounds. The Genesis/Mega Drive allows for two background layers to be active at once on the screen. Generally speaking, most games will allow enough space to load in ~1000 tiles, and if there is a dynamic element then the tiles can always be swapped in and out freely. That can make designing art for the console tricky because the number of graphic tiles that can be loaded into memory at a given time varies depending on what else is going on in the game. This allows a greater range of artwork to be used within a single level or screen of a game.Īnother aspect that’s unique to the Genesis/Mega Drive is that graphic tile and palette data are not the only things being loaded into the console’s VRAM during the game. They can load and swap out individual tiles on the fly, allowing you to load in only the graphics you need when you need them. 8-bit consoles will load Sprite and background tiles separately and in large chunks of data to avoid using a lot of processing power, while 16-bit consoles have the processing power for greater flexibility. In general, 16-bit consoles do not load graphics tiles in the same way as 8-bit consoles do. A sub-palette for the Genesis usually contains colors that are being used by both backgrounds and Sprites in order to fit everything in cleanly. Because of this, artists must be mindful of which colors are being used in a sub-palette so that they can be maximized for both Sprite and background use. Sub-palettes can be freely assigned to either Sprites or background tiles, but the Genesis only allows four sub-palettes to be used at a time. One of the weaknesses of designing art for Genesis comes from the sub-palettes, though.
Next, the Genesis boasts sub-palettes that contain 15 colors plus the common color used for Sprite transparency and layer transparency. You will likely be relieved to hear that 16-bit consoles generally do not have a hard-coded color palette like their 8-bit counterparts, which means the available colors are greatly expanded from the NES. You still need to work within limited sub-palettes with a common transparent color, although 16 bits offers greater freedom in palettes in some ways. All of the graphics are still stored in 8x8 tiles, for instance, and then assembled into larger images, whether they’re Sprites or background elements. That said, the fundamentals of doing great NES artwork still apply. Making the jump from 8- to 16-bit consoles gives you more options on more-sophisticated hardware.