Graphics Analysis of an NES Game's Select Menu | Hacker News Reader

Graphics Analysis of an NES Game's Select Menu

dustmop.io

102 pointsdustmop13 comments

Love these types of articles.

Also, if you develop for, say, the Apple Watch, there's a goldmine in looking at classic console games and how they made use of constrained resolution, memory, colors.

I feel like mobile developers and the creators of the hardware have given up on heavy optimization to work on minimal hardware and instead just gone with more expensive, top of the line hardware so they can continue current programming practices.

I work on console targeted projects, we still have to optimise for very tight hardware constraints!

The reality is that the phones of today are as powerful or more so than the laptops of yesterday.

Yet my phone battery used to last a week and now it doesn't even last a day. Mobile CPUs may be able to handle all that bloated code fast enough, but not long enough.

When your phone battery lasted a week, what did you do on your phone, compared to what you do on it now? If I leave my laptop on standby the battery lasts at least 3-4 days, but if I use it continuously it lasts under 7 hours. Similarly with my smartphone, if I leave it on standby I get 2-3 days, but with "normal" usage - (moderate browsing, emails, texts, phonecalls) I have to charge it either daily or every other day.

I'm not the OP, but when my feature phone battery lasted a week, I made some phone calls every day or two, and used the phone as a daily alarm clock.

If Google Play Services decides to not burn all of my battery in busy waiting or whatever, and if I make zero phone calls and have a daily alarm, my smartphone battery will last between two and three days. When my phone was new and I was commuting with it, I would typically get between eight and ten hours on a charge.

I would happily double the thickness of any modern non-ruggedized smartphone in order to double its battery life.

> When my phone was new and I was commuting with it, I would typically get between eight and ten hours on a charge.

Sounds like you got a dud phone.

but being serious, It's one of the trade offs of modern smart phones. THey're designed to last roughly a day of usage. If you use them like you used your old phone, you'd get 2-3 days out of them, but then you might aswell just run with an Alcatel[0] and get the super long battery life.

[0]: https://www.o2.co.uk/shop/phones/alcatel/1040/#contractType=...

I'm confused. If this was what you were going to reply with, why on Earth did you bother asking the question?

Anyone who's even remotely techy knows why their smartphone battery lasts far less than a day on average. That doesn't mean that they're happy with the (often fashion driven) tradeoffs made by phone designers, or that they don't actually want a vaguely-smart-phone that also has battery life of a week or more.

I would imagine the limitations would make the UI design itself very effective aswell. Every extra sprite you include bears a serious performance cost so you would pare things down to whats absolutely necessary

It's interesting how much this page relies on the browser behavior of rendering all animated GIFs on the page in sync with each other, such that the palettes rotate in sync with the images.

Got me to search for NES overclocking and surprisingly people did swap clocks to pump the cpu faster:

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=nes+cpu+overclock

I already fried my old SNES so I won't touch my NES but still worth reading.

Got me thinking about the Goonies 2 pause map.

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