General-purpose custom screens

darkhog

New member
I'm sure Joe and co are thinking how to implement these, but in case they don't, please add general-purpose custom screens, so people can use it for things like menus, logos or just to piece together an intro sequence (think harry's legend bootleg intro, albeit with static text and images). I mean, you could add specialized ones for that stuff, but having general-purpose screens for everything (yes, including start/win screens which could be just custom screen flags, like player object is flag for object and it doesn't have to be an object that is denoted as player in game object list) means the dev would have full freedom over how he or she would use each of them. Obviously a reasonable amount of custom screens would be needed, but I think 8 screens would be that number. 16 would be even better, but I'd settle for 8 screens (including start/win/game over ones).
 
i know josh is working on more stuff concerning the special screens.

i can see it being say anything over the 2 given would say eat a screen out of the map, but what do we sacrifice for the graphical assets?

or something i don't see much discussion on is compression algorithms for the graphics banks, which could squeeze enough space to give us a bunch more pages to play with.
 
i was thinking something like this:

https://bisqwit.iki.fi/source/tokumaru.html

or

http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=14724


obviously one of us would need to figure out how to dig the hooks into the engine.
 

darkhog

New member
I hope that dithering (talking about Tokumaru thing) isn't inherent to the algorithm because frankly it looks awful. Anyway, we'd need to compress nametables more than the graphics (which can be shared and expanded - I have no idea why the engine has game object tiles loaded on a start screen when it could use entire pattern table for the screen, but it may be mapper thing, if not I think it should be changed).
 
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