Tag: WhitePointerGaming

White_Pointer Game Reveals More Classic Console Graphic Tricks

We’ve linked them before, and more than once, but they’re one of a small number of Youtubers who consistently does great work. Here they look at the effects in a number of games and reveal how the programmers coaxed surprisingly complex effects out of the hardware for each of them. (25 minutes)

The games and effects covered this time:

  • Art of Fighting on the PC Engine, zooming in and out from the fighters as they approach and draw away from each other
  • Road Rash on the SMS, which created a startling effect of a road undulating and going over hills for 8-bit hardware
  • Ranger-X on Genesis/Mega Drive, artillery shots firing into the distance in the background and multi-plane parallax scrolling
  • The Lawnmower Man on Genesis, SNES and Gameboy, fast 3D virtual reality scenes (well, slower on Gameboy)
  • Donkey Kong Country 3 on SNES: vertical stretching of a boss
  • Contra 3 on SNES: rotating both a large boss, the background and the player on the screen at once when the SNES only had one hardware scroll background layer
  • Super Metroid: the Power Bomb explosion effect

If you enjoyed this you’re in luck, for they’ve done many other videos like this one. They’re all in this 21-item playlist.

White Pointer Gaming on Pokemon Gold/Silver’s Real Time Clock & GB Mappers

White Pointer Gaming is another excellent source of retro game hardware information, and a few days ago they uploaded a dive into the specifics of the real time clock used in Pokemon Generation 2 (14 minutes), and as an encore discussed Gameboy mapper chips, a related topic. It seems the clock hardware is on quite a few other GB games as well, as it’s built in to a common mapper chip, but it needs extra power to run the clock, and an oscillator to keep the time accurate. Another game that uses the same mapper, but doesn’t have the oscillator? Pokemon Generation One. Hmmm!

The video mentions that powering the clock and oscillator causes Pokemon Gold, Silver and Crystal cartridges to run out of battery power, and lose their saved game data, much faster than other Gameboy carts with save game battery. Sorry to break it to you; your Pokemon are probably gone by now. Poor out a health potion for Pikachu.

Another interesting fact revealed is, the clock works by recording raw time since the game was last powered on, and the actual date and time are fully updated when the game is started up. If you wait a long time between plays, over 511 days, the timer can wrap around and lose track of how long it’s been.