✨ Micro Mages Maker launches on April 2, 2026 on Steam and Nintendo Switch!

Get ready to create your own levels! Play them solo or with up to 4 players in local co-op. 🧙 🏗

Ahhh yes, these games love to shrink the screen size with massive HUDs so there's less pixel drawing to burden the CPU with 😄

Yup. I just learned I might be wrong, though. 😅 The ROM seems to use MMC5, which extends NES capabilities quite a bit and hasn't been around for long enough during the commercial era (or was too expensive) for developers to learn how to utilize its full power.

Sooo no idea how this actually works

Lastly, the artifacts at the top and bottom of the screen make me think they're forcefully extending the VBLANKing period by turning off rendering during parts of the screen to cram in more updates, a trick very few NES games use.

As black magic as it gets on the NES 🪄

The update handling seems to be pretty smart, only updating changed tiles and possibly spreading updates across multiple game frames to deal with the limited VBLANK time (where updates are allowed to happen).

The artifacts you see on the giant objects when they move make me think that's the case.

With 2 background tiles (one fully black, one white), you can draw very blocky, low resolution graphics.

With 16 background tiles, you can double that resolution (pixel size: 4x4, all possible combinations stored in the 16 8x8 bg tiles)

With all 256 available tiles, you'd get 2x2-size pixels.

Oh boy, here we go again #NESdev

I can imagine 🤠

Yeah, I should honestly have made the switch a while ago. Seems like Linux really can do pretty much anything these days.

I probably won't make the final jump until work calms down (don't wanna mess with my dev machine right now), but... It's gonna happen 😁

I think I found the most noble use for AI:

Switching to Linux. 🐧

I don't enjoy (OS) tinkering, but after spending a couple hours with ChatGPT gaining insight and porting many of my Windows-specific scripts and customizations, Linux is now a breeze to use! 👀

Capturing decent footage directly in OBS should be possible. 🤔

Similarly, the bigger the emulator window (crisp source), the less blurry OBS' output should be when it needs to scale your footage to its output resolution.

You could simply upscale the 1x original footage to a non-integer scale directly with nearest neighbor, e.g. 4.5x (450%) for 1080p, but that may lead to visibly uneven pixel sizes.

Tl;dr

Nearest neighbor scaling = crisp pixels (preferably at an integer multiple of the original resolution)

For 1080p, you may need to stretch the image some more. I imagine if you're stretching the already nearest-neighbor-scaled image some more using one of the common scaling algorithms (bilinear, bicubic), the result will be less blurry than if you simply stretch the og 1x resolution video.

I personally use fceux's avi recording, which produces an uncompressed video at the original NES resolution, then scale up to 200% or 300% etc. using nearest neighbor scaling. That gives perfectly crisp pixels. If you're aiming for 720p, this works nicely, can letterbox a bit if you need

a cartoon girl is holding a cross in front of a purple pokemon ALT: a cartoon girl is holding a cross in front of a purple pokemon

Not today!!

You know how with 32k switching in #NESdev you don't have a fixed bank and have to duplicate some code?

Thanks to gratuitious SRAM, 2k RAM remained free.

"Wait, why not just load the duplicated code into SRAM? SRAM won't switch banks. SRAM IS a fixed bank?!🧙🪄💡"

savings across all ROM banks 🥲

too relatable 🥲🥲🥲

So did I.

Our usual approach of making games does not lend itself well to Kickstarters, we've learned... for the next project :~) But we want this game to be great so bad. I've had to play it a lot and it's still fun, hope players won't struggle with the controls, can't wait for people to play it 💚

😍

Sounds good! 🥳

That is such a pretty palette! I do wonder what a little vertical shake on the car sprites would look like when they're driving on the cobblestone.

I'm much better at written interviews, though, and I'm absolutely swamped with work, currently, so... maybe in the future?

Podcast seems right up my alley, though, I'm gonna give it a listen :)

Aw, well, thanks for reaching out!

I have a bunch of thoughts on sound design on the NES that I'm not sure how to articulate, yet, but would like to at some point.

Hello, you guessed right! What's up? 👋

Simply beautiful. And I'm not just talking the underwater part. How you're making that little jump over the chest at the end with barely touching the ceiling... Great physics combined with great animation work. 😎 Love it!

It's been a blast, buddy!!!!! <3

Oh no, that sounds absolutely terrifying...

Had to revive old C++ code. Got stuck in circular dependency hell within the first 5 minutes. 🥲

How do people put up with this?