Fuck the Super Game Boy: Introduction (2010)

http://loveconquersallgam.es/post/2350461718/fuck-the-super-game-boy-introduction

by danso • 13 years ago

147 24 13 years ago

loveconquersallgam.es

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

This is somewhat interesting from the point of view of Ninendo nerdery, but the author clearly thinks the SGB is great rather than hating it. I don't understand what she's trying to say with the title at all, it seems to be nothing other than linkbait.

corkeh• 13 years ago

She comes back to it at the very end pf the series, with a likely explanation of why the special SGB features weren't used:

Now, imagine you’re a Game Boy developer. You want to add the bullet point “Super Game Boy compatible!" to your box, because it’ll help sell a few more copies. But not many people own one. If you want to do something really neat, it’ll add entire days to the project, require changing some art resources, and doing extra testing on a completely different system. Going that extra distance is going to cost a lot of money, and won’t help that much because most people don’t own an SGB to see it. What are you going to say?

Man, fuck the Super Game Boy!

Exactly.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

I would have read a lot farther if she had explained that at the beginning. Thanks for the summary.

dools3• 13 years ago

nothing other than linkbait

Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything "interesting enough to catch people's attention[1].

What the fuck is HN's problem with interesting headlines? Should everyone create articles and put headlines on them like "My overview of the pros and cons of the Super Game Boy as a platform for game developers"?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_bait

pithon• 13 years ago

It's a bait-and-switch. The headline implies that the article is about X, but it turns out to be about Y.

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

What the fuck is HN's problem with interesting headlines?

Linkbait isn't an interesting headline. Its a headline that is interesting at the expense of not being an accurate reflection of the content of the article for which it serves as a headline.

Its a trick, and unsurprisingly, people don't like to be tricked.

ihuman• 13 years ago

Is this how Game boy games have color when playing on a Game Boy Color or Advanced?

giftedmunchkin• 13 years ago

A brief search[1] turns up that the GBC had a few palettes actually built into the hardware, so games that were released before the system out would end up being colorized by one of these; supposedly for some first-party games, the system would actually determine what game was being played and select a more appropriate palette.

Once the system had been released, games could be made in "dual-mode" which would support a monochrome palette when played on the original hardware, but would use custom colorization on the GBC[2].

I'm trying to find more technical sources but haven't located any yet, so if anyone help me find more information I'd be very interested.

EDIT: I found a little more information. Here's[3] someone who disassembled the GBC boot ROM. It looks like on boot, the system would check to see if the inserted cartridge is one of 93 first-party games, and apply a specified palette; otherwise, it would just apply a default palette.

[1] http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=497582

[2] http://www.allgame.com/platform.php?id=17662

[3] http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?19247...

0x09• 13 years ago

SGB palettes aren't recognized by the CGB, which instead only has a hardcoded set of 12 to apply on regular GameBoy games. Backwards-compatible CGB games used another incompatible format. Some games (Pokémon Yellow) contained both. If you want you can see all the gory details in The Game Boy Programming Manual (huge PDF):

http://chrisantonellis.com/files/gameboy/gb-programming-manu...

BHSPitMonkey• 13 years ago

I knew that the CGB allowed you to pick among the hardcoded 12 color palettes (by holding down various key combinations at the Nintendo logo boot screen), but after reading the article I was curious about this as well. I wonder why they decided not to make the CGB recognize the SGB palettes?

masklinn• 13 years ago

It would just use a default palettization system.

mnutt• 13 years ago

This reminds me of the trick where you can create a GIF of more than 256 colors, by making an animated GIF with a different palette per frame and only selectively updating parts of the image.

kefs• 13 years ago

I believe you're referring to this awesomeness..

http://phil.ipal.org/tc.html

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

Immensely entertaining read. Thanks for the link!

She had me curious as to how DK 94 pulled that one off, that grid made it pretty clear.

DK 94 really was a good game.

jmt7les• 13 years ago

Never forget the day I got my first GBC...

guruz• 13 years ago

I really liked this article series.

The pattern areas are a cool idea on how to add more colors to a 4-shade monochrome game without "changing the API"

(See also http://loveconquersallgam.es/post/50580417138/this-is-neat-a... on how developers/designersprobably used to test it..)