Nintendo

[chrisviper15]

Hello again everybody! I am making a website, and i had the coolest idea for it. It will kind of be like a nintendo game. it wont be an actual game but it will look like one. i just had a few questions for you all.

first, is there any way you can make a flash movie look pixelated like a nintendo does?? or am i going to have to draw with hundreds of little squares?? That would take forever to draw them the right size and get them to line up and wouldnt look very good. if anyone has any ideas on how to make it look nintendoish, that would be so awesome.

another thing is how many colors did the nintendo use? wasnt it 16 colors? and how many pixels was the size of the screen??

[Xurion_Flash_Man]

You'll have to draw it manually, which will take a while to get the right look, and the nintendo (or famicom in the U.S) was an 8-bit machine.

Not sure how big the screen was.

XFM

[chrisviper15]

so i would have to draw each square individually. Does 8 bit mean 8 colors??

[Xurion_Flash_Man]

Yeah, I think it does. But I think the PS2 is 128 bit and it has millions of colours.

So if its vitally important that you know, you can email nintendo and they'd tell ya.

XFM

[optical]

You could draw your scene in photoshop, pixelate it using the mosaic filter and then reduce the colours. This would give you the desired effect.

[Xurion_Flash_Man]

pictures in Flash = big swf's

XFM

[optical]

Clever combitations of vector and bitmap animation can still produce acceptable filesizes.

[Xurion_Flash_Man]

Na, not bitmap! Get jpg format and use the loadMovie or loadMovieNum function to reduce the swf size even more.

XFM

[51055]

I'm fairly sure 8-bit used 64 colours and a screen size of 320x320 should be plenty big enough.
why not make everything from 2x2 pixel squares (just fill, no line) to give it that pixelated look?
then you can make a copy for each colour in your pallette (use as few as possible to make it look old).
copy and paste the colour you need and use the info box to position them exactly and group characters/icons as you go.
My vague memory of the early 80's (when I used to do this stuff on an Amstrad) was that the most sensible (and fun) part was drawing all the elements out on squared paper and felt tips before drawing them onscreen. Saved loads of time.

Nice idea,btw. Had you thought of using the game element to act as a sort of preloader. By which I mean that when the user wants to go to another part of the site and a new swf needs to be loaded they would actually have to play a short game (get through a maze or whatever) to get to the 'next level'. While they play the movie plays and the user doesn't notice the wait.

just a thought.

andy

[chrisviper15]

thanks man, that would be awesome. thanks for all of your help everybody. im a pretty big beginner so i dont know how long it will take, but ill post more as i make progress.

I wish i knew more about making games, that would be way cool to do for a way to get into hidden stuff on the site. tonight im going to try to get the main page done.

are you sure its 320x320?? that seems kinda big. is there any way you can make a custom color pallet for flash??

thanks again

[ha|e]

you know if you want info on something you can just look at the source.

http://www.nintendo.com/systems/nes/nes_specs.jsp

[chrisviper15]

ok, i drew a bunch of the stuff in paint in a really low resolution (so it will be smaller). when i put it in flash it smothed it out. so i went into the properties and set it not to smooth, but it still is way blurry. any advice???

[klotera]

8 bit color is 255 colors.. 8 bits = (2^8)-1 = 255

[chrisviper15]

ok, thanks

[aden_1]

Maby you could sut draw your Graphics in flash,
keeps the file sizes small,

Then make a graph, like a grid, but as small as you want to go over the top!

So then it would look pixelated!

Save a **** load of time and file size!!

just an opinion!