Not too creative, since I've just been translating an existing game to the NES, but I started this after a drunken conversation with my friend about how much the original NES version of Donkey Kong sucks, and whether it would be possible to actually run an accurate version of the game on the NES hardware, playing exactly like the arcade original. It's a little hobby thing I've been working on recently. I'm currently considering pillarboxing the already low resolution of the NES, That would somewhat help with the bandwidth of the background animations. It's barely possible with emulators by having the OS rotate the entire screen. I've considered tate mode as the scanline limit would nicely align with the bullet stream, but I worry that there would be no motivation for the common person to physically rotate their TV set. So for the NES shmup I've been trying to design calls for a 3:4 ratio in vertical orientation (Mainly for gameplay structural reasons). On the elevator screen I had to turn to some pretty creative solutions to avoid the flickering being too bad on the left column of elevators though. There can easily be a few firefoxes and a Mario down there, too, turning the game into flicker central I don't think it looks that bad on a CRT though, and if you've played stuff like Batman Return of the Joker, you're used to it You're obviously right about the sprites per scanline limit, which was actually my biggest issue, since the game likes to have stuff above eachother, such as the rivet screen where Pauline is right above Donkey Kong, and a hammer spawns below him. The original DK arcade game was created for this orientation, with roughly the same resolution (as you can see the graphics go all the way to the sides of the screen - arcade games didn't have to think about overscan), which is why this version looks like it should, while Nintendo's original NES/Famicom port looks horribly stretched. I've done it a billion times in the past with the same TV. If you're into shooters, rotating your screen like this isn't a foreign concept, commonly referred to as "tate mode" (I'm actually surprised I haven't seen any other NES or SNES homebrews with a tate mode), but it's a good idea to unplug it for 10-15 minutes before turning it on, just to avoid the magnetism causing weird colors. In this case, all I was blocking off was a speaker. CRTs usually have venting in the back, so that's rarely an issue.
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