Hey I'm trying to make a quick reference document for the limitations imposed by the SNES/Super Famicom console as I am planning on retro-porting a 1999 PC game that was never on the Nintendo (or any console for that matter) to the SNES (well actually, I'm planning on creating an imaginary "Game 0" in that franchise, or more accurately, a radically different first game but as I understand it that's within the theme/spirit of the jam .
This is what I have learned so far about the SNES:
- CPU: 16-Bit (3.58Mhz) - I have no idea how one could realistically impose this limitation w/o it being a great big pain in the butt, so I assume this can be safely ignored.
- RAM: 128KB (1Mb), 64KB (0.5Mb) Video RAM see above. I doubt it will be possible or even desirable to artificially restrict my RAM/CPU cycles, like if it's even possible it's not desirable
- COLORS: 32768 (256 on screen) this is the first thing that I can realistically do or at least simulate. but what "bit depth" would I downsample these to? I tried saving the image as 8-bits...."deep"...??...but they still look much too good. a bit depth of 4 looks much more like how I remember SNES graphics looking but I don't get how 16-bits = 4-"bit depth" orz
- Sprites: 128 - I really don't understand what exactly this limitation means, because I don't know what is and isn't considered a "sprite" by the SNES hardware/firmware?
- Sprite Size: 64x64 presumably the maximum sprite size?
- Audio: 8-channel 8-bit SONY SPC700 -- I don't really know what this means but I probably won't be seriously thinking about audio until well into the jam (which I know hasn't started yet) once I've established a visual basis
I apologies for any ways the above demonstrated my ignorance and/or stupidity! For a vidya game dev I am REALLY not a very technical person. Thankee!