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OffTopic > Sprites from original Final Fantasy: NES

#174805 - rmcrackan - Tue Jul 20, 2010 6:28 pm

I know that NES had 4-color sprites (with 1 being transparent). How then did the original Final Fantasy have so many sprites with 4 colors + transparent? (Example sprite sheet -- http://pages.cthome.net/mnoni/webpage/finalfantasy.gif -- especially look at the large ones near the bottom.)

I understand that you can layer sprites to achieve additional colors (For example: Megaman's layering gives him 6 colors: body=3+trans, face=3+trans). It's odd that these FF ones are all exactly 4 colors + transparent. If FF used similar layering, why would they stop at 4+1 instead of taking advantage of 6+1? (I see that they do use 6 if you include weapons, but the weapon appears to be its own layer anyway, so no reason to reserve the extra 2 colors for them.)

Is there another method of displaying sprites that gives you an additional color?

Also interesting is the fact that the big sprites are 18x26. Sprites are 8x8 (and I think I read somewhere that they're sometimes 8x16) but both 18 and 26 are [factor of 8] + 2. Very strange.

#174829 - gauauu - Thu Jul 22, 2010 2:49 pm

Heh, I've been thinking about this all day yesterday and all evening. Unfortunately, the PPU viewer in Fceultra keeps crashing my computer (!?), so I haven't been able to easily dig into it and figure out what's going on.

A few things of note, though -- the large character sprites (the ones in battle), seem to actually only have 4 colors -- the black is the transparent color. You can tell this at the beginning when you select characters -- at that point they are on a blue background, and there's blue instead of black in the character sprites.

As far as the "overworld" sprites, I have no idea. Maybe they did 2 layered sprites but only 4 colors in an effort to make them use the exact same colors that the large battle sprites have? (3 colors + black?) Since they would only be showing 1 at a time anyway, it's not like they had a whole lot else that they needed to do with the other sprites...?

Anyway, I'm not much help, but just wanted to chime in since you got my really curious.

#174833 - sajiimori - Thu Jul 22, 2010 10:50 pm

The overworld sprites appear to be divided into a top half and a bottom half, as opposed to having 2 overlapping sprites.

#174841 - gauauu - Fri Jul 23, 2010 3:20 pm

Good point. The overworld sprites that DO have 4 colors all have their "4th color" near the top, above where the "3rd color" stops.

So the final verdict: it only looks like they have 4 color sprites -- the big sprites only use 3 colors + transparent black, the small sprites are multiple sprites that use 3 colors each?

#174844 - rmcrackan - Fri Jul 23, 2010 6:12 pm

I found the answer. It's mostly been stated already but I have the pics for evidence.

I finally broke down and downloaded the ROM and extracted the bitmaps with NAPIT. (btw: staring at extracted ROM bitmaps is really bloody hard on your eyes!) I matched a few bitmaps and end-results here:
http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/9396/finalfantasy2.gif

Each character has a color that is mostly relegated to top part of the sprite so I chased that idea a while. It turns out that's a red herring. The real answer is that black and transparent use the same color mask. Therefore, black must be on a separate layer. I wonder if they do that so they can flash the outline white when the character is hit. It's been a LONG time since I played FF but I remember this effect being used in Dragon Warrior.

#174866 - sajiimori - Mon Jul 26, 2010 10:22 pm

(gauauu already told you that black is transparent on the big sprites.)