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« on: October 18, 2016, 04:59:15 AM »
^
I would assume you'd have to shrink them down a bit, but that can be done with just simple resizing, though you may have to work a bit to get the details crisp again afterwards.
anyway...
To explain that thing with the miniboss a little better, you need to understand that the system memory actually holds two screens worth of data at once (or more for later games with ram support capabilities built into the cartridge). The extra area is used to preload the screens in front of you so that as you move in whatever direction there's a buffer between the visible edge and the tiles being loaded. Palletes often aren't applied until right before the tiles are fully scrolled on screen to save memory, as this area was meant to be cut off the real visible edges, but on widescreens or with emulators you can sometimes see this half-processed data as you walk.
The idea I had in mind is that as long as the player is stuck in a single room the scrolling data is essentially free to use for whatever, such as displaying a static boss background. There is another feature called line interrupts that tell the display to read data out of sequence, often for things like static status bars. In this case I want to set up a designated chunk of the middle of the screen (from the notched-in corners of the purple rocks up to just below the maroon ceiling rocks) that draws from the scrolling area rather than the working area using line interrupts, and by changing where the interrupt data is read from on a static image it should be possible to allow it to move in 8 directions seemingly independent of the background without needing the extra ram.
It would create an extra delay before allowing movement into the next screen while the scrolling mode resets, but I wanted to use that for a quick 'water draining' effect of the boss room as an airlock, and also changing the jumping physics back to normal when the sequence ends.
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