bazilracoondog

"NES Music Associations" 1 and 2

Published: February 4th 2025, 1:09:50 am

(Sound animations and nes rom files are in attachments below)
There also was another thing that got me busy in January but I couldn't post it before I finish all the horny stuff.

I finally managed to master NES graphics which is something I wanted to do for a long time. After all, NES is a world-wide known iconic system, when people hear the term "8 bit" their mind usually goes straight to NES (when it's not GameBoy of course), it was very popular and still loved in Russia as its pirated clone called Dendy and it was the only 8 bit system I actually had in my life, NES games were fundamental in forming my future love for retro graphics, pixel art and 8 bit aesthetics, so there's also a big nostalgic factor for me.

But all this time I was afraid to deal with its limitations, I knew it's gonna be some complicated shit and I already had enough complicated shit with Apple II. And it is actually complicated but it turned out to be much easier to comprehend than Apple graphics.

Another reason is that I simply didn't have any inspiration and no idea what to do with NES graphics. I don't know why, maybe because NES has very little detailed full screen artworks compared to Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum with all their elaborated title screens, load screens and demoscenes which made me feel more liberated to work with those graphics, maybe it's something else.

Anyway, inspiration came to me very suddenly during another NES gaming binge.

I play games pretty rarely due to my busyness but when I do it's usually some NES, SNES or Sega Genesis stuff and January was a REALLY big NES binge month. I played a ton of NES, managed to do the unthinkable: I beat whole Ninja Gaiden trilogy which is some of the hardest NES games, I did it fairly without any save states and even after this I played it over and over again, there's more NES games I played as well but it's not really important.

I guess this mood prepared me to get really interested in finally getting deeper into this topic and the last thing which helped me here is one video YouTube recommended me probably because I was searching NES music way too much. It was some girl ranking worst video game music which obviously involved a lot of NES tracks since it's not a big secret that NES is known not only for some of the best 8 bit bangers but also some of the worst 8 bit music imaginable.
(Check out the mentioned video btw, there's two parts and they're really hilarious)
https://youtu.be/IGYFrzg0450
https://youtu.be/G1D05HcrcJ4
That's how I came across the title theme of Billiard 2008, a bootleg hack of NES Lunar Pool game (which I actually had as a kid), it was indeed one of the most awful soundtracks I ever heard but I found it somewhat catchy and enjoyable and ended up listening to it on repeat for 20 times. It's "so bad it's good" thing. Everybody called it a drunk song and I can agree with it but for me it also felt like a perfect Worst Loser in the World theme, something that would perfectly fit a game over screen, you know, game over screens always had annoying music that emphasised your failure better than anything, as if the very look of a game over screen itself wasn't enough to feel the despair. The thought "What could such screen look like?" crossed my mind and immediately it drew an image of a beaten up Zed in my head. That's how I got my first idea of something I'd like to draw in NES style.

I already had a very useful and informative NES graphics tutorial saved long long time ago just in case and even download NAW (NES Assets Workshop) program for working with NES graphics which was made by this tutorial author but I never got really deep into it until just recently.
(tutorial link: https://nesrocks.com/blog/nes-graphics/ )

My first artwork was made with just Gimp and no NAW operations involved, it was rather an intuitive attempt to follow those limitations I managed to learn at the moment and this is what I already knew:

-First is the basics, NES uses 256x224 resolution, 56 color palette shown above, standard separation of the screen on 8x8 sectors and only two types of graphics - background tiles and character sprites. It's all typical, not really cryptic and 56 colors sounds like a great deal but I saw so many artists failing to nail this humble and sometimes odd NES vibe just because their knowledge about NES was llimited only to everything mentioned above.
They pick NES resolution and start just drawing freely with all 56 colors, obviously it looks too good for NES and makes them say "I didn't know NES has such a colorful palette!" Well, of course it looks too colorful for NES because it couldn't display so many colors at once and it doesn't look like NES at all!

So, now it's time to go deeper into NES specifications that stand behind the secret of its limited graphics.
NES can display only 8 subpalettes on one screen, 4 colors for each palette, 4 palettes are given to visible background tiles with first color being uniform for all 4 background palettes like black on a picture above, 4 palettes are given to visible sprites where first color is given away for transparency so technically sprite palettes use only three colors.
In total, it's only 25 colors NES can display at once and it's only the very maximum if no color repeats in a different palette.
Adventure Island screenshot with palette viewer opened is a good example. It shows all the palettes used on this screen and ultimately on this level because Adventure Island has a very humble design and the same 4 sprite palettes were used for entire game. Many colors repeat so here for example it uses only 18 colors. This is MUCH different from what people usually do when they try to make NES pixel art with all 56 colors at once!
I said NES can show 8 subpalettes per screen and by "screen" I didn't mean level or room, it's just a screen you see at moment which means it can be changed on the fly.
I drew an example in NAW, imagine we have three houses on a screen, red, blue and green, we can't have a pink house on a screen because we ran out of palettes, there's only 4 and the 4th palette was given to the ground and roofs.
But if we progress the screen to the right enough to make the red house disappear we can replace red palette if we don't need it anymore and change it to something else, to render pink house for example. That's how it works. The same with sprites.
The last thing I knew at this moment is that background tiles are more limited at how they can be colored compared to sprites. Background is broken on 16x16 sectors and each sector can have only one palette.

So it doesn't matter if you put 4 identical tiles in one sector or 4 completely different ones like the blue square above, you have your right to use any 8x8 tiles anywhere but the way they're colored is defined by a 16x16 grid.
 So you can't do it like that.
Sprites however allow you to assign any individual palette out of 4 available ones to any 8x8 sprite. This is why Adventure Island boy has more than 3 colors, technically he consists of 4 8x8 sprite blocks, two for his head with one palette and one for his body in a grass skirt with another palette which has green.

With this knowledge I made my first NES accurate pixel art and I felt very proud of it. It perfectly follows 16x16 coloring grid for background, uses only three background palettes and two for sprites (one for stars and one for his eyes and bandage cross because technically there's no way to make them different color rather than by turning them into sprites)

The result felt so nice I thought it would be fun to make a whole series of little animations made as visual associations for weird NES music which either sounds awful and obnoxious or not so bad but just monotonous and silly. I remembered a plenty of them and quickly saved them to a folder to not forget anything but thought I should focus on more urgent projects for now.

However, little time have passed before I felt a craving to do another pixel art for this series. At this moment I learnt a couple more important facts about NES graphics.
-Normally NES can have only 256 unique tiles in a tileset and respectively on screen. 256 sounds like a lot but in fact it's only 30% of the screen so you can't make a beautiful full screen picture without largely resorting to repeating tiles. This actually made me realize why so many NES title screens, intro screens and game over screens usually had just a little image with lots of empty black space or monotonous texture around. There's ways to override it, different technical tricks like mappers, tileswitches and other stuff I have no idea what it is, many title screens for more modern NES games from late 80s-early 90s could have more than 400 unique tiles but classic standard NES graphics were much more humble. At least NES could change tilesets on the fly, if you saw a flaming background or animated bubbling lava in NES games then know that it was done by changing tilesets ever second where everything stays the same but tiles for lava or fire change.
-There was an interesting technique for making huge bosses without sprites which is described here:
https://megacatstudios.com/blogs/retro-development/blending-tiles-for-animated-nes-bosses
In fact, you build bosses out of background graphics. It's done to not overload the screen with too many sprites because NES can have only 64 sprite blocks simultaneously and only 8 on a horizontal line or otherwise they start flickering. But animating such bosses is a bit problematic because NES can change only 32 individual tiles at the same time without switching an entire tileset so the changes in a boss graphics have to be gradual.

So, when I started drawing new NES pixel art I kept these limitations in mind as well and decided to make something even more authentic because my first Game Over screen art was way too big for these limitations with 457 unique tiles. It's not the biggest count imaginable and with mentioned tricks it could be actually displayed on NES but if I wanted to convert my pixel art into a real NES rom file with the tools I have I had to follow more strict limitations.
 And so I did this animation based on a French Baker theme from the infamous awful Action 52 game. It gave me way more associations with Spain rather than France so Mark dressed as Matador was the first thing I thought about. Later it turned out much more logical when I found out that developers of Action 52 stole 6 copyrighted songs one of which was called Tango but used in a French Baker game in Action 52 compillation.
Here I used only one background palette, purely intentional, I don't think it needs more. I imagined Mark's eyes, ear and lips being made of sprites to be more precise with differently colored details, as well as the bull. The cape animation is where I tried to fit into the limit of only 32 interchangeable BG tiles and as a result it looks pretty cringe but this is how NES graphics usually looked like so at least it's authentic, as silly as the music itself.

But then came the most intriguing part, remember I said I had to follow all these restrictions to convert it into a NES rom? Yes, it's actually possible!
First I had to turn my image into a tileset, only those parts that are not imagined as sprites.
Looks like a total mess but that's the only way to do it, then I had to put it all together like a jigsaw puzzle...
I realized that I hit the 256 BG tile limit a bit too early so some stuff didn't fit and without tileswitchers and shit being available in NAW I had to recreate clouds and some letters as sprites as well.
Then I converted it into rom file in one simple click and BOOM.

My pixel art can be viewed on NES emulator! Just any NES emulator and if only I had some flash cartridge I could even launch it on a real console. Of course there's nothing fun in running just a single static picture but still. And yeah, NAW can't do animations sadly so it's not moving as a rom file but still it feels like a great accomplishment.
Then I went back to my Game Over concept and compressed it a bit to make it fit same limitations to turn it into a rom. Of course it's a bit sad to lose all the detail but honestly it feels more realistic this way. Surely some NES game over screens were pretty elaborated but most of them were very minimalistic because not many developers back then could spend so much time, effort and most importantly so much precious cartridge space on just some game over screen.
 So now it works perfectly and can be seen in all its authentic glory! And yeah, I really love that TV filter in Mesen, it looks very euthentic.

The last thing I did is I started doing Zed sprite for the third music association which implied a more complex sprite manipulation. It was inspired by infamous NES Rocky and Bullwinkle level theme, another gem from the worst video game songs playlist.
https://youtu.be/9lAfF8ZFb6E
I don't know, it makes me think of a very drunken fairy and this is what I did lol.

The idea was to make Zed only out of sprite blocks and as I already said NES can display only 64 of them on one screen.
Another source of inspiration here was the flying Tinkle Bell animation in NES Hook game I saw in one of AVGN reviews
https://youtu.be/DB9GM-a7lR0?t=431
It looks clear for me that fairy was made from sprites as well and I imagined pretty much the same thing.
Sadly, I went too much beyond the sprite limit and had to cut several parts greatly, mainly Zed's wings and feet.
 
But hey, at least it can work on an emulator now!
For now it's just a still image. Neither NAW or NEXXT can allow you to make moving sprites but I found one program that is in a very early alpha development stage where you can easily make NES games. It has certain downsides but for now it's the only really noob dev friendly tool I can use, hopefully I figure it out and manage to make this idea real. For me it will mean much more freedom for 100% authentic animations. If I manage to get any successfull results I'll surely share it here and tell more about that program.
It's kinda odd that I still haven't drawn a single dick or a character stuffing his big stomach but don't worry, very soon we'll get some horny NES smut as well. For now, I'm just happy to say that I finally became a 100% true certified NES pixel art furry artist.