First of all, thank you for the compliment! We do take the art of this game very seriously and it's nice to know that our efforts have paid off.
Regarding the rest of what you said — some correction is in order. It's understandable why someone on the outside would draw the conclusions that you have, but they're simply inaccurate.
All of Former Dawn's game logic, background animation handling, sprite handling, enemy AI, world loading, dialogue rendering, portrait rendering, etc. is being run on the NES's CPU. Our mapper is not a coprocessor like the SA-1 and SuperFX chips were in the SNES era. It is a hard requirement of the project not to do the kind of thing that you think we're doing. We're not even driving the expansion audio from a coprocessor! (E.g. the way that the Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, and SNES all did.) We spend quite a large portion of every frame's CPU time just handling the track data and telling the expansion audio subsystem what to do, just as was the case with Famicom cartridges with expansion audio like the Japanese version of Castlevania III.
The truth is, our mapper could have existed around 1990 because it is not doing anything fundamentally different than what conventional mappers did by 1989. It's not very far off from combining MMC5 and Namco 163 into a single chip and then giving that chip a few more address lines to access more memory.
It is nothing like using the NES as a pass through. We never would've spent the last few years developing our game engines and memory mapper if we were willing to do that, because it would be a trivial exercise (by comparison) to offload everything onto a coprocessor board and use the NES as a pass through device.
Comments 1
Re: We Can't Quite Believe That Former Dawn Is Running On Real NES Hardware
@MARl0
First of all, thank you for the compliment! We do take the art of this game very seriously and it's nice to know that our efforts have paid off.
Regarding the rest of what you said — some correction is in order. It's understandable why someone on the outside would draw the conclusions that you have, but they're simply inaccurate.
All of Former Dawn's game logic, background animation handling, sprite handling, enemy AI, world loading, dialogue rendering, portrait rendering, etc. is being run on the NES's CPU. Our mapper is not a coprocessor like the SA-1 and SuperFX chips were in the SNES era. It is a hard requirement of the project not to do the kind of thing that you think we're doing. We're not even driving the expansion audio from a coprocessor! (E.g. the way that the Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, and SNES all did.) We spend quite a large portion of every frame's CPU time just handling the track data and telling the expansion audio subsystem what to do, just as was the case with Famicom cartridges with expansion audio like the Japanese version of Castlevania III.
The truth is, our mapper could have existed around 1990 because it is not doing anything fundamentally different than what conventional mappers did by 1989. It's not very far off from combining MMC5 and Namco 163 into a single chip and then giving that chip a few more address lines to access more memory.
It is nothing like using the NES as a pass through. We never would've spent the last few years developing our game engines and memory mapper if we were willing to do that, because it would be a trivial exercise (by comparison) to offload everything onto a coprocessor board and use the NES as a pass through device.
-SNS