What's Beyond the Screen Borders of the NES?

Video Description

The Nintendo Entertainment System hides a lot of objects off-screen. In this video we'll be taking a look at how it works, and what's out there. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/100th_Coin Join my Discord server: https://discord.gg/SbhTn6nX35 My game, Fantastic Fist (On sale!): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2119470/Fantastic_Fist/ The boundary of the screen can be defined in quite a few ways, and there are multiple ways to interpret what it means to see beyond it. In this video, we'll begin by looking in the overscan regions of the screen, and showcasing anomalies that are visible on certain televisions, or by recording with a capture card. Since objects in OAM can exist up to a Y position of 255, I'll showcase what the screen would look like if instead of having 240 visible scanlines, it instead had 256 visible scanlines. Most games hide inactive objects in that small space below the screen, so this gives us some new objects to look at in your favorite NES games. I'll also make the screen even taller or wider to showcase how far the screen scrolls before the background values get updated. If you've ever seen a TAS on TASVideos with an "Atlas Encode", where the screen is zoomed out, I'll be showcasing my own Atlas encode of Super Mario Bros. 3 level 1-1, allowing you to see exactly when objects off-screen spawn in. And finally, I'll talk about the post-render scanlines and the screen border. There's an amusing behavior with the post render lines that makes them unexpectedly draw data from palette RAM, and I'll explain how that works. Oh- and somewhere along the lines a wizard and some gnomes explode a skeleton or two, but I forget why that was relevant.