

Graphics Analysis of an NES Game's Select Menu - dustmop
http://www.dustmop.io/blog/?p=123

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gdubs
Love these types of articles.

Also, if you develop for, say, the Apple Watch, there's a goldmine in looking
at classic console games and how they made use of constrained resolution,
memory, colors.

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djent
I feel like mobile developers and the creators of the hardware have given up
on heavy optimization to work on minimal hardware and instead just gone with
more expensive, top of the line hardware so they can continue current
programming practices.

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maccard
I work on console targeted projects, we still have to optimise for very tight
hardware constraints!

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djent
The reality is that the phones of today are as powerful or more so than the
laptops of yesterday.

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jeremiep
Yet my phone battery used to last a week and now it doesn't even last a day.
Mobile CPUs may be able to handle all that bloated code fast enough, but not
long enough.

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maccard
When your phone battery lasted a week, what did you do on your phone, compared
to what you do on it now? If I leave my laptop on standby the battery lasts at
least 3-4 days, but if I use it continuously it lasts under 7 hours. Similarly
with my smartphone, if I leave it on standby I get 2-3 days, but with "normal"
usage - (moderate browsing, emails, texts, phonecalls) I have to charge it
either daily or every other day.

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simoncion
I'm not the OP, but when _my_ feature phone battery lasted a week, I made some
phone calls every day or two, and used the phone as a daily alarm clock.

If Google Play Services decides to not burn all of my battery in busy waiting
or whatever, and if I make _zero_ phone calls and have a daily alarm, my
smartphone battery will last between two and three days. When my phone was new
and I was commuting with it, I would typically get between eight and ten hours
on a charge.

I would _happily_ double the thickness of any modern non-ruggedized smartphone
in order to double its battery life.

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maccard
> When my phone was new and I was commuting with it, I would typically get
> between eight and ten hours on a charge.

Sounds like you got a dud phone.

but being serious, It's one of the trade offs of modern smart phones. THey're
designed to last roughly a day of usage. If you use them like you used your
old phone, you'd get 2-3 days out of them, but then you might aswell just run
with an Alcatel[0] and get the super long battery life.

[0]:
[https://www.o2.co.uk/shop/phones/alcatel/1040/#contractType=...](https://www.o2.co.uk/shop/phones/alcatel/1040/#contractType=payasyougo)

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simoncion
I'm confused. If _this_ was what you were going to reply with, why on Earth
did you bother asking the question?

Anyone who's even remotely techy knows _why_ their smartphone battery lasts
far less than a day on average. That doesn't mean that they're happy with the
(often fashion driven) tradeoffs made by phone designers, or that they don't
actually want a vaguely-smart-phone that also has battery life of a week or
more.

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everyone
I would imagine the limitations would make the UI design itself very effective
aswell. Every extra sprite you include bears a serious performance cost so you
would pare things down to whats absolutely necessary

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JoshTriplett
It's interesting how much this page relies on the browser behavior of
rendering all animated GIFs on the page in sync with each other, such that the
palettes rotate in sync with the images.

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agumonkey
Got me to search for NES overclocking and surprisingly people did swap clocks
to pump the cpu faster:

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=nes+cpu+overclock](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=nes+cpu+overclock)

I already fried my old SNES so I won't touch my NES but still worth reading.

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digi_owl
Got me thinking about the Goonies 2 pause map.

