rainwarrior wrote:
Final Fantasy IV spent half its development life on the NES. It was up-ported to SNES at some point, rather than being built from the ground up for SNES.
Are you sure? I was under the impression that a Final Fantasy IV started to be developed on the NES, simultaneously with a SNES Final Fantasy game. But then the NES project but was cancelled as a whole and ideas within the game were probably re-used in various games, and the SNES project remained, and had become the real Final Fantasy IV.
So I wasn't under the impression the Final Fantasy IV was ever ported from the NES, maybe they used ideas they originally had for the NES Final Fantasy IV project though.
My point was that the sprite code was probably ported from the NES - on the SNES you have to be crazy to use 4 8x8 sprites when you could use just one 16x16 sprite for a better result. I didn't check if the code related to sprites uses only 8-bits, however.
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Dragon Quest V was the same, because that game is only marginally better than an NES game in terms of graphics and music.
About music definitely not - the SPC has nothing in common with the 2A03 so it was impossible to re-use anything - if something sounds like beeps beeps it's on purpose (and as far as I know the whole DQ series always retained the NES beeps for the sound effects - purely by tradition).
The game engine is obviously different than the NES ones : The sprites are taller, you can walk on a 8x8 gird instead of a 16x16 gird, and the lag when you press a button before your character actually moves is suppressed. If you walk half into a wall the game engine is even smart enough to deport you 8 pixels and make you continue your way. I canot prove it, but I'd guess the game engine was completely re-done and no code from DQ1-4 was re-used.