Would be a game that creatively gets around the sprite limit. So my idea would be a mech game where you can have 6 people in a mech. And then combat occurs with the the single mech and everyone having one of 3 roles. Most of the time it's just 2 or 3 people per mech. And you have duplicates of roles when you have a big party. There's a hub where 6 people can hang out and trade gear and such while they wait to queue up for then next mech run
how about making it a text-based, like a MUD? you'd free a lot resources by not rendering graphics.
It could be something as simple as a factory everyone has a different job in, and you'd have to use teamwork to prevent disasters.
kinda like what had in mind
you would probably have a few prompts to choose in a dialogue box whenever you bump into someone and press A, you'd join randoms in dungeon quests, recruit at a board of a bar, split money evenly, and be able to save friends in a list that you could send messages to that are pre-written by Nintendo
Aw, hello zoomzoom. Sorry you missed the golden age of multiplayer gaming. You'll never, ever know what it was like to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with 39 of your best bros.
I was there when MMOs first blew up, hated them then, hate them now. However I did enjoy a bit of Matrix Online, only because I was a big Matrix fan at the time
homie the nes couldnt handle the shitty games it had without flickering and slowing down as it is and this moronic motherfricker be like oh gee golly guys what if there was a mmorpg on the nintendo. stupid ass motherfricker, get your simple ass outa here.
IF... and that is a very big IF... but IF the NES had an MMO, it would have been Habitat. Habitat, by LucasFilm Games, was the predecessor to Maniac Mansion, and the visual engine and style of that game began with Habitat. Habitat was the first graphical MMO< and it ran on the C64, which predates the NES, and has a similar processor.
So there's your answer. You can play Habitat at neohabitat.org . It is free because a museum restored it.
First, we chop one of the M's off of MMORPG.
It's not gonna be massive.
Then we have to expose the NES expansion slot and design a device to use it and allow it connect to other NES's.
This device incorporates a multi-player adapter to allow up to four players to connect to a single NES.
It also allows the NES to connect to up to three other NES's via a link cable.
The game is designed to support up to 16 players at once.
Yes. there will be flickering.
There is no split-screen.
Each player has a captain who guides the party from screen to screen on their particular NES.
The NES's communicate and keep track of where each party is in the game world.
There is actually no online element.
Players would have to get together LAN-party style and link up their systems for a night of adventuring.
First party to complete the dungeon wins.
Parties can fight and sabotage each other.
Expansions are released as new carts and players carry over characters a save file stored on the expansion device.
Floppy disks are not involved. I think this thing is already way too expensive.
OP specified the NES so I refrained from using any Famicom technology.
However, in reality such a project would have to make use of some existing R&D repurposed for the NES platform.
I'm not sure if an RJ11 cable is going to have enough pins for the kind of communication you would need for my idea. You could encode the data and send it across, but that will eat up CPU cycles on both ends.
I envisioned the system link cable as having a lot more.
https://www.videogamesage.com/forums/topic/4706-nes-modem-and-minnesota-state-lottery-cart/
There actually was a prototype of a moden for NES. So if we’re hypothetical here, we can imagine that this modem addon got finished.
(16 players at once) Jesus even with single tile player slots ala micro mages and use only 8x8 sprites you'd still be making 2 times the amount of sprites the NES could handle at the time. The only way I could see an MMO really working on the nes is with BG tile overwriting ala gauntlet 1.
Essentially to keep the NES from catching fire you would need to render every sprite as a background asset then re write the banks using backstitching to animate them. That means super choppy movement for everything but the players.
You can have 64 sprites on screen at once with the NES. You're referring to the 8 sprites per scanline limit, which can be worked around with flickering.
Yes, however moving sprites use memory which could lead to massive Slowdown as 64 sprites move with their own AI at once. Ultimately it would be too much work to do in a single frame than the CPU has time for. You would have to keep the sprite limit low if you wanted to have anything that's even semi playable.
There's basically no feasible way a NES could run anything resembling an MMO. Like you're never going to have a city hub going with 200 players hanging out in it on a NES.
Probably something closer to Phantasy Star Online, at least in structure. Having hundreds of players in the same crowded area wouldn't work very well on the NES, so a lobby system like in PSO would be a way around that.
I imagined it would be really fun to play an online SNES Super Mario World where you could customize your Mario colors and just wander around entering and exiting levels that already had players in them
Zelda 1 but the world would be as big as in DQ 4 or Mother 1
I think it would be too limited for people to interact in real time, it would need to work more like a BBS door game such as Trade Wars 2000
Bad. There are no good nes games.
Maybe duck hunt.
Well there were ultima games on the nes, maybe an ultima mmo set in or around ultima 3?
Would be a game that creatively gets around the sprite limit. So my idea would be a mech game where you can have 6 people in a mech. And then combat occurs with the the single mech and everyone having one of 3 roles. Most of the time it's just 2 or 3 people per mech. And you have duplicates of roles when you have a big party. There's a hub where 6 people can hang out and trade gear and such while they wait to queue up for then next mech run
how about making it a text-based, like a MUD? you'd free a lot resources by not rendering graphics.
It could be something as simple as a factory everyone has a different job in, and you'd have to use teamwork to prevent disasters.
kinda like what had in mind
>It could be something as simple as a factory everyone has a different job in, and you'd have to use teamwork to prevent disasters.
Boring.
you would probably have a few prompts to choose in a dialogue box whenever you bump into someone and press A, you'd join randoms in dungeon quests, recruit at a board of a bar, split money evenly, and be able to save friends in a list that you could send messages to that are pre-written by Nintendo
i played this on release and it was better than anything i've experienced to this very day. zoomies missed out.
Can you believe that this was originally made as a flash video in 2003? I saw it many years later, for me.
It would suck because all MMOs suck
Aw, hello zoomzoom. Sorry you missed the golden age of multiplayer gaming. You'll never, ever know what it was like to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with 39 of your best bros.
Golden age of nolifers you mean. It is the shittiest genre.
the only good MMOs were Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Everything else is fricking shit
City of Heroes/Villains.
I was there when MMOs first blew up, hated them then, hate them now. However I did enjoy a bit of Matrix Online, only because I was a big Matrix fan at the time
good times
homie the nes couldnt handle the shitty games it had without flickering and slowing down as it is and this moronic motherfricker be like oh gee golly guys what if there was a mmorpg on the nintendo. stupid ass motherfricker, get your simple ass outa here.
IF... and that is a very big IF... but IF the NES had an MMO, it would have been Habitat. Habitat, by LucasFilm Games, was the predecessor to Maniac Mansion, and the visual engine and style of that game began with Habitat. Habitat was the first graphical MMO< and it ran on the C64, which predates the NES, and has a similar processor.
So there's your answer. You can play Habitat at neohabitat.org . It is free because a museum restored it.
FNS had a max baud rate of 9600. Network rate won't stop it, the very little amount of ram would be a restriction.
First, we chop one of the M's off of MMORPG.
It's not gonna be massive.
Then we have to expose the NES expansion slot and design a device to use it and allow it connect to other NES's.
This device incorporates a multi-player adapter to allow up to four players to connect to a single NES.
It also allows the NES to connect to up to three other NES's via a link cable.
The game is designed to support up to 16 players at once.
Yes. there will be flickering.
There is no split-screen.
Each player has a captain who guides the party from screen to screen on their particular NES.
The NES's communicate and keep track of where each party is in the game world.
There is actually no online element.
Players would have to get together LAN-party style and link up their systems for a night of adventuring.
First party to complete the dungeon wins.
Parties can fight and sabotage each other.
Expansions are released as new carts and players carry over characters a save file stored on the expansion device.
Floppy disks are not involved. I think this thing is already way too expensive.
*each party has a captain
This would be something like $250 per set-up btw.
It would be marketed as more of an upper-teens and college students thing.
Famicom actually had a modem extension, so there’s no need for LAN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System
OP specified the NES so I refrained from using any Famicom technology.
However, in reality such a project would have to make use of some existing R&D repurposed for the NES platform.
I'm not sure if an RJ11 cable is going to have enough pins for the kind of communication you would need for my idea. You could encode the data and send it across, but that will eat up CPU cycles on both ends.
I envisioned the system link cable as having a lot more.
https://www.videogamesage.com/forums/topic/4706-nes-modem-and-minnesota-state-lottery-cart/
There actually was a prototype of a moden for NES. So if we’re hypothetical here, we can imagine that this modem addon got finished.
(16 players at once) Jesus even with single tile player slots ala micro mages and use only 8x8 sprites you'd still be making 2 times the amount of sprites the NES could handle at the time. The only way I could see an MMO really working on the nes is with BG tile overwriting ala gauntlet 1.
Essentially to keep the NES from catching fire you would need to render every sprite as a background asset then re write the banks using backstitching to animate them. That means super choppy movement for everything but the players.
You can have 64 sprites on screen at once with the NES. You're referring to the 8 sprites per scanline limit, which can be worked around with flickering.
Yes, however moving sprites use memory which could lead to massive Slowdown as 64 sprites move with their own AI at once. Ultimately it would be too much work to do in a single frame than the CPU has time for. You would have to keep the sprite limit low if you wanted to have anything that's even semi playable.
You'll have to do a text adventure for the most part. Maybe some enemy sprites on screen dragon question style but navigating the world is a MUD.
There's basically no feasible way a NES could run anything resembling an MMO. Like you're never going to have a city hub going with 200 players hanging out in it on a NES.
There's not really any issue with that if you have a server for the NES to connect to.
Probably something closer to Phantasy Star Online, at least in structure. Having hundreds of players in the same crowded area wouldn't work very well on the NES, so a lobby system like in PSO would be a way around that.
I imagined it would be really fun to play an online SNES Super Mario World where you could customize your Mario colors and just wander around entering and exiting levels that already had players in them
The question here is whether there is a server or not.
If there is a server it's a lot easier. There are rooms you can enter with players in them and if there's too many players you can't enter the room.
>What would it have been like
kino.
like ultima online but more pixelated
a NES MMORPG would be played in turns. so basically multi-layered chess.
It could probably be done in the gold box engine, just stripped down like the NES version of Pool of Radiance.
It would have had a separate diesel generator to power all the enhancement chips in the cartridge
garbage.
Basically Mother with online multiplayer