Blaster Master and Journey to Silius are by far not the only games that exploit color fringing in composite video. We can add Final Fantasy for NES to this list. A member of a Discord server pointed me to a 2020 interview[1] in which designer Koichi Ishii revealed this about the color choices for mountains:
[1] "FINAL FANTASY III 30th Anniversary Special Interview Vol.2". Final Fantasy Portal Site, 2020-05-01. Accessed 2024-07-31.
It appears the fringes were supposed to represent reflection of the sun's rays off mineral crystals in the mountains. Can someone get a screenshot of this?Games at that time were played on cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs, and if you put black dots in a plot of all white, it would bleed together on the CRT screen giving you light blue or pink showing up around the black dots. The NES had a limited number of colors, and we wanted to give the illusion of even just the slightest bit more colorfulness. We used tricks like putting black streaks in the white mountain surface to achieve that.
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Viewing those same black and white mountains on an LCD screen now looks different from what we intended when the game was developed, since we input that pixel art to make use of the blurring and warping that occurs when displayed on a CRT screen.
[1] "FINAL FANTASY III 30th Anniversary Special Interview Vol.2". Final Fantasy Portal Site, 2020-05-01. Accessed 2024-07-31.
Statistics: Posted by tepples — Wed Jul 31, 2024 10:26 am — Replies 0 — Views 16