Mike Tyson's Punch Out is a Technical Masterpiece, Here's Why.
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- Опубліковано 20 чер 2024
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/ sharopolis
It's a Punch Out deep dive!
Mike Tyson's Punch Out! is stupid clever in the way that it works and sometimes plain stupid. I go in for a detailed look at this 80's NES classic.
00:00 Intro
01:15 PCBWay Sponsorship
02:20 Giant bad guys thanks to clever use of backgrounds
06:58 MMC 2 The unique enhancement chip
12:30 Sprite 0
14:27 The Mystery of the colour changing shorts
16:15 MMC4 on the Famicom only
17:28 Other contenders
18:21 Ending waffle and Patreon thanks. - Ігри
Sprite 0 in the fights is used to shift Mac at pixel granularity left and right as he dodges, throws punches, etc. Since he's a background tile, you can't just shift him by a little. Instead they shift the entire background a little left and right. That's why the entire mat at Mac's level has no side graphics. If you want to see it in action, change one of the mat tiles to something that can be differentiated, and you'll see it slide left and right with Mac. If you disable split scrolling in the fight by writing a 1 to RAM location 0x22, Mac will just stand there like he's stuck in a tight space even when he dodges.
I was yelling at the screen thank you.
I was wondering about that. I figured they did a bank switch through banks with different stages of animation. Seemed like a lot of work.
Cool! You forgot one thing though: the sprite / background priority is changed mid frame so that the sprites appear in front of the crowd at the top of the screen but behind the player at the bottom.
Sprite priority can't be changed mid frame via raster effects, instead each sprite has its priority bit set accordingly. Even MC Kids does something like that for your player character to be behind cloud tiles.
So then that’s why Little Mac moves lower on the screen at knock outs. Interesting.
What I want to know is why doesn't the green part of Mac's tiles show in front of the opponent's sprites?
I never even noticed the lack of sprite flicker, i was too busy playing the game. Thanks for sharing this info Sharopolis.
Sprite Zero Hit actually has a second use that you don't normally think about: Letting you know when vblank time ends. There can be code inside the vblank handler that repeatedly checks for Sprite 0 Hit no longer being set, and that can be a synchronization point for the beginning of the screen.
I always thought the sprite-zero flesh sprite was the enemy's coach putting his arm under the ropes trying to hype up his fighter 😂
I'm legitimately amazed how the stuff that least leaves an impression in the game, the pre-fight screens, are actually the ones that require special tech. What a fascinating cart this is.
omg, i remember looking at punch-out's sprites and trying to figure out how the fighters never clashed with little mac or mario in both size and palette, and it never occured to me that little mac and mario were part of the background the whole time. absolute genius!
I have to wonder why they didn't just make the player's gear white all the time, rather than have it change
Never occurred to me that Mac's colors were tied to Mario being on the screen, I used to take the color change as a signal that the player had control now which I guess it does inadvertently also serve as because of the timing of everything.
Some of the enemy boxer animation frames do span over two graphics banks, so they need to use the latch titles to get graphics from the two different banks.
Looking back on it, I, and no doubt many others, was spoiled by this game. It never occurred to me just how great an achievement it was getting such large figures to perform such crisp, detailed animations with _no_ slowdown, flicker, or frame loss. Compare that to Double Dragon, Mega Man, Shinobi, Metal Gear, Kung Fu, 10 Yard Fight, among numerous others.
For the record, I remember the arcade Punch-Out. It was actually the basis for Super Punch-Out for the SNES. You might want to give that a look if you haven't already, it was pretty wild.
This is officially my favorite episode to date. I always wondered how it pulled off such large characters for the Nes. I originally thought they might be background, but then how'd they appear over the audience when knocked out. If they were both player and enemy sprites that would be more than 8 per scanline. I never would have guessed the smaller player character was background and sprite/background priority was switched mid frame.
When I was a little boy my uncle told me that the graphic in the ring that represents Sprite 0 was the tail of Great Tiger's tiger.
I always used to think that Sprite Zero in the corner was something like the hand of a cornerman for your opponent.
Mike Tyson's Punch Out also had several "hacks" in programming that improved the sound and music over the baseline NES quality - and I believe these utilized the MMC as well. I'm too lazy to google it, but it's obvious that the music and sound is superior to the basic bleeps and blops of early NES games.
That was very interesting. Punch Out is one of my most favorite games from my childhood. Do you even know, that it took me about 30 years to beat all enemies? But only since I got to know the double-down dodge move in the last decade.
Punch-Out on NES endured because it was on home console and got passed around. The arcade version was more obscure and wasn't even around for that long. Meanwhile the NES game could be found for decades in any flea market, salvation army, yard sale, retro game store, older cousin's hand me downs, ect. You had kids giving each other tips for how to beat the tougher boxers. It was hype.
*poonch euoght
Had this game and remember my thumbs hurting afterwards
Looks really good for the NES, so does Graidius!! back in the 80s in our arcades it was called Nemesis, I know MAME had both versions if they are different?
Thank you awesome video. I just started posting my work on nesmaker with tutorials. I made a rad racer style engine with no sprite zero and using sprites for now pieces of the road.
Watching videos like these help me to be more creative with the limatations of the NES.
Fancy meeting you here Pat! ;)
Yet another fantastic video from my absolute favourite channel. Always top quality stuff! As I’ve commented before the truly great broadcasters of all time, be it radio, television or podcasting is that they all sound like an old friend. One of your mates you can pop down to the pub with for a chat. The likes of John Peel, Kenny Everett, Norm MacDonald all shared this quality and you my good man have it in spades. The combination of your knowledge, technical know how, clever and always witty wordplay plus your genuine humility are a sure fire winner. In answer to your recent post asking why not many people had watched this latest great video maybe the answer lies within that very humility I just mentioned. You don’t plaster everything everywhere and certainly do not even approach the ridiculous lengths these young, click bait pedalling, like hunting whippersnappers go to. I’m a firm believer in quality over quantity - do you or have you considered doing a longer, presumably cheaper to produce podcast version of your show too - it could help. Anyway keep up the good work!
lil mac is the background but is on top on the enemy *mind blown*
I really enjoyed this one, and I'd be totally down for it if you did more videos about other MMC (or 3rd party) NES chips that don't get much attention. Like I know there were MMC5 and MMC6 but I don't know much about them. MMC3 seems to get all the coverage.
MMC6 is basically just MMC3 with RAM integrated inside. Used by Startropics and Startropics II. It's less RAM than would normally come on a NES cartridge, 1KB instead of 8KB.
The MMC5 is best known for being used in the US version of Castlevania 3. It also added two pulse wave and one DPCM channel, but as with all expansion audio it only ever got used in the few Japanese games that had it.
The commentary, editing, and gameplay capture on these videos is really fantastic!
I KOed Tyson in the first round after knocking him down just twice (after a lot of practice and 007 codes) I was 9. I don’t understand what happened.
This was my absolute favorite game as I grew up...I beat it and years later everyone thought I was lying...never realized it was that hard of a game...but it was absolutely my favorite.
Your videos are always superb, thanks for the great job you do to explain all to understand. Greetings from Spain.
What a cool overview. Cheers and big ups for putting this video together.
That mid-scanline swapping was also neccesary to have those fluent instants responses when a hit gets registered; this game was unique for that, and if they didn't go the extra mile in experimenting with that chip we'd be noticing one of the first cases of "input lag" either ruining a faster-paced game, or another one of many with glitchy animations to compensate.
Mike Tyson's Punch Out is known to have two frames of input lag. The MMC2's Mid-scanline tile swapping feature has absolutely nothing to do with input lag at all.
@@Dwedit without that swapping feature it would've absolutetly taken more frames, making perfect timing impossible and animation less fluent -;) that's the whole point.
But you seem to know better so-- do tell me what you think it was for, then 🤷♂
I've been asking myself why little mac's pants changed color for years.
Fun fact: King Hippo is the same name I use for my ex sister in law.
I never would have guessed those two were on the background layer. You make more stuff like this? I do love learning about 8/16 bit development trick
If the enemy's sprite priority is set to be behind the background layer, how come the enemy doesn't disappear under the blue/green floor area? Is that area actually transparent and there's a 2nd blue/green background layer under it showing through?
Love it. I'm still trying to learn more in regarding to drawing bigger sprites for the NES.
You should look into the sprite for the bird that carries you up the clouds in Iron sword. I believe they used a clever trick to pull off such a large sprite.
punchout is one of the best games on NES, without a doubt. if you can beat this game you have amazing reflexes. I've managed to do it twice.
*poonch aought
So, the most impressive thing for me here is how the background tiles are changing to loads of variations to get all the different frames of animation for Little Mac [and Mario] and moving as such speed with apparently no issues whatsoever. If backgrounds are this capable them I don't know why we didn't see far more animated bosses on the likes of the SNES when they were created with background tiles. They often just looked like one large object simply moving around the screen with very little else happening to give the boss or whatever more life and character. Here, it's dang impressive and indeed so convincing that I guarantee no one ever suspected Little Mac wasn't sprites until they saw videos like this. I know I certainly never did.
There are issues. The big issue is likely cart space. Punch-Out uses 128kb for its graphics, which is the same as games like Super Mario Bros 2 and Mega Man 3. But Punch-Out has "only" 11 enemies and a single-screen "stage", while games like SMB2 and MM3 have large, varied worlds. There are other various issues of course. Devs may be burning their "budget" on other graphical effects, such as animating backgrounds in various ways or just squeezing out more tile variety. It is also worth noting that in most mappers, bank switching is not "free". It takes time to call for a bank switch, and inefficient and/or repeated bank switching can eat into the time necessary to run the rest of your game code. (Indeed, some games suffer slowdown at least in part due to inefficient bank swapping. Expanding your graphics options through bank swapping can also be inefficient space-wise, requiring some tiles to be duplicated across multiple banks.
You just get the impression Nintendo got very lazy after the release of the SNES. Given the ability of the hardware, I found the artstyle (for the most part) to be very lacklustre, especially in the first 3 years of its life.
Even when you take a game they really spent time on in-house, like Yoshi's Island, even that game's effects and sprite sizes were largely down to the Super FX Chip, rather than pushing the boat out with development techniques per se. Even then, the game didn't look THAT impressive, even though it still looked very nice and was great fun.
I always felt more could have been gotten out of the hardware and we only really saw glimpses of what the console could do, whereas you always felt Sega was squeezing every drop of juice out of that Genesis at all times and for the most part to more impressive effect in my opinion.
The less good looking always make the most effort to scrub up.
@@inceptional Yeah very few games took advantage of background layers on the SNES the way Sega did with the Genesis. In saying that, I think the Genesis had a configuration that was more conducive to producing scrolling parallax, it seemed to be the trademark of most games on the system.
ThunderForce IV is still the game I refer back to if we want to talk about background layers. That was probably the Genesis pushed to the absolute maximum in terms of background work, so you're right that there's probably little motivation to continue retro hacking Genesis games. Although in saying that, have you seen the work done reworking Sunset Riders from the ground up? The new port looks planets apart from that original abomination that came out, it's pretty close to the arcade now.
PS:- How long have you been doing stuff on the SNES? Are you doing this on original hardware, or PC emulated tools? I'd like to get into something like that, but I'd literally be starting from ground zero, so would be interested to know the best way to start out going about it.
@@Longlostpuss I'm doing this in Game Maker 8.1 with the SNES limitations in mind, and it's been tested by someone who can do SNES programming using a Super Mario World hack and basically inserting my graphics and stuff into that, so I know it definitely works. I personally don't know how fast that would translate when running on an actual SNES but right now it's really just doing the background stuff and the sprite stuff is very basic, so I imagine it wouldn't actually be too taxing on the SNES in its current form. As it currently stands, I expect it could stay at the max 60fps without any issues, since it's really only doing a handful of instructions per frame to achieve everything that's currently there (such is the benefit of Mode 0).
Interestingly, Thunder Force IV is still stuck with only two backgrounds layers as per the Genesis' hard limit on backgrounds, but it does some really impressive visual trickery to make it look like it's doing otherwise, especially on the Trite level. I fully intend to blatantly steal that technique at some point and incorporate it into my game alongside the two additional full background layers that the SNES Mode 0 has access to. I'm actually doing a small amount of it in my current examples in principle, such as for the cars on the road in the first level, but I have a couple of ideas for levels that will really show it off.
So far, based on what I've read, there's no specific feature the Genesis has that allows it to do all the line-scrolling and priority switching any better than SNES. I just think most developers on SNES ignored it because they could instantly use 3 fully overlapping layers in Mode 1 anyway. But, personally, I wish more of them had gone further and combined those extra layers alongside a bunch of line-scrolling effects. I've found a few examples of SNES games that really do show that effect off much more than usual though, like Scramble Valkyrie for example, and it looks great on SNES.
@@inceptional Nice.
With regards to the Genesis background layers, I think this may be being oversimplified by saying it was restricted to only two.
From what I've been able to dig up, it had 2 scrolling layers, 1 sprite layer and 1 window pane. I'm no expert, but could this not be interpreted as 4 total layers if the developer knew what they were doing? This might explain how they were able to achieve something like Thunder Force IV, because to this day I've not seen anything like it in a 2D game and this went all the way back to '92. It looked like something the Neo Geo would be expected to do.
In your opinion, what was the SNES best looking game (and you're not allowed to pick the obvious ones like Donkey Kong Country or Star Fox)?
What was the game that represented technical mastery in your opinion which got the closest to showing off what the machine could do?
I had this game when it came out, absolutely loved it, one of the best.
Another great video! like the break downs. Keep them coming
Thanks! Will do!
You wold always hear punch out in the arcade before u would see it. I saw it in 84 as a 4 year old.
You could talk about any punch-out!! Game and I would be more than happy to listen thank you for sharing this information and your thoughts and time!
Always enjoy your videos. Keep em’ coming!
I bought a cheap X350 Chinese handheld emulator that plays NES,SNES,SEGA,GB,GBC,GBA games and i can't be happier with it. Best 20$ I've spent since i bought that cute blonde a vodka and orange in 2014 at 2am. It came with punch out (and 10 000 other games) so I've been playing it again recently.
14:10 bike bike bike, n***a stole my bike bike bike, n***a stole, n***a stole, n***a stole my bike!
Another excellent video -- oddly enough, did not receive an alert this was published.
Ditto. Click on the bell if you don't want to worry about missing anything in the future.
You have to love the quirks that the limitations create - even after getting special chips.
I have played this game off and on over the years since I was a small child back in the 90s. How on earth is it that I never realized that Little Mac's palette changes at the start of the fight?
I always thought sprite zero was somebody at ringside with his face and nose on the mat for some reason
this was one of the first games I ever bought as a kid. What a gem! Never did beat it but had a blast getting to Mike Tyson…it felt like an accomplishment just to get knocked out by him.
I can appreciate that you haven't played much Punch Out so you wouldn't be familiar with the subtle patterns of the boxers but it looks like a you have literally NEVER played any video game before, lol!
Most of the boxer have MAJOR tells before they punch and dodging is just a simple dpad press left or right. One opponent literally flashes before he punches and you still got hit... And when you did manage to dodge a punch half the time Little Mac just sat there and didn't punch back!!
Just busting your chops, I loved the video! Pulling the curtain back on these games and systems of my youth is very interesting to me! Keep up the good work, sir!!
Sprite zero being on the right side like that is incredibly clever. On a crt television that area is technically not seen by the player under normal circumstances. I believe fceu and other emulators also have that feature where you can cut off the last bit of columns on the left and right side of the screen.
Is the zeroith sprite really doing nothing? Was it palette limitations that made them use skin color rather than drawing a non-transparent version of blue of the ring for the sprite?
I'm surprised that they just didn't have Mac always wear white trunks. If they just did that consistently, nobody would know that they were supposed to be any other color.
Or just give him Mario's hat palette.
Very cool and informative video! Thanks a lot!
Great video - I'd like to suggest Elite on the NES for your next deep dive. I'd love to see how the wireframe graphics for that were implemented!
Really awesome - Must have taking a long time to do all the test - very good thx.
Thanks! Yes this video took a while. I'm glad it's finally starting to get some views!
it does look great for nes
The commodore Amiga often had to apply the tactics to overcome its limitations.
One of the things about the Tyson license was, Mike Tyson was sort of an underdog at the time, so Nintendo were able to pick up the license for cheap. Tyson only became world champion *after* the game's release -- afger which, of course, the game sold like hotcakes.
That's not true because Tyson became champion November 22 1986! And Tyson's punch out came out in the fall of 1987!
So many memories....would play with my dad. Boxing is the sport we bond over to this day.
IIRC, the MMC2 posed some difficulty for early NES emulators as Punch-Out was listed as a game that was incompatible.
WTF, I always thought the boxers were the background layer.
How did I never know Little Mac was a background? He might be the smoothest animated background character I've seen. Only thing similar I can think of are the 8-bit ports of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2 on GB & SMS/GG if I'm not mistaken, impressive but definitely choppy!
I can watch these videos all day,
Being able to add new tech to the cartridges is really something consoles today miss. It allowed game developers to go beyond the boundaries of the console and be very creative. Its the reason why the games library of the NES (and SNES) had such a huge variety. Nowadays all games are basically just scripts for Unreal or Unity. It's why there's not been real innovation in games as much as most of them are built within the constraints of these engines.
On rare occasion it happens some game developer decides not to use these engines and that's where still interesting things happen. Like Minecraft for example. But unfortunately its understandable that this is rare. Its just so much easier to just use a premade game engine. Starting games from scratch is just very hard and time consuming. I'm sure many game ideas got lost the past years just because the ready made engines did not provide the needed capabilities and the devs had no time to develop it themselves. Let alone game ideas that would require new hardware! That's something that has not happened for probably over 10 years now, which back in the days of the NES and SNES was actually something that was more the rule then the ocassion.
I have infinite patience for talk about the intricacies of how people pushed old consoles to their limits
I'm surprised someone still talks about punch out I wish there were more games to the series
The arcade version was terrific. I can't count the amount of money I spent playing that.
Very interesting video
I always tout that the mmc2 chip was responsible for those large sprites on screen but it turns out to be responsible for mid-scanline spite updates,now what nintendo has done here is pretty clever by making mac & mario to part of the background and the boss to be a huge sprite,
Sure they could,ve decide to do it the otherway around but then i can imagine that if the boss will fight or fall in front of the crowd,that parts of those BG tile sets from that boss needs to be replaced with sprite tile sets,or it would,ve require tons and tones of extra BG tile sets to make sure the boss is always in line with the crowd in the background without introducing clashes but that would,ve very hard,
Also i suppose that blue or green mat uses a transparrant color to avoid mario or max to clash in with the boss,
And lastly i was thinking, if george formance ko boxing and power punch 2 uses the mmc3 chip, i was thinking “what if somebody could altering and port punch out to the mmc3 chip sothat we can run it on nested as well,if😁
Is Power Punch 2 the one that got ported to Commodore 64 as the Frank Bruno game?
I wasnt around during the 80s but man punchout is one of my all time favorites. When i had the time to watch ufc, every fight night id play it both before the fights and during, if there was a fight i didnt care to watch id put the fight on my phone and punchout on the tv. The sound is really good for the time, and the graphics are incredible for an nes game. The nes punchout is the only punchout i like. I absolutely loathe any other version!
With a CRT display from that time, would Sprite 0 even be visible at the farthest edge of the frame?
Some of them. I remember stepping into electronic stores back when they had CRTs and they all looked different.
So why not make Mack a bit bigger since he's just background and not limited to the sprite limitations? You'd think they could also make him a wireframe like the arcade version.
Sponsorship actually ends at 2:30
Smart talk
More please
So...the MMC 2 chip is effective at very fast bank switching? At least that's what it looks like too me. When I was a kid I never understood why Punchout was so expensive compared to other carts. I think my mom paid 65.96 for that cart instead of the usual 59.96 they usually ran for in 1987. I distinctly remember her being a bit annoyed that the game I wanted was more expensive than the other games at...I think it was Walmart.
MMC Memory management control.
On the topic of losing the Mike Tyson brand: when their contract expired, Tyson had lost the title and wasn't as dominant a force as he used to be, so Nintendo elected not to renew.
Couldn't they just made Macs gloves and shorts white?
How did I never notice that his pants change color?
Haven't watched this channel in a while
Glad to have you back! The algorithm is being kind this month.
@@Sharopolis awesome 👌 love your videos you always do a great analysis
So then, it's still a mystery why they used the MMC2 chip & not the MMC1?
Was this the same game as frank brunos?
I beat up Mike Tyson back in 1988.
On NINTENDO
So why not just have Lil Mac's shorts & boxing gloves be White? Would have been perfectly fine I think.
There's small "donk" sound every 5 seconds in the audio in some parts of the video. You can hear it easiest at the end. It's driving me crazy. It's like Chinese water torture.
=SO,THE PUNCH-OUT IS A SONIC R OF NES.......VERY UNUSUAL,THOUGH
......YUP,I KNOW ABOUT HOW UNIQUE THAT SONIC R WAS IN TERMS OF PROGRAMMING.......
Powkiddy V2 How to add more rom
I bought UA-cam premium So i dont have to listen ads in videos or lies about VPN, except i still have to
Sponsor block might help
If you watch on computer, I'm going to change your life by telling you about the J and L keys, which move videos forward and back by ten seconds each press.
Many video creators make their ads with specific blocks of time, like 30 or 60 or 90 seconds, so L jumps will bring you perfectly to the end of the ad. And those that don't, you can either choose to miss fewer than ten seconds of video, or press J once at the end and watch fewer than 10 seconds of ad.
I don't watch on mobile much, so no idea if something similar is built in there or not.
These creators still have to earn a living, so it’s okay by me!
@@Morgan423Z you can with mobile too. Just double tap the screen towards the right for forward or to the left for backwards by 10 secs each jump.
@@thecunninlynguist didn’t know about this one it might be useful but still
I remember when Jimmy Fallon had Iron Mike on and Mike couldn't beat himself in Mike Tyson's Punch Out 🤣
I beat Glass Joe by decision everytime, get on my level scrub😎
Comment for engagement points
Man, Punch-Out In Space is such a solid concept for a game, especially in the late 80s. Too bad it sucked.
you really should improve at that game tho
"Poonch euoght" wtf lol
You mean it would be a masterpiece if Nintendo would of did a remake on Mike Tyson punch out but yet again Nintendo doesn’t like to do remakes and the NES ruined arcade hits I was buying arcade machines instead of NES cartridges cause how much better the arcade was I don’t see any reason to why I would want to go back back and play on the NES when it was the worst Nintendo console of all time Super Nintendo wasn’t bad it was a lot better it didn’t ruin street fighter 2 final fight turtles in time as the NES ruined teenage mutant ninja turtles operation wolf prisoners of war P.O.W. Bad dudes lots more I give the NES an F
Mike Tyson punch out is no different then the one that comes with Mr Dream second Mike Tyson doesn’t do real in the game as he does in the UFC games the original xbox boxing game you couldn’t even play as Mike Tyson on the NES it was dumb
I still cannot understand your breathing pattern and rhythm. You take breaths at the WEIRDEST TIMES. I just don't understand it. Is it narration, or do you talk like that normally?
Who is playing so poorly? I can't pay attention to the tehnical details when the gameplay is shit