The Magic Of Mode 7: The Tremendous Nintendo's Secret Weapon

The Tremendous Nintendo featured seven completely different video rendering modes, every providing a unique stage of show element, proven in a single to 4 background layers. A lot of the Tremendous Nintendo’s video games utilized Mode 1, which may show 16-color sprites and backgrounds on two layers plus a 4-color sprite on a 3rd layer. This little trick was the important thing to the parallax scrolling impact you’d see in video games like “Tremendous Mario World,” the place background parts would scroll at completely different charges from foreground parts.

Mode 7, nevertheless, was the one one in every of these show modes that permitted superior visible results. In a nutshell, Mode 7 permits the Tremendous Nintendo to take a 2D picture and apply 3D rendering results to it, comparable to scrolling, curving, stretching, and extra. By switching to Mode 7, video games may remodel one in every of their background layers into an independently shifting picture, which may very well be used for gameplay modifications and easy spectacle. Plus, with a little bit of inventive warping, a 2D picture may very well be turned into a pseudo-3D view, having 2D sprites transfer round in a flat 3D house. It is form of like rolling a ball on a treadmill.