Foone🏳️⚧️
oh hey this is interesting: See this palette-cycling-ass effect?
The palette never changes. This game must be doing that /in software/
Foone🏳️⚧️okay, so this fire effect is being run dynamically: it's iterating over part of the screen buffer, and lowering/raising all non-zero pixels, and when those pixels hit values 90 or 111, the increasing/decreasing reverses.
Foone🏳️⚧️but it's happening per-pixel, which means they need to keep track of which pixels are going up and which are going down. So there's some memory used to store that, right?
they didn't hide it in VRAM?
they didn't hide it... on screen?
Foone🏳️⚧️IT'S RIGHT THERE, BABY!
Foone🏳️⚧️The game uses the palette entries 0 and 143 to determine if it's going up or down. #143 pixels are going down, #0 are going up.
And both palette entries are set to pure black, so the fact that part of the screen is being used for algorithm storage isn't visible
Foone🏳️⚧️it's at the top (left and right) and bottom because it was misplaced. The offset is wrong, so it loops around the segment (vertically), and it's placed too far to the right so it scrolls to the left side of the screen.
Foone🏳️⚧️but since it's invisible, who cares?
Foone🏳️⚧️the developer may not have even known they misplaced it
Foone🏳️⚧️I could probably fix it, though.
Foone🏳️⚧️this is what the logo loaded from the datafiles looks like: Since each pixel starts at a different state, we get the fire effect, instead of the whole thing just brightening and darkening in sync
Jonathan Reiter (张飞)@foone@digipres.club looks like the gradient is changed through some sort of perlin noise generator.