MMC2 Magic - How Punch-Out's Graphics Work

The way punch out utilized the NES' limitations will never not be amazing. Another game is recca. Recca did some magic

I love the cleverness of programmers from the 80s & 90s. Creativity comes from constraints, not unlimited resources.

When you said "Wait, scrolling in Punch-Out? We'll get to that later", my thought was "Yeah, of course! For the training scene where you run through the city and Doc rides the bike!", but the real answer was MUCH cooler. Any chance you might do a little bonus video about how that scene works? The parallax effect is really cool.

You've really helped me appreciate how amazing this game is by 1987 standards.

I love these deep dives of NES games.

that 'whatever this is' in the corner looks like the arm of the ring corner man/coach that stands on the ground of the ring. His arm resting on the ring just happens to coincide where the scroll breaks from top to bottom, that can't have been an accident. How neat...

So, basically we're controlling the background instead of a moving sprite? This is certainly unique!

I love that scrolling trick to make Little Mac animate smoothly and the fact that they had to finagle Mario Ref's smooth movement into different tiles for it to also look like smooth sprite movement. Clever stuff indeed. Thank you for making another great video!

Holy crap, this is so cool to see. I never even considered Punch Out being technically impossible to do with sprites alone. Wow. Would it be too far to call that magic in the programming sense?

I always thought the larger opponent in Punch-Out was drawn as background tiles, pretty cool to know Little Mac is the background "sprite"

Nintendo made an updated version, the MMC4, which was used only on three Famicom games. The two Fire Emblem games and Famicom Wars. Though I can't recall offhand what was different from the MMC2. I know in the Fire Emblem games, tiles FD and FE are the left and right window border tiles. That means they are literally used to "open" and "close" the menu tileset on each scanline.

13:47 I loved that scene where he said "It's scrollin' time" and then scrolled all over the place

Very cool video! I always wondered how PunchOut had such large, flicker-free sprites. I can see why MMC2 was only used for MTPO... seems like it was designed specifically for that game.

When I played this as a teenager in the 80s, I always thought programming this game must have been so much simpler than ‘complex’ games like SMB. There’s no moving around anywhere you want, only 1 screen to deal with, and 1 basic mechanic of game play. I had no idea it required the MMC2 and a bunch of tricks to pull it off, and that it would have been next to impossible without that extra chip. Wow…just wow! Thanks for explaining it!

Bank switching done by hardware compare + the scrolling surprise made this a really fascinating episode. Thanks for dissecting this one for us :)

I always knew that Punch Out!!! used some trickery, but it was easy to hand-wave it all and say "Eh, MMC2 witchcraft". But it never settled right with me; sure, the gfx stuff made some sense, but to put the smooth animation on that seemed like a lot. So now you're showcasing the scrolling flag and how the MMC2 steals the show and saves memory and time. I knew that the work involved would have been heavy, but I had no clue how much time was saved by having the MMC2 go "Whoops, new bank!" half-way through a screen draw. I even tried to understand the game, but I didn't fully understand how these pieces fit together. It's really quite amazing to see how much they could do with what they had. I'd have loved to see the Blaster Master and Punchout coders build anything together. There's just so much talent between them!

This is without a doubt my favorite channel on YT. Lately I've started to look for your videos a couple days before they get released.

This is one of the weirdest mappers, totally fascinating to see your breakdown.

Holy shit, your videos are such a treat. Not only is the explanation digestible, but these deep dives are tech history. Someone in the god damn 80s came up with this solution to work around the NES' limitations! Top moments for me: 1. Going from "what's with that $FF corridor to Mac's right?" to actually shouting "OF COURSE!!!!" when you revealed the obvious 2. Going from "what do you mean, scrolling? There's no scrolling here", to "OF COURSE IT SCROLLS!" 3. Watching Don Flamenco take a barrage behind the outro cards

Super excited on the trajectory of these recent videos - Sprite 0 teasing and hopefully some MMC3(or 4, or 5) game dives to follow, like Kirby's Adventure. Love your work!