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I am making a new 16-Bit Styled game and I was wondering what the most common sprite resolution is for 16-Bit Systems.

Pixelated Bearz
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    There's no standard. Many sprites had to be composed of multiple smaller tiles because of memory and palette limitations. In the 8-bit era, you would often see sprite flickering because too many sprites were on-screen... when this happened sometimes only a portion of a large sprite would flicker, and this is a giveaway how some of the more prominent objects on screen (the ones that covered a large surface area) are actually multiple sprites. – Andon M. Coleman Aug 16 '15 at 12:26
  • it depends on the game the legend of zelda per example is like 16*16 pixels – Sergi Martinez Aug 16 '15 at 01:48
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about industry trivia. –  Aug 17 '15 at 15:19

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The sprite design of that era was heavily influenced by the technical capabilities of that time.

Both the Sega Genesis and the SNES had specialized hardware for drawing sprites. But in both cases that hardware only allowed sprites with width and height which were multiples of 8. Both systems also had a limit on the number of sprites it could draw every frame and also a limit per scanline. But video memory was very limited, so it was important to not use more 8x8 blocks than necessary.

So spritesets of that era usually had grid sizes which were multiples of 8.

When designing an animated character, it was important to not already fill the whole available size in the base frame. When you add more animation phases, you will usually need additional space, and it would be quite wasteful to use a larger spritesize for some frames just for a few pixels. Sonic the Hedgehog, for example, used a 32x48 sprite size, but the base frame is only 29x39. Still there are animation phases which reach the whole width of 32 or height of 48.

Another limitation of that time was the available color palettes. The Genesis had 512 colors, but only allowed up to 16 different colors per sprite and only 4 such 16 color palettes on the screen at the same time. The SNES was more flexible in this regard: it had a 32,768 color palette (RGB555) with up to 256 simultaneously on one screen.

Philipp
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