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I have a strong programming background just not from game development. I only made some pong and snake in high school and I did some OpenGL in college.

I want to make my own game engine. Nothing fancy just a simple 2D game engine. But because I'm kinda old school and feeling retro. I want graphics to look like old 8 bit games (megaman, contra, super mario, ...).

So how were the old games made back then? I want the simplest approach. Were they also using assets (images) like newer engines now do? How do you achieve this kind of rendering using OpenGL?

Keep in mind. Simplest solution. I want to know how it was made back then and how I can replicate that. Doesn't even have to be OpenGL. I can draw on window canvas. I do want to make it from scratch basically.

Matjaz Muhic
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    8bit graphics are a matter of assets and not programming, I suppose you could limit your color palette in the code, but that sounds a little too much just for the old school feel. – Luke B. Nov 26 '12 at 19:13
  • If you want 8-bit like graphics, limit the color palette when you make your art assets and always use nearest-neighbor filtering on textures. – Robert Rouhani Nov 26 '12 at 19:14
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    Where to get started and which technology to use questions are off topic for the site. See the [FAQ] to learn what types of questions to ask here. You could try rewording your question to just ask about how to render 8bit graphics, and remove everything about making a game engine. – House Nov 26 '12 at 19:19
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    What Byte56 said - this could be a great and useful question if you reworked it to be more specific to a precise topic. – Maximus Minimus Nov 26 '12 at 19:34
  • Changed. Hope it's better now. – Matjaz Muhic Nov 26 '12 at 19:47
  • Seems like an acceptable question to me now, please all, reconsider your close votes. – jcora Nov 26 '12 at 20:00
  • How it was made back then has already been asked: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/443/how-were-8-bit-and-16-bit-games-developed?rq=1 Perhaps further edit the question to just ask how to do it now. @Bane, there's no way to "undo" close votes, just down votes. – House Nov 26 '12 at 20:00
  • Oh, OK, I wasn't aware of that. – jcora Nov 26 '12 at 20:05

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So how were the old games made back then?

Completely differently -- more akin to what we would now call "embedded system programming". Mode-based graphics from 8-bit consoles and arcade boxes were driven by the hardware, not the software. The game code (typically assembly) poked specialized memory on an instruction-schedule (e.g. X instructions per scanline).

How do you achieve this kind of rendering using OpenGL?

Texture-map a quad with filtering turned off. Better yet, batch several quads together and atlas the assets for better performance.

Max
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