![]() What does parallax scrolling require, on a technical level? Conceptually, it’s quite simple: We need to draw the background separately from the foreground, and use different scroll offsets for each. ![]() But the rendering engine itself is still fundamentally EGA-based, and the game does in fact run on EGA cards – just with incorrect colors.īefore we dive into Duke Nukem’s implementation of the effect, let’s take a look at why parallax scrolling was generally hard to do in EGA games. It requires a VGA card and features some 256-color scenes, but all the gameplay itself is using a 16-color EGA mode, just using the VGA palette to achieve custom colors that aren’t possible on EGA. Early DOS games featuring parallax scrolling were typically VGA games, and that’s for good reasons, as we’ll see.ĭuke Nukem is kind of a hybrid. It’s worth noting that the vast majority of early Apogee games targeted EGA, to make the games accessible for people with older hardware (VGA is backwards compatible with EGA). Duke Nukem II’s parallax scrolling in action So by having this feature, Duke Nukem II stands out among Apogee’s catalog of platformers, along with its predecessor Duke Nukem from 1991 and the 1992 game Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure (which shares a lot of code and file formats with Duke 2). There are also some very early examples, like the PC port of the aforementioned Moon Patrol from 1983, but it features only an outline of a background, not a graphical image. Among the side-scrolling DOS games released from 1990 to 1993, very few have parallax scrolling (by 1993, it becomes a little more frequent, but still rare). Popularized by the arcade game Moon Patrol in 1982, the effect was already quite common on arcades and home consoles by the early 90s. Parallax scrolling – creating an illusion of depth in a 2D scene by having the background and foreground move at different speeds – is pretty much a staple of platformers and other 2D games nowadays.
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