i got bored and decided to see how faithfully i could recreate this recent pixel art on a real NES. i had to remove a lot of colors and make a few tweaks to work around the console's extremely restrictive palette and nametable limitations, but overall i'm surprised at how well it turned out! this is using all eight palettes, all 64 sprites, and 254 out of the 256 available background tiles (i scrounged up an extra two tiles after putting together the final ROM last night, lmao).
the left shot is from FCEUX, and the right one is captured from my AV Famicom using a Framemeister! the NTSC artifacting kinda screws with some of the finer details in a still shot, but it actually looks much better in "motion" (displaying both artifact patterns on alternate frames).
these are slightly older images, taken before i added the rest of the background and made some small tweaks, but here you can see the raw background, the sprite overlay that is responsible for the finer color details, and the overlay with each 8x8 tile tinted to show both its exact positioning and to indicate which of the four sprite palettes it uses. separating Tara's colors into individual sprites, arranging them so that no more than 8 appear on any given scanline, and staying within the global 64-sprite limit was by far the most time-consuming part of this little project. i could have maybe squeezed out a few more details if i'd used 8x16 sprites (since that gives you an additional 8x8 tile for "free"), but that comes with its own drawbacks, and would have required me to rearrange everything to account for overlapping sprites exceeding the 8 sprites per scanline limit. it's done and i'm happy with it!!
