>>58353176That's a filtered mock up. The DMG only has four shades total and one background palette (no per tile colors) so a GBC screen recolored green isn't something a real Game Boy could display.
Picrel: a few period correct DMG (Dot Matrix Game) screenshots (Mole Mania (1996), Legend of the River King (1997), Harvest Moon GB (1998)) so we're comparing like for like instead of cross gen and cross genre cherry picking.
>>58353119Gen 1 Pokemon was built for the 1989 Game Boy: ~4.19 MHz CPU, 8 KB RAM/VRAM, 160x144, 4 shades. Atlantis is a 2001 Game Boy Color game on hardware that's 2x the clock, 4x the RAM, 2x the VRAM, and 32,768 colors with real palettes. GBC titles also commonly shipped with larger ROMs and even cart RAM, letting artists push more/varied assets than most DMG projects. DMG carts could be big, but many early-mid 90s Game Boy games used relatively small ROMs and little/no save RAM because memory was expensive. By the GBC era (1998–2001) memory got cheaper so publishers more often used larger ROM sizes and added SRAM. That extra space let artists include more tilesets, animation frames, enemy/NPC variants, UI art, bigger maps, and better music/data. Also you're comparing a top down RPG to a side scroller. Very different art and memory budgets. A tile based top down RPG with lots of UI, menus, overworld tiles and tons of sprites/NPCs has different constraints than a side scrolling platformer spending memory on large sprites and effects. On DMG you're juggling 10 sprites per scanline (40 total) and palette limits. GBC eases those with more VRAM, palettes, and speed. It's later, faster hardware with more RAM/VRAM, palettes, and a faster clock. So basically you're a fucking retard. Judge Pokemon against other DMG era RPGs, not late gen GBC showcase titles.
