I was reading an interview (http://www.miyamotoshrine.com/theman/interviews/0561.shtml) Miyamoto gave where he mentions that Yoshi, as Mario's sidekick in a game, was "impossible technically" before the SNES:
QuoteA good example is Yoshi the dinosaur who just appeared in Super Mario World. We wanted to have Mario ride a dinosaur ever since we finished the original Super Mario Bros., but it was impossible technically. We were finally able to get Yoshi off the drawing boards with the Super NES.
I've seen the work JY Company did in its 8-bit version of SMW -- they made it work.
Miyamoto just didn't believe. Or maybe they wanted him to have like... Lots of abilities or something that the hardware couldn't handle.
Maybe his vision of Yoshi was different when the NES was alive, and it slightly changed over time. It also could've been simply because he didn't think the NES could handle it. I think JY Company was able to do it because Yoshi was already in a game, so they didn't have to think of anything original...they may have also adapted Yoshi's movements and colors in ways that Nintendo didn't think about back in the day so he could work on the NES
There was probably a certain amount of detail that Miyamoto wanted Yoshi to have. Yes, it's technically possible to have Yoshi on the NES, but, at the time, it probably wasn't everything Miyamoto wanted it to be, so they shelved the idea.
The Yoshi that's in the SMW pirate is more like a proof-of-concept version of Yoshi. It's proves that it's possible, but it's not very good.
It's also possible that he was just simplifying a much longer anecdote to "not technically possible".
I think it's because the sprite with Mario riding Yoshi would turn out too large for the system to handle properly, and also the sprite color limitations would not allow for different colors for Mario & Yoshi. (please somebody with more experience with NES dev correct me if wrong :)).
The SMW pirate Yoshi doesn't look very good, it seems that it resorts to programming quirks to get its colors.
Quote from: 133MHz on April 16, 2009, 08:07:51 pm
The SMW pirate Yoshi doesn't look very good, it seems that it resorts to programming quirks to get its colors.
It depends on how you build your sprites. You're typically stuck with only three colors (technically four, but the fourth is always a "transparent" value). You can get around this by stacking sprites on top of each other and having them move in unison. This is how Megaman manages to have five colors (black, dark blue, light blue, skintone, white). His face/eyes are a separate sprite.
In that case, maybe they thought it would take too many stacked sprites to do, taking too many away from what they could use for enemies and obstacles.