ActRaiser used it for some special effects here and there - flying down to the surface before a battle sequence, or making a boss rotate. There was a Konami space shooter that I remember making pretty interesting use of it on certain levels. Lucasarts used Mode 7 for one of the Death Star levels in Super Star Wars (flying over the surface, shooting towers and TIEs), but I think that was a bit ambitious for the time. Mode 7 was the mode of real, ultimate power.Īs mentioned, flying around the world map in Final Fantasy was a great effect. Likewise other drawing routines are there to enable programmers to present nifty effects on the screen or reduce the burden for commonly used operations. So Mode 7 wasn't just a marketing term in the sense that it was actually a set of usable routines for drawing images to the screen. It's not really anything special about the hardware per se, but obviously the hardware has to be fast enough to allow the transforms to occur at a high frame rate. Other details like objects on the map can be set to appear at different distances, and there is a vanishing point for things that might be compared to polygon "pop-in" that you see in modern 3D engines. That's pretty much what Mode 7 was doing - it redraws that checker board to give the illusion of depth. Now adjust you viewing angle to 45 degrees. Imagine looking straight down at a checker board. Mode 7 essentially is a set of math transforms that took a 2D image and presented it with the illusion of 3D based on inputs from the programmer that determined the viewers height and angle to the map. It's a pretty obvious effect, and it's easy to tell when games are using it. Rather than simple turns where you can only see what is directly in front of you, scaling the entire environment expands what the viewer can see, and gives a limited illusion of 3D. Games like Mario Kart and F-Zero are good examples of this. It allowed them to give the user a sense of perspective. Mode 7 was Nintendo's term for scaling and rotating tricks that Nintendo had implemented for developers to use.
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