I'm hacking on Jurassic Park (SNES) (for the usual reasons) and it turns out this is one of the weird games that stores your health not as a number that goes down from some maximum, but as a number that counts up

it's also running in a Fun video mode: 512x224!
This gets stretched out to the normal aspect ratio (8:7) but it does mean the game is effectively running with pixels that are twice as tell as they are wide.

The game doesn't look like it's using super-tall pixels, though. These look pretty square to me.

This is for a funny reason...

If we look at a screenshot without aspect ratio correction, you'll notice that EVERY PIXEL IS DOUBLE WIDE.

So they set it up so that every pixel is double-wide, then set a high-resolution width of the screen (so it runs at 512 instead of 256)

Doesn't this seem like just running at 256x224 with extra steps?

it's actually to enable a trick to get pseudo-transparency. The backgrounds & sprites are double width, but the UI isn't, because it only appears on odd-numbered columns of the display.

A zoom in

on a relatively blurry CRT this effect probably looked halfway decent

This fucker seems to encode each portrait with a separate palette. That's especially annoying because ALL THESE PORTRAITS ARE GREYSCALE

you're not my dad, don't tell me how to live my life

I've got a partial disassembly project and I still haven't figured out how to inject text into this or extract the font!

https://github.com/Yoshifanatic1/Jurassic-Park-1-SNES-disassembly