What is Colour Blasting on SNES?

Colour Blasting is a term I coined on New Year’s Day 2024 that I like to use to describe all the awesome things you can do on SNES due in part to its amazing colour capabilities, especially for a console of its time. My original idea was to use it as a “cool” back-of-box marketing name for the feature otherwise known as direct colour (bit of a boring name for a feature that allows the SNES to display a massive 2040+1 visible colours on background 1 alone), which I didn’t think would really excite people and capture their imaginations if they saw “uses direct colour” on the back of a new SNES game box. Thus, Colour Blasting was born.

So, what does it mean to have the power of Colour Blasting available to you on SNES?

Well, first it’s important to understand that Colour Blasting has grown into something that reaches beyond just an alternative name for one of the SNES’ specific colour features. It now encapsulates all the background modes (there’s a whopping eight of them), all the cool graphical tricks and features, and really all the particular strengths of the SNES on the whole, especially anything to do with its amazing colour capabilities. It’s very much like the “Blast Processing” buzzword that was coined by Sega’s savvy marketing men during the heyday of the 16-bit consoles. Colour Blasting is the SNES equivalent.

And now that we have that clear . . .

See the gorgeous background layer that’s scrolling past in the SNES-spec mockup below, the power of Colour Blasting is what would allow you do do something like that alongside all the other stuff you see going on at the same time there too:

Looking at the images below, you can see how I’ve shown a way it would be possible to add some lovely semi-transparent reflective water into the first level of TiagoSC’s excellent demo of Sonic the Hedgehog for SNES, which is possible on SNES because of its Colour Blasting capabilities and is detailed further here:

The following footage of the gorgeous underwater level from Donkey Kong Country 3 looks almost like one of Pixar’s animations running on SNES (see from 59:30), and that is very much the power of Colour Blasting in all its glory at work:

When I made the mockup below, I was really thinking about how to take advantage of SNES’ Colour Blasting to put as many colours in the background as possible for those lovely images, while also allowing the SNES to use the second background layer and its 128 sprites to create the illusion of a whole lot of coins on-screen at the same time:

And below are a couple of actual working SNES demo examples that use Colour Blasting to do the opposite of what you might expect, by allowing the SNES to drop down to its special lower-colour Mode 0 (although it’s still roughly 200 colour on-screen total across all backgrounds and sprites), which then allows it to increase to using the full four backgrounds for levels of overlapping parallax plus row/line scrolling that are impossible on any other home consoles of the time to the same degree (some of the examples there aren’t even using the layers fully. And none are even remotely taking full advantage of the sprites yet, which have access to 120 visible colours of their own and can also be used to fake even more background elements if desired):

Similarly, this rough two-day mockup of Symphony of the Night on SNES specifically uses Colour Blasting to force the colours per pixel for each background down into 2bpp mode–although it still allows for 97 visible colours on-screen total for the backgrounds alone, and another 120 visible colours for the sprites too–while allowing for the use of all four full backgrounds again, giving it the ability to have the same amount of overlapping parallax as the original PlayStation game pretty easily, and without sacrificing a single sprite or wasting VRAM on relatively complex and costly tile animations and such to do so:

The reason the SNES is able to display such a detailed and colourful city below in Sim City 2000 at 1:25:42 with all the different buildings and constructions overlapping in a way that goes beyond/breaks the typical 8×8/16×16 4bpp tiling you often noticeably see on systems of that era is, you guessed it, something the SNES’ Colour Blasting allows by giving the SNES the means to run in one of its 8bpp 256-colour [chosen from that massive 32,768-colour master palette] modes:

If you’ve ever wondered how Rare was able to create games with the gorgeous pre-rendered visuals as seen in the likes of the Donkey Kong Country below (see 1:15, 51:53, 52:31, etc)–a game so visually impressive in its day that upon first reveal many people actually thought Nintendo was showing off something from some new 32-bit console–it’s because of the power of Colour Blasting:

All the gorgeous images you see in the mockup below are result of me taking advantage of the SNES’ Colour Blasting (and not even full advantage at that):

See the lovely Kirby’s Dreamland 3 below at 4:05, 9:31, and 19:59, with the subtle blending of the pixels of the 512×224 pseudo high-res background layer for some faux transparency in the foreground, that’s Colour Blasting working its magic:

And there we are, a little insight into the SNES’ Colour Blasting. 🙂