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The big difference there is that the gameboy didn't have a way for you to draw on the screen directly. It was a sprite/tile-mapped only system. Same with the
by simcop2387 10y ago
The big difference there is that the gameboy didn't have a way for you to draw on the screen directly. It was a sprite/tile-mapped only system. Same with the NES and SNES, which is why a co-processor such as the SuperFX was needed, to generate the tiles needed for arbitrary graphics. the Megaman X series also used a coprocessor (in 2+ i think?) that allowed them to use compressed data and arbitrary rotation of a sprite by generating the tiles on the fly.
- camhenlin 10y agoInterestingly, in MegaMan X2 and X3, the Cx4 coprocessor built into the game cartridge is used for some very specific wireframe animations used in only very specific areas of each game and was largely unnecessary. (Only 2 scenes in X2: a miniboss and the final boss, and one scene in X3: after defeating the final boss)
- simcop2387 10y agoInteresting, I had thought it did some sprite compression also but it looks like I was confusing it with the SDD-1. There's a lot of neat co-processors out there that got used. It's one of the things I loved about the cartridge era systems because it let them get upgraded in ways you can't do anymore.
- khedoros1 10y agoSome few games on the NES had RAM instead of ROM for graphics storage. Many more games supported bank-switching. Each 8KB bank of graphics tiles would provide enough tiles to uniquely cover a little over 1/4 of the screen, and hsync time would be enough time to switch to the next bank, every 1/4 of the image. I think that transferring 60K of data from the CPU to PPU every frame would be completely infeasible, though. All that in mind, I'm very impressed by how well the game Elite runs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoBIOi00sEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoBIOi00sEI