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I've been reading about the gameboy's architecture and internals (in the hopes of making a game with it), and it's pretty amazing how much specialized hardware
by qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I've been reading about the gameboy's architecture and internals (in the hopes of making a game with it), and it's pretty amazing how much specialized hardware there was in earlier generations of consoles, especially compared to the more general modern consoles. And yes, new consoles have GPUs, but those are everywhere.
Your computer has a GPU. It probably doesn't and didn't have scrolling registers or hardware sprites (unless, like the C64, it had a gaming focus).
- iflowfor8hours 10y agoThere is an excellent video from 33c3 about Gameboy internals and all the wonderful tricks that can be utilized when writing software for it. https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8029-the_ultimate_game_boy_talk https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8029-the_ultimate_game_boy_talk
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoC3 never ceases to surprise me. Thanks!
- derefr 10y agoOne could at least describe the "text mode" of VGA/CGA/EGA video hardware as actually being the same kind of "tile mode" you find in consoles. And in slightly more modern video cards (the kind you'd find in a Windows 95/98 machine), the mouse cursor was usually a hardware sprite. (Even today, mouse cursors seem to frequently escape OS gamma correction for some reason...)
- rahimnathwani 10y agoMy first computer was an Acorn Electron, and that had hardware scrolling, too. I don't think it had hardware sprites, but game programmers of that era often used compiled sprites to improve performance.
- kalleboo 10y agoAnd even without a dedicated scrolling register, John Carmack famously managed to get the IBM PC to do scrolling by manipulating the screen buffer address (and emulating sprites by manually redrawing those parts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh