This reminds me of the Atari 7800's architecture. The screen is composed of horizontal "zones" with variable heights. Each strip renders one or more objects (sp

This reminds me of the Atari 7800's architecture. The screen is composed of horizontal "zones" with variable heights. Each strip renders one or more objects (sprites or tiles), stopping the CPU to do a DMA transfer on each scanline. A lot of this is controlled by display lists in RAM, but some settings (palettes for example) have to be changed on-the-fly via interrupts. And sprites invariably span multiple zones, which is another PITA.