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A programmer at Interplay, Rebecca Heineman, ported Out of This World to Super Nintendo around ... 1992 or so? It was an amazing accomplishment because the SNE
by netcoyote 5y ago
A programmer at Interplay, Rebecca Heineman, ported Out of This World to Super Nintendo around ... 1992 or so?
It was an amazing accomplishment because the SNES only had a 3.58 MHz (yes, you read that right) processor, and wasn't afforded the luxury of drawing into a traditional pixel-oriented bitmap (e.g. one byte per pixel).
The code that Rebecca wrote rendered triangles into SNES "chunky planar" format on the fly. The chunks are 8x8 pixel tiles, where the bits of each pixel are spread out across four planes (https://sneslab.net/wiki/Graphics_Format https://sneslab.net/wiki/Graphics_Format). And all this at 20 FPS, a feat which still boggles me, 30 years on.
- joosters 5y agoThe website has a page covering the SNES port : https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index.html https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index... I like the comments about how they had to keep optimising because management wanted to save money on the cartridge hardware!
- masklinn 5y agoFWIW the linked article is just the introduction on an entire series on the game. The SNES port is covered at https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index.html https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index... I’ve no doubt it either has already been reposted or will soon be, as apparently ‘tis the season (this is the 2nd or 3rd repost I’ve seen for the series)
- msk-lywenn 5y agoThe bit about putting code in the DMA registers because they weren't used is such an insane trick :)