Sure. But arguably, that's a lot of extra work, plus some arbitrary restrictions (tiles of single colour, scroll directions), for a system that, at worst case,

Sure. But arguably, that's a lot of extra work, plus some arbitrary restrictions (tiles of single colour, scroll directions), for a system that, at worst case, is surely going to be doing at least a little bit more work than the simple optimal colour splat technique I described. Whereas if one has a system where there is no worst-case because/and it runs in constant time, and is as optimal as possible (i.e. the fastest way of updating all the necessary data) — which requires no restraints on the graphics, can work no matter which way the games/player scrolls, doesn't require much extra work on other frames (i.e. when not updating the colour RAM), nor any extra work using custom-made external tooling — it would, with little argument from most folk, clearly seem to be the better choice. There are reasons why simple solutions often win out over more complex ones. Particularly when coding on limited hardware. Particularly when under time pressure to publish. Particularly when graphics designer's iteration time has a cost per hour. > So unless you had a game so complex you absolutely had no choice but finding ways of cutting it down, it'd have made no sense. I've worked on lots of games projects that never actually got published, some of them were because we came across a wall, and despite trying lots of novel solutions, often many of which were 'outside the box', those issues couldn't be overcome. These things are massive time sinks, and, often, solutions that seem like good ideas, simply aren't. Sometimes one simply has to accept that you cannot squeeze an elephant into a matchbox! It becomes easier to spot when solutions might not work as one becomes more experienced. But sometimes one might still spend time trying to squeeze the elephant. Solving the worst case, with the least restrictions, in both the simplest and the most optimal way, often gives one a sensible measure as to what is actually reasonably possible. — If you can reduce the time needed to do a full-colour update when scrolling arbitrarily (including 8-ways), with unrestricted use of colour design on the maps/tiles, on the C64 platform, then I'm sure there's a reasonable handful of folk that would like to hear your suggestions. Otherwise, technically you're solving another problem, and it's not the one which we were dealing with back then.