Karateka didn't use any of the C64's advanced features (hardware scrolling, sprites) as far as I know, being a game that originated on the Apple II. It was stil

Karateka didn't use any of the C64's advanced features (hardware scrolling, sprites) as far as I know, being a game that originated on the Apple II. It was still very impressive. I wonder which C64 game was the first to have smooth parallax scrolling (at 50/60Hz). The technique of pre-shifting was used very widely, even on consoles with some form of hardware assistance (Sonic 3 uses pre-shifted images to gain an extra parallax layer in some places, like the Launch Base Zone background, in addition to the two hardware tile layers and single sprite layer, which could be combined in interesting ways via priority bits). Many Amiga games would also dedicate two sprites to generating a parallax layer (as the Agnus chip's "copper" could rewrite sprite registers mid-scanline, two sprites would be sufficient to cover the whole width of the screen via updating the image pointers on the fly, which was really the endgame of the idea of "racing the beam", dedicating a piece of compute logic towards updating registers at extremely high speed)