There were a lot of other tricks to be had: - Some form of sprites were the rule, not the exception. Albeit very hardware coupled, usually a fixed width and

There were a lot of other tricks to be had: - Some form of sprites were the rule, not the exception. Albeit very hardware coupled, usually a fixed width and maybe unlimited height. Fixed # of sprites per line as well, or they'd just turn invisible. - Tile based (character) graphics, so there's a lot of games that aren't bitmapped, but rather character or tile based. So think updating a 40x25 screen (eg) not a 320x200 screen. - Palette (indirect) based graphics = some tricks for animation here. - A hardware supported transparent color. - Direct control of frame buffer pointer = lots of goodness. - Interrupts based on raster position - DMA for sound Sometimes: - Some control of modulus based scrolling (think starting bitwise horizontal and vertical for up to 8 bits) = easy tile based bit scrolling. - Blitter (with boolean ops) - maybe. - Planar graphics. Still, we're lazy today. Lots o layers in between us the hardware.