Desoldering Chips Safely

[Sch3mat1c]

No? Might have my terminology wrong then. Whatever the sprite hardware was -- I recall it has some very specific limitations, like two colors within a row of some pixels, and the number of sprites on screen or something like that. Which, of course, would be a painful limitation for some, but was used to rich effect in the best games. Sonic 3, even all the Sonics, really, were rich and colorful. Takes talented artists I'm sure.

Tim

[evildragon]

Information on the Genesis VDP: http://emu-docs.org/Genesis/Graphics/genvdp.txt

My favorite use of the VDP used in the Genesis is this. I also love the tehno tune, but people dissagre with me on the music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n_eHN-ArK8

This is considering that it can't rotate or scale graphics.

[Sch3mat1c]

I'm pretty sure a lot of that is just having the memory -- they wouldn't even rotate or scale graphics as a precalculation (if for some reason they needed to, perhaps running low on ROM or something), especially with the VDP's limitations; all those angles and sizes would be created by the artists and simply stored in ROM. Even so, doing some of those things, like generating the moving pseudo-3D background, would be challenging at best to predraw.

(Interesting to consider what kind of algorithm would be required to achieve reasonable results; probably a rotation matrix with filtering (not nearest-neighbor selection), followed by palettization involving error diffusion or something like that to pick the best pattern per line, in the best colors. All this is certainly doable on the 68k, but there's no way you'll finish a good looking rotation of a sprite like that in less than a frame, let alone real time for several!)

Tim