/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3158295
>>I thought the sprites were tile sized
>They are. If you see games with bigger "sprites", they're actually assembled out of multiple hardware sprites.
What I mean is a lot of things have big old squares making up a lot of the background, but now I'm pretty sure the tiles being referred to are-- here, I found it, pic related.
>That's the really important thing with tile hardware. You do not draw anything. There are no draw calls. The hardware takes all the info of sprite locations, background map and offsets and palettes, and generates the picture from that.
>generates the picture from that
That's what I meant by "draw", I know there's no rendering as we thinking of it today. You still have to get all your ducks in a row (duck=pixel) by the time a given memory area is being turned into video signals and sent down the line as part of a frame. That was famously a challenge on the Atari and as >>3150838 pointed out, even by the NES era, there were sometimes issues doing this consistently if you tried to get fancy-- the jittering status area on StarTropics comes to mind.

>>3158295
>>I thought the sprites were tile sized
>They are. If you see games with bigger "sprites", they're actually assembled out of multiple hardware sprites.
What I mean is a lot of things have big old squares making up a lot of the background, but now I'm pretty sure the tiles being referred to are-- here, I found it, pic related.>>3158295
>>draw everything
>That's the really important thing with tile hardware. You do not draw anything. There are no draw calls. The hardware takes all the info of sprite locations, background map and offsets and palettes, and generates the picture from that.
>generates the picture from that
That's what I meant by "draw", I know there are no software calls unless they're pulling some trickery to make better use of the hardware. You still have to get all your ducks in a row (duck=pixel) by the time a given memory area is being turned into video signals and sent down the line as part of a frame. That was famously a challenge on the Atari and as someone pointed out, even by the NES era, there were sometimes issues doing this consistently-- the jittering status area on StarTropics comes to mind.