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I know that just about any video game system has a character, sprite, and mabye some extra stuff to store game images. But, can video game systems display litterly anywhere on the screen and make mosaic patterns and stuff? Like, say I made a pattern and saved that single tile in the character table. Could I then re-use that same tile and display it lots of times to make a repeatable pattern?

Chris :o)

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> I know that just about any video game system has a character, sprite, and mabye some extra stuff to store game images. But, can video game systems display litterly anywhere on the screen and make mosaic patterns and stuff? Like, say I made a pattern and saved that single tile in the character table. Could I then re-use that same tile and display it lots of times to make a repeatable pattern?

um, yes, of course. the whole tile thing would be kind of silly if you couldn't.
in fact (in the case of the SMS) you'd have to. There are 768 tile spaces on the display, but only 448 (512 if pull some trickery) tiles to display in them, and that's including sprite tiles.

I mean, how many 8-bit (or 16 bit) games have you seen that don't use the same tiles over and over?)

Of course, each time a game defines a new tile it takes away from the supply of tiles that the SMS can use over it's lifetime, so it's best to reuse them as much as possible for the benefit of the player.

there are a few systems where the sprite image data can't be shared (or can't be easily shared) among seperate sprites, either because the data is at a fixed location for each sprite, or other complications (I recall with the amiga, you could put the sprite data in any location in 'chip' ram (the first 512k, or 1 or 2 megs in later models), but the sprite data format included the actual location on the screen it would be displayed, followed by the image data. I could be mistaken, I haven't done amiga coding in years, and I did very little with sprites anyway).

The Atari 2600/VCS did not have sprites or graphic data stored in tiles at all, in fact in had no video ram or access to cartridge rom: you had to feed information about the screen display to the video chip for each scan line of the display, in the brief period before that line of the screen was drawn (enough for about 10 or 12 instructions, I think. or less? the situation was pretty awful).

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Consolemu Guest	Displaying Graphics Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2000 8:53 pm
Consolemu Guest	I know that just about any video game system has a character, sprite, and mabye some extra stuff to store game images. But, can video game systems display litterly anywhere on the screen and make mosaic patterns and stuff? Like, say I made a pattern and saved that single tile in the character table. Could I then re-use that same tile and display it lots of times to make a repeatable pattern? Chris :o)

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2000 9:34 pm
	Quote > I know that just about any video game system has a character, sprite, and mabye some extra stuff to store game images. But, can video game systems display litterly anywhere on the screen and make mosaic patterns and stuff? Like, say I made a pattern and saved that single tile in the character table. Could I then re-use that same tile and display it lots of times to make a repeatable pattern? um, yes, of course. the whole tile thing would be kind of silly if you couldn't. in fact (in the case of the SMS) you'd have to. There are 768 tile spaces on the display, but only 448 (512 if pull some trickery) tiles to display in them, and that's including sprite tiles. I mean, how many 8-bit (or 16 bit) games have you seen that don't use the same tiles over and over?) Of course, each time a game defines a new tile it takes away from the supply of tiles that the SMS can use over it's lifetime, so it's best to reuse them as much as possible for the benefit of the player.

Heliophobe Site Admin Joined: 25 Oct 1999 Posts: 2029 Location: Monterey, California	that said... Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2000 9:47 pm
	there are a few systems where the sprite image data can't be shared (or can't be easily shared) among seperate sprites, either because the data is at a fixed location for each sprite, or other complications (I recall with the amiga, you could put the sprite data in any location in 'chip' ram (the first 512k, or 1 or 2 megs in later models), but the sprite data format included the actual location on the screen it would be displayed, followed by the image data. I could be mistaken, I haven't done amiga coding in years, and I did very little with sprites anyway). The Atari 2600/VCS did not have sprites or graphic data stored in tiles at all, in fact in had no video ram or access to cartridge rom: you had to feed information about the screen display to the video chip for each scan line of the display, in the brief period before that line of the screen was drawn (enough for about 10 or 12 instructions, I think. or less? the situation was pretty awful).

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