On Thursday, 19 September 2013 at 07:24:19 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
On Wed, 18 Sep 2013 13:31:48 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
I remember in the old DOS days, some games would load up custom
graphics into the video card's text font buffer, so that they
can
draw sprites just by writing the corresponding characters into
the
video card's text buffer. You can get very fast drawing rates
since
the video card does most of the work for you (and you only
need to
transfer 1 byte per 8x8 block of pixels instead of 8 bytes or
more).
That's essentially the same strategy behind the graphics
hardware in
most 8/16-bit consoles. Basically the ones from around SMS/NES
and then
up until 3D. You can identify them from the grid-based
layouts (which were a huge improvement, for both gamers *and*
developers over the "carefully time your opcodes to adjust the
scanlines while they're being drawn" used by Atari VCS/2600
and, I'm
guessing, probably the ColecoVision and SG-1000, which is what
make
them so amazingly affordable at the time).
In DOS, a lot of CGA/EGA/VGA games used a similar approach as
DOS-text-mode/NES/SMS/etc, but it had to be done in software.
Obviously in those cases it didn't reduce the amount of data
sent to
the video card, but it did still reduce (significantly) the
amount of
HDD and RAM required to store the levels, and it somewhat
simplified/reduced the amount of processing needed to render.
(I've done a bit of old-school homebrew, and got my real coding
start
in DOS VGA gaming. Fascinating and incredibly fun stuff to
develop for.
I'd love to design/build my own tile-based console someday,
just for
the heck of it.)
You are not alone. These guys are still in business selling
hardware just for that.
http://www.xgamestation.com/