software sprites in msx1
For those who don't know about msx computers, the first generation runs a tms9918a display processor from Texas Instruments. Which was a quite capable video accelerator for the time, using 16Kbytes of dedicated video ram. It provides hardware tiles of 8x8 pixels with 1 byte of color per line (4 bits foreground, 4 bits background), which gives quite nice graphics if you manage to arrange the colors properly. Some japanese game designers in the 80's found the way the get the most of that limitation. You can also have single color hardware sprites of 8x8 or 16x16 pixels, max of 4 aligned horizontally and 32 at the same time on the screen. The combination of both things is very good to have simple hardware accelerated games. See for instance Nemesis 2 and Goonies from Konami. It is also true that these kind of graphic limit the kind of games you can have; mainly because the sprites are basically the only thing you can move on the screen. As tiles are plac...
