Bob's Blog

There's the trick from Dolphin where each row is limited to 8 pixels, but the overall sprite is wider than 8.

It depends on whether you are planning on mid-screen repositioning and what else you plan on doing each line. You can easily do 9 pixels wide using a the player & missle for each sprite. (Assuming you have the cycles and storage to handle the missle updates). You can also use HMOVE or NUSIZ updates to fiddle with the effective width.

You might be able to give 10 pixels to one sprite and 11 to the other. It depends whether you can squeeze the work in the available cycles. Assuming there is time, you can use NUSIZx, HMMx, and ENAMx to produce 2 two-pixel sprites. Then just use the ball for the 11th. You can save a few cycles by loading the HMMx and ENAMx values at the same time, since they are read from different nybbles.

 

When I first conceived of the two-pixel missile sprite, I tried to make a six-pixel sprite to coexist with the regular player sprites, but I couldn't fit them in the available cycles. Making a 10 and 11 might fare better.

It depends on whether you are planning on mid-screen repositioning and what else you plan on doing each line. You can easily do 9 pixels wide using a the player & missle for each sprite. (Assuming you have the cycles and storage to handle the missle updates). You can also use HMOVE or NUSIZ updates to fiddle with the effective width.

I'm looking for "pure" techniques; i.e., not worrying about drawing anything except the two sprites.

There's the trick from Dolphin where each row is limited to 8 pixels, but the overall sprite is wider than 8.

Yeah. It would be pretty cool to combine 10-pixel-wide sprites with row-by-row shifting, but that takes a LOT of computational time for each row. At single-line resolution, anyway.

You might be able to give 10 pixels to one sprite and 11 to the other. It depends whether you can squeeze the work in the available cycles. Assuming there is time, you can use NUSIZx, HMMx, and ENAMx to produce 2 two-pixel sprites. Then just use the ball for the 11th. You can save a few cycles by loading the HMMx and ENAMx values at the same time, since they are read from different nybbles.

 

When I first conceived of the two-pixel missile sprite, I tried to make a six-pixel sprite to coexist with the regular player sprites, but I couldn't fit them in the available cycles. Making a 10 and 11 might fare better.

Hmm. Now that's an idea.