Drawing sprites for the Jaguar

[SlidellMan]

I wanted to know about drawing sprites for the Jaguar. Namely:

-How many colors per sprite?

-Do they always have to be arranged vertically like a film strip?

-How tall and/or wide can they be?

As for what I draw sprites with, it's Paint.NET.

[ggn]

I have written a few words about the Object Processor here

[VladR]

Do you have jag_v8.pdf ? That's really all you need initially. Once you get oriented there, check mule kybernetick site, as they will connect quite a few dots for you,

 

But, here goes anyway:

1. Colors: 2, 4, 16, 256, 16-bit, 24-bit

The less colors you use, the less will the bus get hit, hence the faster performance.

2. Yes- how else would OP know where is the rest?

3. Jaguar.h contains all valid widths. The max I used was the 1536 one

 

One of the most common gotchas with OP is that even if you set sprite's position offscreen, it will still be read off the bus, so to avoid a performance impact of unused sprites, it's best to remove it from OP list completely.

 

Another commonly hit limit is number of overlapping sprites per same scanline. All depends on bandwidth, so for max performance you want monochrome sprites (64 pixels per phrase). Anything more colorful than that will get you to eventually quickly converge on the scanline limit and OP will glitch out.

For most games in low resolution (e.g. Anything below 640x240) it's not a huge problem though.

[+CyranoJ]

-Do they always have to be arranged vertically like a film strip?

 

 

No, that's just the way I've implemented it in the RAPTOR API.

 

You could arrange them horizontally and use gwidth as the image width, then adjust the offset by the x-size and step thru that way, or use a traditional table and create an index to each sprite, or just store them however you want and update the graphics base pointer. Like most things involving programming, there are multiple ways to skin a cat with an egg.