Hardware sprites

[masteries]

On 9/24/2021 at 10:12 PM, Cyprian said:

with all due respect for your knowledge and contribution to the Atari world, I see only a few scenarios where the BLiTTER can be beaten by the CPU.

E.g. a really small sprites e.g. 12x12px, or a small number of bytes word aligned and arranged sequentially ("movem" rules).

In other scenarios the BLiTTER can be many times faster than the CPU. e.g. non-sequentially data like interleaved bitplanes plus masking, shifting and ORing.

 

a great example how to use the BLiTTER for sprites is "Metal Slug":

 

 

As Cyprian stated, and to complement his good text,

 

In Metal Slug there are a lot of 3x3 pixels sprites, all player and enemy bullets, these are rendered faster using the blitter than the CPU.

 

As well, when blitter is drawing (performing his work), the CPU is sleeping, until blitter ends. Blitter can share the memory access time with CPU or not.

 

Another set of features is blitter configuration sharing... If your next sprite line to render is equal to the last one, why to reconfig blitter masks?

And why to render a sprite in sucesive lines? Minimize the amount of blitter configs and render equally masked lines using a single blitter config

 

 

[+Stephen]

On 2/17/2023 at 12:39 PM, AnimaInCorpore said:

"PUZZLE DREAMS – A contemporary-sounding piece that won’t get in the way of sound effects. Might be nice in a upbeat, non-combative game with lots of motion in it. (:46) Royalty-Free."

 

https://soundimage.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Puzzle-Dreams.mp3

 

Thank you - I didn't get notified of the reply to my post or I would have responded sooner.

[mikro]

On 9/24/2021 at 11:04 PM, Cyprian said:

In '90 I also was sure it is not so efficient, mainly due to someone told me that and I believed that blindly

Also, many democoders considered using STE features as cheating.

On 9/24/2021 at 11:04 PM, Cyprian said:

I realized that even on the Falcon the BLiTTER can beat the CPU in some cases.

Would you remember such examples? To inspire others.