Games that animate players using bankswitching

[+x=usr(1536)]

Can anyone think of a 7800 game (or games) that animates players by way of bankswitching?

 

What I'm getting at is having a large number of frames stored across multiple banks for multiple players.  The idea is that a single bank may not be enough to store all of the player animations in, so by switching banks a single player could have some very complex animations.

 

Where this would get complicated would be if multiple players were on the screen at once, each needing its own animations.  It seems as though the same data would need to be replicated in multiple banks to prevent both flickering and / or player corruption on a bank switch.

 

There is a specific game I have in mind for this, and it's a 3D polygon-based (flat shading, low polygon count) game.  What I'm curious about is if a chunk of the 3D calculations can be taken out of the equation by using pseudo-sprite scaling through player animation, but it looks as though a lot of player graphics would be required to make that happen at any sort of reasonable quality.

 

Not going to name the game quite yet, but am thinking out loud as it seems like it would be a good fit for the 7800 provided that the performance can be there to make it playable.

[RevEng]

I'm not aware of any. As you say, the scheme gets complicated and requires a lot of duplication if you have multiple sprites.

[+x=usr(1536)]

Appreciate the sanity check.

 

The game I had in mind was I, Robot.  I was watching how the arcade game draws the screen, and it appears to be a very similar method to how the vector games that also used the Mathbox did it.

 

One thing that became apparent is that the sprites seem to have a large number of polygons relative to the playfield, so this is where my sprite-scaling idea came in.  Hopefully, by doing that, enough CPU time would be left over to handle the playfield drawing, but at the cost of complexity.

 

I'll add that I was watching the game in emulation via MAME, so how MAME caused the screen to be drawn may be different to how the original hardware did it.

[Trebor]

@Dan Boris wrote the components that make up the emulation present in MAME when viewing the respective video, driver, and machine source files.   Perhaps, he may be available to offer some insight on how it is handled under MAME.