Thread by @matthughson

Did you know: 🤔

The infamous "sprite flicker" you see on the NES, is not actually a built-in hardware feature.

This flicker needed to be hand-coded into every game!

But why!? 🧵👇

The flicker is an attempt to avoid a limitation of the NES:

The NES can only display 8 sprites per horizontal line of the screen.

Source: nesrocks.com/blog/nes-graph…

The NES's default behavior is to *stop drawing sprites* once that 8 sprite limit it reached. This is what *that* looks like.

Notice that the purple character on the left just completely vanishes. You can imagine why games avoided this.

(The 4 skeletons use 8 sprites total)

Here's a basic version of the flicker. In an emulator you can see that the sprite memory on the right (highlighted with a red circle) is changing the order of sprite data every frame, which means that *which* sprites come *after* the 8-sprite-limit changes every frame aka flicker

And the final results running on a real NES + a CRT TV where I find it looks a lot better than in an emulator + LCD. #nesdev