Did you know: π€
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!? π§΅π
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!? π§΅π
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-graphβ¦
The NES can only display 8 sprites per horizontal line of the screen.
Source: nesrocks.com/blog/nes-graphβ¦
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)
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
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