Kabuto wrote:
And the SNES is dirty in the sense that you need to fiddle with banks all the time (not needed on the MD due to its 16 MB linear address space) and Nintendo was stingy with register and memory bits, forcing programmers to fiddle with bits too (they e.g. crammed sprite coordinate bits together whereas on the MD the 9 bit sprite X coordinate just lives in a 16 bit memory slot with the upper 7 bits left unused).
Pretty much. The 65816 issues has been beaten to death here, obviously, but it is indeed a shame that WDC didn't go for something a bit more expensive, and spent those transistors on for example a couple of 24-bit address registers. Having register/memory size encoded in the instructions instead of relying on status bits would've been nice, too. But hey, the machines are what they are and we love them with all their faults and imperfections... (:
Anyway, congratulations to an absolutely mindblowing demo! One of few "proper psycho code" level demos ever done for consoles, really...
Kabuto wrote:
It will come, but it's easier said than done. It's not just about how hardware features were used, some effects (esp. the rotozoomer) have a mathematical background I don't want to leave unexplained, but this will take time, I want to make sure that most people will actually understand it. I will probably draw lots of pictues and diagrams too.
Looking forward to that! That rotozoomer is a damn head scratcher.

The greetings scroller is also really something else... The interference, blending and plasma effects are obvious how you do after reading the technical write-up, but nontheless impressive and you just gotta love this kind of "world's first" hardware exploitation effects.