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A programmer at Interplay, Rebecca Heineman, ported Out of This World to Super Nintendo around ... 1992 or so?

It was an amazing accomplishment because the SNES only had a 3.58 MHz (yes, you read that right) processor, and wasn't afforded the luxury of drawing into a traditional pixel-oriented bitmap (e.g. one byte per pixel).

The code that Rebecca wrote rendered triangles into SNES "chunky planar" format on the fly. The chunks are 8x8 pixel tiles, where the bits of each pixel are spread out across four planes (https://sneslab.net/wiki/Graphics_Format). And all this at 20 FPS, a feat which still boggles me, 30 years on.



The website has a page covering the SNES port : https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index...

I like the comments about how they had to keep optimising because management wanted to save money on the cartridge hardware!


FWIW the linked article is just the introduction on an entire series on the game. The SNES port is covered at https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index...

I’ve no doubt it either has already been reposted or will soon be, as apparently ‘tis the season (this is the 2nd or 3rd repost I’ve seen for the series)


The bit about putting code in the DMA registers because they weren't used is such an insane trick :)




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