God knows at this point what "guides". There's various and multiple, but those are certainly two of the many sources I used when trying to figure all of this out (along with asking a bunch of questions in SNESdev too).psycopathicteen wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 1:17 pmWhat "guides" are you talking about? The only places I've seen people saying that are Sega-16 forums and youtube comments.iNCEPTIONAL wrote: ↑Sun May 08, 2022 4:55 amBut, see, right here is the problem:93143 wrote: ↑Sun May 08, 2022 4:36 am I already explained this in the other thread, but I'll do it one more time.
Your impression that the "sprites" the SNES can display 128 of are necessarily 8x8 is WRONG.
The SNES can display 128 sprites, and they can be 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, or 64x64, with any two of those sizes being available at a time. These are hardware sprites - "objects", as Nintendo puts it. The "sprites" in the artist sense are sometimes referred to as metasprites, and they are built out of these basic blocks, but the basic blocks are not necessarily 8x8.
This means your question was indeed ambiguous.
When someone who has very clealry stated they are an artist and not a programmer, asks if 128 "sprites" can be switched out per frame. It should be real easy for anyone else to know they mean the 128 8x8 "sprites" that are likely to ever actually be used in any real scenario.
You show me a single SNES game that has ever loaded up 128 64x64 sprites into the game "(flickering and disappearing all over the place), never mind then tried to switch them out every frame.
And all the SNES guides online say the SNES can display up to 128 8x8 sprites/objects onscreen, with the number being less anytime you get into bigger sprites made up of multiple smaller sprites [objects].
Here's a few of them:
https://youtu.be/sheOZ-Dlleo
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consol ... -nintendo/
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/H ... comparison
http://www.gamepilgrimage.com/content/s ... 21_no4temg
https://nerdbacon.com/super-nintendo-vs ... sis-specs/
https://megacatstudios.com/blogs/retro- ... guidelines
What I have learned by asking the very helpful RetroGameMechanicsExplained guy (along with some people responding in here too)--and hopefully I got this right (and these are my words based on what he said)--is that the SNES can in fact technically "put" 128 objects of any size "onto" the "display" BUT once you get into certain object sizes and certain object amounts, it ultimately can't truly display them in the obvious way most laymen would understand. I mean--if I have got this right--the SNES can show a few 64x64 objects onscreen, but, if you go past 16 or so, it starts going above the objects/sprites/tiles per scanline limit, so it ultimately can't truly display more than around 16 64x64 objects as they'll start flickering and/or just not showing at all. So--assuming I'm still getting this correct--in any real use, it's fair to say it can really only display around 16 64x64 objects onscreen, as anything after that largely becomes meaningless, or just wouldn't look great or make much sense.
And that goes back to me asking about 128 "sprites"--which are of course made up of objects--and therefor, it would be beyond stupid of me to be asking if it could switch out anything other than 128 8x8 "sprites" [possibly 16x16 too?] if, at any other object size than 8x8 [and possibly 16x16?], it literally couldn't even properly display 128 "sprites" anyway. Which, goes back to my original question when I simply asked if the SNES could switch out all 128 "sprites" every frame. Also, similarly, that wording should, imo, also make it clear that, as a layman, I'm not asking about how many "sprite tiles" on the "tile sheet" it can play around with (have internally loaded in VRAM or whatever it all means and how it works at a purely technical level), or whatever else, but just if it can literally have 128 8x8 [possibly 16x16 too?] "sprites" [actually objects] displayed onscreen and then literally change them for a totally different set of 128 8x8 [possibly 16x16 too?] "sprites" [actually objects] in the very next frame, and so on for each new frame. And there was even more context for my question based on prior discussion about first using a background to fake a single large character and then me further enquiring about instead using basically all the available "sprites" to make a single large character and switching them out every frame, which effectively took up around 128 8x8 tiles using the previous background method anyway, etc.
So, that kind of thing.
I do hope that makes some semblance of sense.
Not that I need an answer anymore, as I think I now know what I wanted to know originally and [hopefully] understand how it works.