How does Castlevania 3 render the character switch animation?

[mkwong98]

When the player switches character in Castlevania 3, character is drawn on alternate scan lines. How does the game do it? It doesn't seem to affect other sprites on same scan lines.

[Fiskbit]

I've not looked into it myself, but my understanding is that it swaps out the CHR bank used by the character for one with blank graphics.

[mkwong98]

Thank you! I tried to find it myself by running the Mesen debugger 1 scan line at a time but no success.

What are other ways to render a sprite tile as something other than a standard 8x8 or 8x16 such as this?

[Dwedit]

Klax uses a vertical scrolling trick to get 16x8 size attributes, but that's for background tiles rather than sprites.

[calima]

There are no tricks to affect a single sprite like that. It's all faked by CHR.

[Marscaleb]

So it's just timing its bank switching to go on specific scanlines?
I suppose that isn't too hard since it freezes gameplay, but that still has to be done manually...