I think I found a good scanlines/dma compromise

[psycopathicteen]

I guess I'll bring it up to 12 pixels on top and bottom, because v-blank is already saturated with 1 big 8kB block, and there needs enough CPU time to run the game.

[psycopathicteen]

http://wiki.superfamicom.org/snes/show/Registers

On this website I found this under registers $2180-$2183

This means you could use DMA mode 4 to $2180 and a table in ROM to write any sequence of RAM addresses. The value does not wrap at page boundaries on increment.

Is this true? Can you DMA from rom into wram with these registers? If so, then using a CPU RAM buffer would be possible. The only problem I see is that it wouldn't work for decompressed sprites, because you can't do wram-to-wram DMAs.

[Bregalad]

Well, I can't answer for your questions, but about the "is it true" question, the only really reliable document for the SNES is Anomie's. Most others/older documents are totally inaccurate and somtimes even complete crap.

[psycopathicteen]

I'm finished with my animation engine. Here is a demo showing Red's running animation from Gunstar Heroes.

[psycopathicteen]

I realized that instead of using HDMA to create the top and bottom bar, a better way would be to use BG3 to create the top and bottom bar. This way would be better because the CPU can keep the PPU in forced-blank until DMAing is finished, even when it finishes late.