It’s well known that the SMS supports 64 onscreen sprites, but for each scanline, at most 8 sprites can be displayed without flickering.
However, I’m puzzled about how R-Type seems to have overcome this limit. Take a look at this long play at 5:31 https://youtu.be/dQc_hkTEb4s?t=331 (frame shown below).
It seems to me that there are many scan lines almost full of sprites and not just 8 (see top part of the attached figure).
- A row full of sprites
- rtype.png (174.67 KiB) Viewed 9575 times
Yes, some flickering occurs in some frames, but on other frames all the sprites are visible at once. I thought that even with flickering, still eight sprites could be drawn per each scanline on each frame.
Did I misunderstand how flickering occurs?
Or perhaps in this video we see just inaccurate emulation or “wrong” screen capture? Or did the programmer use some background tiles, as trick (especially in the horizontal part of the snake) ?
Cheers!
Nicola
