I love how the NES has a fundamental limitation of 8 sprites per scan line, it literally cannot render more than 64 pixels worth of sprites per horizontal line. This should really limit what kind of games you could make on the system.
But no, the developers were like “fuck it, we’ll shuffle the sprites each frame! Then on each frame, which eight are visible will alternate”
“won’t that flicker like mad?”
“yeah, but… Fuck it!”
And they just carried on! Making professional games! Hundreds of them! And they look like flickery shit because of a fundamental console limitation! But who cares, they’re good games. Move on.
I love how for years as a kid i assumed it must be some soffisikated algorithm to detect whicht sprites were drawn last frame
But NOPE they jus shuffle which order they get written to sprite ram
An important thing about computer games is a “good enough” simple algorithm beats a “clever trick” complex system nine times out of ten.