A trip down NBA Jam graphics pipeline

The main programmer behind NBA Jam was Mark Turmell. He's basically from my hometown and I remember reading about him in the local paper, he took computer classes at the local community college and was selling Apple II games when he was 16 or so.

He also worked on other coin-op hits like NFL Blitz, Smash TV, and WWF Wrestlemania.

I am always interested in articles that detail the process of developing video games during the late 80s and early-to-mid nineties.

I especially love anything documenting the sometimes strange transition to 3D - (the Sega Saturn actually used ‘quads’ - or scaled sprites, as polygons instead of triangles...) - there is something really fascinating about it to me.

Note: this is an article about the hardware used to render an arcade game called NBA Jam. It has nothing to do with JAM stack graphics.