Hacker News Reader

Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

No hblank interrupts? Game boy has them to make this sort of thing relatively easy. Hblank interrupts is also how "mode7" style pseudo 3d for a Mario kart style game can be made (on GBA or SNES).

View on HN

You could get the equivalent of hblank interrupts with a mapper, such as the mmc3 used in Super Mario Bros 3. That is how SMB3 renders its hud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_controller#M...

We abused hblank to death in Infinity for Game Boy Color (unpublished in 2001, later dumped on GitHub), for things like parallax scrolling, tilted overworld map, screen transitions, and scrolling inner text.

I looked for that, found it on github and then looked at the build instructions, followed the link provided to GBDK and saw my credit as one of the contributors. Totally forgot about that... :)

Are you participating in the re-launch of development for Infinity? (great to see it happening)

If so, what approach are you taking for the toolchain? Keeping the existing version that had been used/modified? Updating to newer tools (and code changes that may go along with that)?

Everything's up to Incube8, although I'll be advising. In general, my recommendation is to consider better tooling for managing assets and running builds but be very careful with the code (e.g. don't change compiler versions, don't refactor anything).

Thanks for the reply. It'll be interesting to follow the progress.

Can definitely see wanting to keep the compiler and code in a known state. Though modern SDCC generates code that's probably 50% faster in some cases and with 90% less bugs than versions from the early 2000s.

Lots of great Game Boy releases have been coming out.

Edit: add a little more.

Atari had a patent on a cpu instruction to wait for hblank, I suspect Nintendo didn't put anything similar in the hardware as a result. But it was needed, so interrupt generation ended up in cartridges... And since they didn't get sued, put in the next gen hardware.

IIRC, SNES had those, NES did not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com