Hi All, first post on the forum.... nice site you all have! I've been more-or-less fiddling with ASM on the SNES to satisfy some cravings of understanding the system more; nothing too serious, just to gain some ASM knowledge, but have hit bit of a conceptual roadblock. Say I wanted a single screen with platforms I can jump on (no side-scrolling). Is it more advantageous (or even possible?) to have the entire "stage" pre-designed as one big "tile" and DMA it into VRAM, or to manually create the stage using small 8x8 tiles with a hoard of writes to register $2118? With the pre-designed big tile approach, I understand a tile can't be bigger than 16x16 because of the whole 2 bytes storage per address in VRAM, but I assume there is some kind of trickery that people can do to make a single-screen level quicker with far less code. =\ Not sure if this post makes much sense, but guess I'll find out
For a homebrew game I'd say just DMA the nametable into place. No reason to manually write to the register. And tiles can be either 8x8 or 16x16. You choose.
Thanks for the replies MottZilla and marshallh. I ended up writing a small C program that just generates all the assembly code for me (based on a text-file input that details where tiles should be placed), that I can then copy/paste into my ASM. Rudimentary but seems to work! Finally just started to really understand how the tile-data works in conjuction with looking up colors in the pallete table in CGRAM... that was a painful reading and experimentation experience!
