Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by JohnBooty 1050 days ago
Essentially, yeah. You give it a list of pointers to background tiles and a list of pointers to sprites and tell it where you want them drawn. It then does that for you at 60fps for free.

The downside is that that's all it does. That's the whole graphics system. You can't like, paint an individual pixel.

(you can, if you treat each tile as a mini framebuffer, which is how something like the NES port of Elite is possible, but this is expensive and you only have a very small amount of processing time and a limited number of tiles)