[memoryhole]

This is exactly what we did. The video frames were converted to tilesets and stored in the rom image. For playback, the memory mapper (MMC3) is used to swap between the frames without having to rely on too much CPU. Luckily Guy figured out the MMC3, otherwise we'd have only had enough space for a few frames.

Correct as well about the colors. It would have been nice to better utilize them, but we didn't have enough time to do that properly.

[ericfontaine]

great hack btw! I'm sure you had limited time to waste!

[gcirino42]

Thanks! Alex had been studying getting better compression by repacking the tiles based on a scheme I still haven't quite figured out, but we were getting CPU --> PPU bound in what we could do during vblank. The MMC3 solution let us basically dma our way around the problems and push a much larger screen update far more often. The original version ripped through playback so fast that we had to slow it down to get a decent number of frames into the available 32 CHR ROM banks (it's a mapper 4 NES rom).

The homebrew community was a fantastic resource! Shoutouts to nesdev, Shiru, and the countless articles we googled!

[memoryhole]

Thanks!