[sorry to continue an offtopic discussion, but I find it hard to
resist]
On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 09:17:07AM -0700, Glenn Saunders wrote:
> This is kinda going off topic, but I was wondering why it is that Nintendo
> hardware always seems to use an odd number for its featureset. For
> instance, the Nintendo 8-bit has a color palette of what, 52 colors or
> something? And the GBA can display 511 colors at once. Neither of these
> align to an even multiple of 8 bits. It seems really odd.
The GBA is pretty regular. (and, as Andrew said, the 511 colors (of 32k)
is logical, and is only in some modes) It's a lot nicer to work on (for
sprite-based titles) than, say, PSX (where sprites are just texture
mapped rectangles, and video ram is a real pain to access).
The 52 colors on the NES was due to mirroring, though, wasn't it?
ISTR the palette was 4*16 but palette entry 0 was mirrored at three
other positions in each set of 16 colors, something like that?
It's been a little while since I played with the NES.
The original gameboy was pretty regular, too, iirc. Of course, the 6502
is much cooler than the Z80. ;-)
Speaking of messed up, though, ever looked at the packing of instructions
on various RISC processors? I'm not sure about ARM, but I know AXP has
the most screwed up way of packing instructions... the bits for the
opcode and operands are scattered all over the word.
--
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|/| Julian Squires <tek@xxxxxxx>
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