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Rendered at 15:48:34 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I couldn't afford the jump to Pentium at the time. I had it for about 4 years or so, until I bumped up to an overclocked Duron at 1ghz around 2000-2001 or so.
CPU completely halts, so you can't use the joypad or sound anymore.
https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Gameboy_and_Gameboy_Color...
In PGB mode 2 the CPU is still able to run (within a limited address range) and can use register FF75 "PGBIO" for limited input and output on some cartridge pins (and/or the link port for IO).
But somehow the Game Boy Color itself can transfer a full screen's worth of tiles and their color palettes at what looks like 60 FPS. Quite impressive, really.
but GB's screen is shitty enough that 30FPS is aplenty
Cruisin Exotica had better graphics/art maybe but that's it, Supercross did more credible jumps and perspective tricks under an 8 bit console.
On 16 bit racers, probably the patched Genesis ROMs for Road Rash I-III would be one of the best faux 3D games ever before 32 bit consoles and computers rendered (no pun intended) them obsolete. They add a far better framerate while being totally compatible for consoles. You can get thrown from your bike and "explore" the environment on your own with nice scaling tricks.
Lotus 3 for the Amiga achieved believable perspective based techniques too to simulate a 3D cliff in a pure 2D game, at leat racing aside. These were great too.
Now, once Road Rash 3D hit the PSX (and Ridge Racer among Daytona Usa, altough Daytona's render distance sucked and RR hided it far better) the 2D games' days were numbered. With Road Rash 3D you could totally free roam around on your own outside the circuit, go anywhere, do 360 degree turns and be sure that any town/road you would be seeing further in the horizon would be a rideable path. It was, and that was mind blowing, compared to the static screens from 2D games.
Imagine a pre-Street View world where video games would be almost the sole way (among movies and series OFC) to experience yourself the rest of the world, or America if you were an European. No, multimedia CD's were expensive and your parent's wouldn't buy you a "Virtual Tour CD" from Paris or the like, it had no actual use except if it were something like Italy or France showed from a touristical/historical basis. These first videogames gave me a roaming experience until GTA III was a thing. Later, yes, Street View killed it because, you know, you got the real thing in your computer, but the magic was lost a little.
Related... for a native GB/DMG/Z80 take ... the original first person shooter for the Game Boy was Faceball 2000. (1991) The studio was full of coders who loved and admired Wolf 3D and everything that followed. By day, we were stuck coding variations of Z80 and 6502 assembly. I did the Sega Game Gear port. It was not good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2AG-gAuS-U
https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Gameboy_and_Gameboy_Color...
Also related: "There oughta be GTA5 for the Game Boy" about a Wifi cartridge that can stream video (gameplay, etc) directly to the GB screen. https://there.oughta.be/gta5-for-the-game-boy
I did a small racing prototype with both vertical and horizontal scrolling and segmented my updates to 4x4 blocks of tiles per-frame (160x144 resolution so 20x18 of 32x32 tiles is visible at any point in time, so stippled updating 4x4 blocks outside of view is within the budget together with updating some of the tiles each frame)
You can update 1 tile per scan line (during hblank), so 154 tiles per frame (including 10 vblank scanlines). So you need 2.5 frames to replace all tiles.
If you are really smart about updates, you can “race the beam”, basically start updating tiles just as the frame starts rendering, just behind the active scan line. Then you can update maybe 280 tiles before the active scan line of the next frame catches up with you.
Right!
> So the mid-screen update is to go from one tile dictionary to the other
Yes
I guess I'm missing something here, but I remember doing this myself like 15 years ago
Systems with DMA like the Genesis could just act as a dumb framebuffer to whatever the cartridge decides to dump down the address lines. The Gameboy is a little more difficult, but could also theoretically do it as well if you decide to dump the FPS a bit and/or lower the resolution, and buffer the frames. Which is essentially what the faceball2000 devs had to deal with. And you can speed that up a bit by "racing the beam" (rendering the next frame to a previous tile as the next tile is blitting).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0