12-24-2020, 04:52 PM
Don't try to auto-impose such limitations. The max 16-color per sprite or per-tile was a hardware limitation due to memory constraints. Any developer of that era would have welcome an unified 256 colours per layer/sprite instead of those chunked modes, they had to work hard and do a lot of planning to make nice graphics. You can put much more color onscreen with Tilengine than they could do with their hardware. And as I said, pixel art graphics uses small, hand-picked palettes:
https://lospec.com/palette-list
Same happens with scrolling too. In real hardware, the viewport RAM was just a bit bigger that the screen size, so they had to stream tile data from the ROM in sync were the full map was stored. Try for example the Sega Genesis/Megadrive emulator Gens Plus! that has debugging windows, and see what happens to the video RAM in realtime as you scroll in the game. By contrast, in Tilengine you have the whole map loaded, so with just a pair of coordinates you can get anywhere. That was a dream back then.
https://lospec.com/palette-list
Same happens with scrolling too. In real hardware, the viewport RAM was just a bit bigger that the screen size, so they had to stream tile data from the ROM in sync were the full map was stored. Try for example the Sega Genesis/Megadrive emulator Gens Plus! that has debugging windows, and see what happens to the video RAM in realtime as you scroll in the game. By contrast, in Tilengine you have the whole map loaded, so with just a pair of coordinates you can get anywhere. That was a dream back then.