How were video games in the late 80s/early 90s animated before huge digital advances were made? Additionally, how was music added?
In: Technology
Game consoles of the 1980s and early 1990s didn’t have lots of storage or processing power to handle large amounts of data, so there was a strong focus on making everything as efficient as possible. In many early consoles, such as the NES, graphics is stored as small tiles, with each pixel in the tile only having a few options for colors, to minimize the amount of data required. To produce images, these tiles are combined together in groups, and to produce animations, the tiles were moved around or replaced with other tiles. That’s why backgrounds and objects tend to look similar or have repeating patterns. Lots of strategies were used to minimize the amount of tiles required; [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM) shows some some of these strategies. For music, rather than storing an audio file containing the music, the game would store instructions for playing a song as a sequence of notes on a few basic audio channels. The limitations of hardware greatly restricted the complexity of music; the NES can only play up to 5 notes at a time for example.
Latest Answers