Playing older games got me thinking that you can usually tell the system even if you aren’t familiar with the game itself, even if they are from the same “generation” of systems and you may be able to do this even on the same game. You can probably do so from Atari up to the PS3 or maybe even later.
Trying to figure it out it seems the SNES used a sort of scaling effect to zoom (see Zelda or Super Mario,) but I’d like to know more about this topic. Is it a hardware thing? Studio design rules?
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Most older consoles were tile-based, The background and moving sprites was composed of 8×8 to 64×64 tiles. They were always a fixed size on the screen, any zoom or scale was done with changing the tiles to use different graphics.
SNES (and Gameboy Advance) had a special mode which could do transformations, rotate, scale, zoom. It’s part hardware, part game code. The images are still tile based, but the game code can program a different math equation transformation (matrix) on each scanline (for perspective mode) or for the whole screen (for whole screen scale/zoom).
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