Looking for a programer who wants to make some fake scaling.

[Gustavo]

Hello:
I always saw in the Sega Genesis games with fake scaling that only uses 4 o 6 positions for the sprites (four or six sizes) and I always wanted to try a smoother fake scaling.I tried to do it by myself but I'm not good at all for programming,I couldn't even with basiegaxorgz.
Is that possible to achieve?
Maybe someone wants to give it a try,I only want to make a "techdemo" not a "game demo",just the sprites moving with the background there in a rom file.

Here is a mockup that I made with gamemaker.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PcBq2eiBqs
It looks choppier on that video.
flying thing:16 positions.shoot:16 positions.water details:11 positions.

Some stuff.
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/517/ ... iptest.jpg
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/2567/otranave5.jpg
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/628/ ... hot1wp.jpg

Those are .jpgs but the originals are bmp files,the sprite tile with the flying thing is incomplete but is just a sample and also I'm cleaning the pixels of all the positions (check the first five positions in the first image).
I've made those graphics very fast just for this mockup but I can make it a little bit better.

Best regards.

[dtech]

Terrifying thing is that for many olschool games, sprites in all scales were drawn and edited by hand. Scary stuff, and that's why in many games (like chase hq etc) there are just few sizes of every object.

Many games did the scaling live, too. As far as I remember, Sonic3 robotnik boss in the marble (or what it was called) zone, roadrash, skitchin, toystory (for the racing level) and few more as well.

You can use batch processing of some graphics applications to create high quality scaledowns. Simplest way: use freetool irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/), use batch conversion/rename - and then enable 'advanced options' with resize to the size you need (many times) and use all sprites as a batch at the same time. When everything is done, just make a panorama image with all sizes you need.

I think this will do

[tomaitheous]

You have to sit down and figured out some details. Like how many scaling sprites do you need onscreen at once, are some sprites limited to where they will display vertically, how much vram do you have free, do you have enough to update all frames of scaling sprites at once or will you have to cycle through with one or two sets gets updated at a time, can some smaller scaling sprites have all the frames in vram, etc ? You have to take into count sprite overflow (too much sprite pixels on a scanline) that will cause flicker. There's just soo many variables and ways to approach what you want. The biggest factors are speed (local to vram DMA), vram space, and sprite per scanline limit. Those are the most important things you need to work around.

On a side note, I see that your two example enemy sprites are horizontally symmetrical. You can take advantage of this by only storing scaled frames of one side(half of that image), but in vram sprite table have it flip horizontally for the other half in realtime for you (sprite table supports horizontal and vertical flipping).