Coding old videogames

[mtbc]

While chatting with one of my children as they played on the Nintendo Switch, talk of sprites reminded me of raster interrupts and I wondered if modern hardware makes them obsolete. Apparently so: Wikipedia's page about them mentions system support approximately through the 1980s. It is nice to see the two Commodore systems listed there: despite the company's series of poor business decisions I recall finding their hardware a rewarding pleasure to program for.

Some simple background: when the hardware supports but a handful of sprites, one trick is to move them further down the screen after the television scan line has passed so it appears that one wields more sprites than the hardware easily offers. The scan reaching a given line triggers an interrupt that executes code for modifying the sprites or other graphics. Using hardware sprites confers benefits such as collision detection.