Then thank you for doing that on my behalf! This is why I love the people that still hang around on Livejournal :)
It's fascinating how the things that you think are just random artefacts all have a reason somewhere deep down at the hardware level, like that white line that happens because you can't quite pick up on the line being drawn with completely accurate timing. I, too, wondered why there wasn't just the memory to store an additional row and column rather than an entire screen's worth of tiles... I hadn't realized that CRTs were imprecise enough for a chunk of the screen that large to go missing, when we all used them, even though I know most games of the PS era offered a "screen position" option.
I say quite often now that I realized that my impossible life's ambition was to be a game developer in the early 90s... and I'd probably have loved the puzzle-like aspects of tricking the hardware or coming up with the multi-layered workaround of the Doom engine in the absence of true 3D if there hadn't been any better way at the time, but at the same time, now I'm very glad that the abstraction exists to be able to concentrate on actual... game design.
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It's fascinating how the things that you think are just random artefacts all have a reason somewhere deep down at the hardware level, like that white line that happens because you can't quite pick up on the line being drawn with completely accurate timing. I, too, wondered why there wasn't just the memory to store an additional row and column rather than an entire screen's worth of tiles... I hadn't realized that CRTs were imprecise enough for a chunk of the screen that large to go missing, when we all used them, even though I know most games of the PS era offered a "screen position" option.
I say quite often now that I realized that my impossible life's ambition was to be a game developer in the early 90s... and I'd probably have loved the puzzle-like aspects of tricking the hardware or coming up with the multi-layered workaround of the Doom engine in the absence of true 3D if there hadn't been any better way at the time, but at the same time, now I'm very glad that the abstraction exists to be able to concentrate on actual... game design.