GTE (tile engine)
GTE (Generic Tile Engine) is a 2D tile engine developed for the Apple personal computer and written in 65816 assembly language.
History
The underlying technology was developed for a recreational port of SUPER Mario Bros for the Apple platform. At this point the engine only supported single-layer backgrounds, a single non-standard tile size and limited sprite support. After The Release of the unfinished SMB GS, the core graphics engine was modularized and released as a GS/OS Tool Set.
Features
GTE provides graphical capabilities that lie roughly between the third and fourth generation of video game consoles. The technical capabilities of the engine are contrasted with the NES and SNES consoles, which share the same CPU family as the Apple
Name |
GTE |
Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom |
Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Super Famicom |
|---|---|---|---|
CPU |
2.8MHz 65c816 |
1.79MHz 6502 |
3.58MHz 65c816 |
Screen Resolution |
320x200 |
256x240 |
256x224, 512x224, 256x239, 512x239; Interlaced: 512x448, 512x478 |
Simultaneous Colors |
256 out of 4096 (16 per line) |
25 out of 53 |
256 out of 32768 indexed, 11 bpp direct |
Sprites |
32, 32 max per line, any size up to 64 KiB per sprite |
64, 8 max per line, 8x8 or 16x8 pixels |
128, 32 max per line; up to 64x64 pixels |
Tile Sizes |
4x4, 8x8, 16x16 |
8x8 |
8x8, 8x16, 16x8, 16x16 |
Background Layers |
2 planes plus 1 static background |
1 plane |
4 planes; each up to 1024 x 1024 |
Memory |
8 MiB main RAM |
48 KiB main RAM (+ bank switching) |
128 KiB main RAM |
Effects |
|
|
|
Framerate (min/avg/max) |
10/15/18
|
30/60/60 |
30/60/60 |
Implementation
The memory bandwidth of the Apple is 1 MiB/s, which is too slow to update the 32 KiB graphics memory at a full 60 frames per second. In fact, the theoretical maximum frame rate for full-screen animation is 31.25 frames per second. Thus, GTE focuses on achieving a reasonable frame rate given the limitations of the hardware.
The tile engine achieves its speed by leveraging hardware-specific feature of the Apple platform as described in IIgs TN #70: Fast Graphics Hints to map the CPU stack to the RAM address of the graphics buffer and using specialized stack instructions to quickly copy graphics data to the screen. This technique is faster than a RAM-to-RAM copy because the hardware stack is automatically decremented after the data is pushed to memory.
Plane Buffers
Since the Apple does not support multiple graphics planes in hardware, this feature must be implemented in software.
Tiles
Tiles are stored internally as aligned bitmap images. A total of 64 KiB are available for tile storage and the total number of tiles are fixed at 256 regardless of the tile size (4x4, 8x8 or 16x16). Each tile consumes 256 bytes of RAM. 64 bytes area llocated for the tile data, a horizontally mirrored version of the tile and the corresponding masks. the image data are stored in sequential 16 KiB chunks of memory as given i the following memory map:
- $0X00: Tile Data
- $4X00: Horizontally Flipped Tile Data
- $8X00: Tile Data Mask
- $CX00: Horizontally Flipped Tile Data Mask