Retro Gamer 23

[Ash]

You could do sprite scaling without it being a hardware feature though, no?

Most of the bosses in Super Mario World change in size and/or rotate when they're beaten. Or is my memory playing tricks on me?

[Harlen Quinn]

You could do sprite scaling without it being a hardware feature though, no?

But then technically that ain't sprite scaling. If it were then anything with re-drawn sprites could be classed as sprite scaling. I'm not going to debate this, I'm right.

[trickytree]

So you're telling me that when enemies die and zoom in and out of the screen that that isn't sprite scaling?

No it isn't, it's background layer scaling. Notice how you don't see several sprites being scaled/rotated independent of each other, because there is no sprite scaling and only one scalable/rotatable background layer.

[Sketch]

Didn't Yoshi's Island (thanks to the inclusion of a chip) have sprite scaling, with seperate sprites scaling independantly of each other?

[Meh]

But then technically that ain't sprite scaling. If it were then anything with re-drawn sprites could be classed as sprite scaling. I'm not going to debate this, I'm right.

What, so you can't write something that would scale an object for you without it being a feature of the hardware?

[trickytree]

Didn't Yoshi's Island (thanks to the inclusion of a chip) have sprite scaling, with seperate sprites scaling independantly of each other?

Well yes, but that was the Super FX doing all that work - a standard SNES can't scale sprites.

[Harlen Quinn]

What, so you can't write something that would scale an object for you without it being a feature of the hardware?

You can but that would mean everything could sprite scale, including the Atari VCS. Kind of defeats the point of making a feature of sprite scaling.

I do see what you mean and agree that some machines could probs do it in software such as to be seamless but I do think there should be a differentiation between hardware sprite scaling and software sprite scaling. The snes definitely could not do the former and the FX chip does not count when the article is referring to the base snes hardware.

One of the first games I saw that gave the illusion of hardware sprite scaling was Super Aleste. I'm discounting all the prior games that were obviously using a mode 7 background as a single, super scaling and rotating sprite.