MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Arcade game graphics, explanations and demos

Tilemaps come in all different forms. Have you looked at games with ROM-based tilemaps? Dooyong hardware supports absolutely massive ROM-based tilemaps for the scrolling backgrounds, of which MAME just renders a small slice at a time. Then there are row scroll and column scroll effects (e.g. the water effects in Raiden Fighters games). Some hardware supports mid-tile palette changes (e.g. Laser Battle).

Animating sprites is typically faster than animating objects in tilemaps - you only need to update the coordinates and sprite code. You can also do simple collision calculations on the sprite RAM itself. Animating with tilemaps is slower because you need to go from object position to tile location, and update the tile codes for the old and new positions. Collision calculation will be less efficient too if you rely on scanning tilemap memory. On top of that you're more limited in how you can place objects, because you won't have tiles for overlapping objects.

Sprite generators generally have per-frame and per-line sprite count limits. This may tip the balance in favour of a tilemap if you're animating a large number of objects that move in formation.

Anyway, I think a lot of your assumptions and conclusions are wrong. It would pay to understand the hardware a bit better before writing "informative" stuff like this.