I played a bit with original gameboy too. I was very surprised when, iirc, the cpu is not even fast enough to clear the screen in one vertical blank, or even in one frame! It takes like three to fully clear the map.
Great resource! But a lot of it is very old. I recently discovered this open source ds cart[1] and an alternative SDK[2] to devkitPro. Both were used in the development of a demo[3] released at Revision this year.
Well, it’s texture RAM, the only one that RDP can access. It’s closest thing to « video memory ». Although, you’re right as the framebuffer lives in main ram. But that just means the system is sharing like in modern hardware, so I wouldn’t call the main RAM VRAM in any way.
Because the article is about hardware formats, not storage formats. GPU hardware formats are left compressed in GPU memory, the GPU decodes it on the fly. Basis universal must be decoded to a GPU hardware format (or to plain RGBA) before it can be used by the GPU.
I wouldn't go that far, but yes, no compiler will leave that on the table today or even twenty years ago. They do even more impressive transformations than that on basic math.
Marbotic does the same kind of stuff with specially crafted wooden pieces on a regular android/ipad tablet. Maybe focusing on kids wasn't the best path to success...
https://www.youtube.com/@marbotic