Introduction

While exploring PC Engine image quality and quantisation, I found that when loading an image from CD-ROM to VRAM, it took something like 6 seconds for the load to finish.

I thought this was a hardware limitation at the time, and supposed that this was the reason that PC Engine games from back in the day didn’t feature more colourful background graphics.

An unexpected correction

I was very grateful when prolific PC Engine developer Elmer corrected me:

Update, 24 Dec 2024

Check out Part 2, where loading times get much improved!

Introduction

I spend some time in the evenings working on various toy projects. It’s a good way to exercise a programmer brain in a way that a day job generally doesn’t.

Anyway, a while back I bought an Analogue Duo, which is a high quality FPGA clone of the old 8/16-bit PC Engine console.

I say 8/16 rather than just 16-bit, because while the GPU was 16-bit, the CPU was an 8-bit HuC6280 – a derivative of the legendary 6502 CPU, with a bunch of handy extra instructions and so on. Oh, and 4 times the typical speed.

Introduction

One of the first code smells we encounter when working with an object-oriented language where everything is an object, or everything subclasses a common base class, or there are no static methods, is how OOP typically handles equality of objects.

For value types such as integers and floating point numbers, it’s not controversial that we should be able to compare them and decide if they’re equal or not. Integers can be compared by bits, and data structures can be compared by descending into the structure and comparing elements.