Displaced Gamers takes a lot of time to make their videos, but I always know their videos will be worth watching, and usually also worth posting about. Their newest video (36 minutes) is a typically deep dive into Metroid’s game engine, and why the game inexplicably drops frames. It’s only a first part so far, but they do an excellent job of breaking down Metroid’s game loop. As far as it goes to this point, a big part of the issue has to do with the main game loop being called to prepare game screens being scrolled into, which are kept in a big memory buffer (so big the game requires extra RAM on the cartridge to store it) and copied into the PPU’s VRAM when needed.
Here’s the video. If you enjoy this sort of thing, we’d probably get along very well in person!
