Ninja Spirit backgrounds

From Earnest Rymer <xxxxxx@valley2.valleyint.com>
Date
>>I'd really be interested in knowing how games like ninja spirit and GOT
did their parallax scrolling too, didn't the tg16 only have 1 background
layer and 1 sprite
layer? Are they using sprites for those parallax background's, or can you
animate the background layer? How'd they do that?<<

Yeah.  That seems to make sense.  Maybe it only LOOKS like two layers, but
in reality it's just some insanely clever background tile-swapping.  If you
take really small steps in the game, you can see that both layers alternate
between scrolling togehter and independently.  Looks like the program waits
for a 'two-pixel bias' before swapping to the other tile.  (Sorry for the
clumsy terminology, I'm an auto tech, not a programmer!)

Perhaps a lack of patience on the part of programmers would explain why it
was done so infrequently.

The Ys games do the same alternating swappy thingy but it's at a much higher
offset.  It's so bad that it looks like there's an earthquake going on in
the background everytime you move.  Oh yeah, so does Ninja Gaiden.

Earnest
xxxxxx@valleyint.com