Glossary

Graphics

Background

A grid-based layer containing a tileset, one or more tilemaps, a scroll offset and other attributes.

CGRAM

256 15-bit words of memory located in the PPU that holds the palette data.

CHR

Character

Another word for tile.

Nametable

Another word for tilemap.

Object

Nintendo's term for Sprite.

OAM

Object Attribute Memory

544 bytes of memory located in the PPU that holds the sprite table.

Palette

A color lookup table.

Raster

A horizontal line of the output picture. (Also: scanline)

Scanline

A horizontal line of the output picture. (Also: raster)

Sliver

An 8x1 pixel segment of a tile.

Sprite

A 16-colour (4bpp) square of tiles, usually 8×8, 16×16, or 32×32 pixels in size, that can be drawn anywhere on the screen.

Tile

A small square graphic.

SNES tiles are 8×8 pixels in size and are stored in a variety of formats in VRAM. Adjacent tiles can be combined to create larger tiles for backgrounds and sprites.

Tilemap

A grid (in VRAM) that describe which tiles and palettes to draw for a background layer.

Mode 7 Tilemap

A 128×128 grid of 8-bit tile indexes for the Mode-7 background (in VRAM).

Tilemap Entry

A 16 bit word containing the tile index, flip, palette index and priority.

PPU

Picture Processing Unit

Generates video output from VRAM, CGRAM and OAM memory.

VRAM

Video-RAM. The SNES has two 32 KiB Video-RAM chips (64 KiB total VRAM).

The VRAM holds tile data, tilemap data and offset-per-tile data