Glossary
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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) tile that can be drawn anywhere on the screen.
- Tile
- A small square graphic.
- SNES tiles are 8x8 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 128x128 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 2x 32KiB Video-RAM chips (64KiB total VRAM).
- The VRAM holds tile data, tilemap data and offset-per-tile data
