Glossary

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Revision as of 14:30, 26 July 2022 by Tepples (talk | contribs) (sprites can be bigger than 8x8; saying "a sprite is a tile" is misleading)
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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) 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