Difference between revisions of "Framebuffer"

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Due to the high cost of memory in the 80's and well into the 90's, consoles often settled for small amounts of video RAM, and palette-based images that mapped 8x8 tiles onto the screen using a name table.
 
Due to the high cost of memory in the 80's and well into the 90's, consoles often settled for small amounts of video RAM, and palette-based images that mapped 8x8 tiles onto the screen using a name table.
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[[Category:32X]]
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[[Category:Hardware]]

Revision as of 00:20, 8 August 2012

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A framebuffer consists of data that tells a video controller the colour of a specific pixel. Framebuffers weren't commonly found on 16-bit era consoles, such as the Mega Drive while making the 32X an exception, even though it is really a 32-bit add-on.

Framebuffers usually take a large amount of memory as they need to have information for every single on-screen pixel. An example of this are modern computers - there are 256 possibilities for the red, green and blue channel of a pixel, so each pixel takes up 24 bits - often referred to as bpp, or bits per pixel.

Due to the high cost of memory in the 80's and well into the 90's, consoles often settled for small amounts of video RAM, and palette-based images that mapped 8x8 tiles onto the screen using a name table.