Those old systems didn’t do fancy physics at all – they relied on a handful of tricks that fit in a few hundred bytes of code. First, the picture was built one scanline at a time, so the TV’s electron beam moved down the screen line by line. The console could change the horizontal and vertical positions of a sprite for each line, making it look like the sprite was moving smoothly even though the CPU just sent a handful of new coordinates. Then there was the so‑called “sprite scaling” trick. The hardware would repeat a single pixel block across many pixels, creating a low‑res square that could grow or shrink in size by simply changing how many times it was repeated. That gave the illusion of an object moving away or toward the viewer. It was all integer math, no fractions or floating point – just multiplications by powers of two or by the size of the block. Parallax scrolling was another staple: the background layers moved at different speeds. Because the TV drew the screen line by line, the console could tell the background to jump a few pixels each frame, while the foreground moved faster, giving a sense of depth. All of it boiled down to clever use of memory bandwidth, bit‑shifting, and line‑by‑line updates. No real physics, just math that synced perfectly with the display hardware. It’s the kind of elegant, hand‑crafted solution that feels more satisfying than today’s GPU blitters.