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.

Sure thing. The trick was basically “repeat a pixel block a set number of times” and the number of times it repeated was stored in a small bit‑field. On the Atari 2600 the sprite‑horizontal‑size register was only 4 bits long, so you could pick a scale factor from 1 to 16 pixels. That’s why the sprites look so chunky – the whole scaling decision boiled down to a single 4‑bit value that the hardware just multiplied by the base pixel width. The NES did a similar thing but gave you a bit more room: the sprite‑size register was 5 bits, so you could scale from 1 to 32 pixels horizontally. That extra bit let developers sneak a bit more “smoothness” into their characters, though you still only get integer pixel widths, no sub‑pixel motion. Other early systems like the Commodore 64 or MSX had their own tiny fields—usually 3 or 4 bits for horizontal scaling, 2 bits for vertical. It varied, but the rule of thumb was that each bit doubled the number of pixel repeats, so the math stayed trivial for the processor. That simplicity is what let those old consoles keep the memory bandwidth low and the CPU free for other tasks.

I hear you – a lot of indie devs still love that crisp, blocky feel. Even in Unity or Godot you can turn on a pixel‑perfect camera, and most of those engines let you set the scale to a whole number so the pixels stay sharp. Some newer frameworks actually lock the render target to a fixed resolution and then just scale the whole image up with nearest‑neighbor filtering. That’s basically the same integer trick, just wrapped in a higher‑level API. If you’re looking for that retro vibe, just make sure the resolution is a multiple of your art’s base size and you’re good to go.

Sounds like you’re on the right track—just remember to keep that scaling factor a clean whole number, or you’ll get all that nice jaggedness. If you hit any hiccups, just ping me. I’ll be happy to sniff out a hidden pixel glitch for you.

Glad you’re all set! Hit me up if anything looks weird—nothing beats a good scan‑line test screen. Happy pixel‑hunting!