The player's ship was also animated this way.In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene. When they started their attack on the player, they were converted to sprites, then back again if they returned to the formation. So when enemies were in formation, they were drawn/animated with the tile map and moved from side-to-side using the hardware scrolling registers. Each 8-pixel high column of tiles (which was a horizontal row, since the screen was rotated 90 degrees) could be individually scrolled by writing to its corresponding scroll register. It only had one CPU, and only 8 hardware sprites (plus 8 bullet/missile/bomb sprites) but managed to draw 46 enemies on screen. Its predecessor, Galaxian, was even more limited. I'd guess the Galaga CPUs are spinning their wheels most of the time. The star field is generated completely in hardware with a LFSR (linear feedback shift register), and there is a 8x8 tile map to draw the score and any other text. Galaga has specialized graphics hardware that draws 64 individual sprites, so to update a screen full of objects you only need to update 256 bytes at the most. How did the Namco hardware create such an effective graphics rendering engine from slow, cheap, multiprocessing Z80 CPUs? So I am guessing that the sprite hardware available for the top 8-bit home systems was no match for Namco's custom graphics hardware. There was a weak port for the Atari 7800 and a decent, serviceable port for the NES, which still falls well short of the arcade game graphics. I think it is noteworthy that none of the 8-bit single CPU home or console systems of the 1980s faithfully reproduced this game. Although, I would assume a similar means of sharing data existed for the sound co-processor too. I'm mostly interested in how the Z80 for graphics processing was utilized to manage the drawing of all the sprites. I am aware from the limited information found online that the 3 Z80s were divided up as one main CPU, and a co-processor each for sound and graphics. It had amazing, fast, smooth 2D-sprite graphics, and relied on Namco hardware that utilized 3 Z80 CPUs running at ~3 MHz. Galaga was a popular arcade game developed and released by Namco (Midway in N.

Galaxian arcade game sprite