> Of course there is the issue of compression. We were hoping
> that by using a light compression algorithm (like RLE, or even BIOS
> compression) we would still have enough time to complete all
> the transfers during vblank, since in our engine no other
> operations are required to run during this period.

A 32bit RLE system running out of cpumem in arm can be actually be faster
than DMA transfer if enough data gets repeated and is generally not any
slower. Obviously its not the best compression but can knock a reasonable
amount off the size at negligible cost given the right sort of data.




> Speaking of composite rotating sprites, we found out that
> using 2 or 3 big rotating parts in the same scanline would
> quickly waste all the available rendering cycles (causing
> parts of our composite sprite to disappear).

Yup, hardware rotations are expensive in terms of sprites allowed on a line.


Kriss

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