Was it fast enough to replace the palette during horizontal blanking? A quick Go...

vardump · on Feb 28, 2021

Yeah, it would steal a lot of DMA time, and would starve a CPU not executing code & accessing data in the Fast RAM.

But at least you can display pretty pictures without HAM fringing. :-)

pezezin · on Feb 28, 2021

Fair enough. I'm always amazed at the kind of tricks expert programmers could pull off on those old 2D machines.

Have you seen the Sega MegaColor demo? A crazy guy managed to play full color video at 30 fps in the Sega Megadrive. No graphics, no sprites, just change the background color for every pixel through DMA!