Troed SångbergZeme (edit: He's here on Mastodon as @sandor ) is blogging about his retro game development journey on the Atari ST at the moment, and while I'm linking a specific entry you should read all of the entries.
Anyhow - this post specifically is about what I think is the coolest development that the demoscene ever invented on the lowly 1985-era Atari ST hardware: "Sync scrolling".
The ST computer was completely incapable of shifting the screen display horisontally, which made it horribly inefficient to make side scrolling games for. But us demo coders never stopped trying anyway - and the Swedish demo groups Omega and TCB independently at the same time found a hardware abusing trick to do it.
Zeme's writeup on the subject is really good - and yes - I'm mentioned multiple times since I've put together a library for others to make use of this trick in their productions.
Sync scrolling
As you may know, the Atari ST (unlike the STE) officially doesn’t support hardware scrolling. In this post, I’m going to talk about a demoscene technique that allows an ST to achieve basic hardware scrolling regardless of that restriction. This technique is called sync scrolling.
Steven Bagley
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