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I've heard many times how a few decades ago screen scrolling wasn't quite possible on PC and it was id (or specifically John Carmack) who coded the technology to make it possible with a demo of a Mario game (as a possible port for PC), which would later evolve into Commander Keen.
As someone who isn't very technically literate, what does it mean that it was't possible and then he made it possible? What limitations where there? What did he do? Why is it now so easy?
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>>380779736
It was always possible to do. Even the Commodore 20 had games that scrolled. Video hardware simply improved enough to have a framerate that was as good as Commander Keen in full glorious VGA color.
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>>380779736
At the time, PCs had more general purpose hardware which wasn't as efficient at creating video game graphics. Something like the NES, though primitive, had more specialized hardware that could do the things games needed.
What id did was to draw the screen more efficiently. Pretty much all games then, even console games, redrew the whole screen from scratch every cycle in order to display graphics. id games didn't redraw every frame, they only drew the changes from the previous frame, allowing them to draw frames much more quickly.
Eventually, computer graphics got better and hardware got more standardized across all electronics so this kind of problem is ancient history.
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