Why do hardware engineers always make things more complicated than they have to be?

Question

I'm trying to start making homebrew games on various retro game systems. Something that is stopping me from doing it is that, every graphics chip has so much extra settings c**p that you have to go through. It's not so much for NES and Gameboy, but for Sega Genesis and even more for SNES the amount of settings you have to set gets overwhelming.

One thing you have to do is figure out where in the V-RAM you want to store the sprites, and the background tiles. You have to use a lot of math so you don't overlap it with the color pallette and tile maps and stuff. Why can't they just have specific locations that are always used for sprite tiles, background tiles, ect, instead of figuring out where you want to put it yourself.

Second problem, to load a specific sprite tile for a specific sprite, you have to calculate where exactly it would be in the V-RAM by using addresses. It would do much better if you can select the actual tile number instead of the tile location.

Why do you only get to access graphic registers during v-ram. I think that should be reengineered, so that you can access it anytime, and have a hardware copier, copying the entire psuedo v-ram into the real v-ram for the graphics chip can use it, instead of having the CPU copying it itself with all those complicated registers.

Answer 1

You might find an old Windows 3.1 computer on eBay.

Engineers had not yet complicated things to much back then.

Answer 2

Welcome to real programming.  Where programming is more than just drag this and drop that.  Back then, there were many more constraints that you had to deal with in order to make code optimal.  Remember that back then a 1G processor was only on the drawing board and memory was measured in megs not gigs.

Also, if you look under the covers of something as simple as a context switch, you will see that many of the same calculations are being done.  It's just that everything has been taken care of for you and you don't have to worry about it.  But...Those OS guys are busy at work in the back hallways of MS and Red-Hat taking care of the things that most people don't even know or care exist.

So what you are doing is reverting back 10-15 years to the time when programmers actually knew what their code did.

Have fun and Good Luck.