I am putting together the building blocks of a multi platform RPG engine that is going to be somewhat of a hybrid between an old style text interface somewhat like an early title like The Bards Tale, with a more modern turn based jrpg combat engine.
Yes, a little bit of an odd combination!
Anyway, with the MSX(2) target I'm going to be using screen 8; 256x212, rgb332. My 'sprites' are simply bitmaps and since I am not needing collision detection or fast animation this should be fine - all combat will be resolved using 5th edition D&D rules.
128kb VRAM will be a minimum and 256x212 uses slightly less than one page. My question is - are there any restrictions on the remainder of the available VRAM? The 'sprite' frames I've calculated to take up the entirety of the second page:
There are two possible combat scenarios;
1. 4x Player characters + (up to) 6 Enemy characters:
3x idle frames
2x attack frames
1x damage frames
1x backbuffer frame to store BG on sprite movement
These are all sizes at 32x32px.
2. 4x Player characters + (up to) 2 Enemy characters + 1 Boss character
As above, but Boss is 64x64px.
In both situations I would use 64kb of the second page, or just under. Is that possible? (I.e ignore sprite and palette table - the latter of which is not used in the screen 8 332rgb mode.
Secondly, can the remaining "off screen" vram in the first page still be used (I am thinking for things like UI elements, hit effects etc). Basically I don't want or need an hardware sprites at all - so can that space be used fully, or is it always reserved?
