Inferno style games

That's the point: you can trade fps for a number of objects. Just remember that 30fps is often enough, and when you start flickering you have to drop *always* at 30 or 20 or 15 fps. Even worse, and good for epileptic.

when someone told us that sw sprites mean 8 pixels steps in movement?

About lazyness i stay of my opinion. they used those hw sprites because if more easy to poke some x,y values in some memory location than to implement a kind of sw sprite routine. Even if one get worse to almost unaceptable levels. Rastan saga is an example of this with monochromatic enemy sprites (they can be realized with sw sprites). A true punch in your eye considering the richness of background

Very impressive the slowness of this game too. With a little profiling however i've found that the main bottleneck is the z80, due to the huge amount of calculations needed to do differential tile plot.
I think inferno is different: it does massive gfx operations with sw sprites, dropping the 'scroll utopia' and uses the vdp at most, leaving the cpu for other tasks

Don't worry Grauw. a few big MSX2 games are on the way

Me too actually! also I think a lot more people agree with me/us: http://www.msx.org/poll/i-would-see-new-games-being-made

So I'd say it's time to plug the #msxdev compo again I suppose ;)

I hope more ppl will join this competition, and maybe some of those will be with games aiming for msx2 or higher, so we can have a steady/yearly flow of nice stuff :D The first edition was imho a decent start, last year was a bit dissapointing, so lets hope people get their act together and start dev'ing ! :D

I totally agree with you, I think that hw sprites are better option than sw sprites in most games. The games with sw sprites rarely shows a good frame rate, instead hw sprites that shows a massive amount of srites at great speed. Talking about design, there are games with incredible hw sprites like Metal Gear, Usas or Hinotori where I really don't think that sw sprites could improve the graphics but could deteriorate the frame rate.

I think that Valis II is not a good example for sw sprites since its frame rate is really low for an action game. I should prefer hardware sprites as first Valis where you get a full screen scroll at a really stunning speed.