Hacker News Reader

It's likely due to being easier to deal with across various memory mapping modes. There's a Retro Game Mechanics Explained video about it that I can't seem to find right now.

View on HN

This. The Super NES memory map is divided into 256 banks of 64KB each. The bottom 8KB of RAM is visible in 128 of these banks, but the remaining 120KB only appears once. The bottom 8KB of RAM is therefore faster to access (at any time, it's more likely to be visible in the "current" bank).

Of course, game developers tried to put as much data as possible into the part of RAM that is faster to access.

Here you go:

https://youtu.be/-U76YvWdnZM

Highly recommended channel. The video about blanking is a particularly awesome entry in this series and it even features Super Mario World:

https://youtu.be/Q8ph2OVqZeM

Reply on news.ycombinator.com