I've heard that some NES games used subpixel coordinates in the format where the per-pixel coordinate is shifted by 4 bits, and the low 4-bits are subpixels. If 2 bytes are used for the coordinates, levels are limited to being up to 16 screens long.
A trick to having longer levels that I came up with, is to have a small level collision map buffer in ram, and have it "wrap" as the player advances, so that a level can be longer than 16 screens in legnth, without resorting to using 3rd byte.
Is this a new trick, or was it already used a long time ago, and I just didn't think about it until now?
EDIT: Fixed poor wording.
A trick to having longer levels that I came up with, is to have a small level collision map buffer in ram, and have it "wrap" as the player advances, so that a level can be longer than 16 screens in legnth, without resorting to using 3rd byte.
Is this a new trick, or was it already used a long time ago, and I just didn't think about it until now?
EDIT: Fixed poor wording.