Hello guys!
Does someone know who owns the patent for the tile rendering circuit/method of the 8-bit computer/consoles? Not that new 3d stuff like nvidia - i am looking for really old tile techniques.
I know that commodore owns a patent for a sprite rendering method. I tried google patent search but it shows too much of the new stuff.
Thanks.
We are not lawyers. There are lawyers who can do this for you with complete reliability.
If there is a patent here, it will be due to glass teletypes, not games.
And in any case, any patent filed pre-1999* will have expired by now.
* With the exception of U.S. patents filed prior to mid-1995 that issued in mid-2002 or later or patents on drugs and medical devices that meet certain criteria.
Very specific question deserves a better answer. The patent was acquired by an internet bot on 2nd July 2017, but it is believed that the bot (Spider19) was destroyed in a tsumani a few weeks later, that is leaving 8bit graphics in a legal limbo. Most people on nesdev use 7bit graphics since that day.
nocash wrote:
Very specific question deserves a better answer. The patent was acquired by an internet bot on 2nd July 2017, but it is believed that the bot (Spider19) was destroyed in a tsumani a few weeks later, that is leaving 8bit graphics in a legal limbo. Most people on nesdev use 7bit graphics since that day.
If I could +1 / upvote this answer, I would do so daily.
nocash wrote:
Most people on nesdev use 7bit graphics since that day.
NO$A2 when?
Explanation: Apple II high-resolution graphics (HGR) mode has 7 pixels per byte.
koitsu wrote:
If I could +1 / upvote this answer, I would do so daily.
Wrong site, man
If you can only find new patents, I guess the place to look is at what older patents those ones reference. It seems like there must be a list of game/computer related patents somewhere, I don't know of it though. And you might not like what you find anyways, seems like a lot of them are written in ways that seem almost deliberately hard to understand. Some of them are pretty good though, like the Game Genie one.
Tile graphics in general seems like it might be something to obvious to patent maybe? It's like movable type VS woodblock printing, but for screens. But I've heard there are "it's X, but on the internet!" type of patents, so I don't know.
I'd heard there was some kind of settlement reached between Nintendo and Atari somehow related to scrolling, as a part of that Tetris lawsuit. If it's patent-related or if it that's even based anything, I have no idea. Somewhere I remembered hearing something about TI's video chips like in the MSX2 scrolling being what it is due to some similar issue, but that too is just complete BS that I heard somewhere, unless shown otherwise.
A lot of details like that are something that could be looked in to, like sprite scaling, any kind of unusual background or sprite transformations, basically.