"Lin, take a look at this section. This 256-byte memory region is Sprite RAM. It can be used to..."
[Received guidance from a senior, graphics experience +3 (due to the skill's effect, the modifier has been adjusted to 2.5x)]
"Let's use the Ricoh 2C02, the PPU for the 6502, as an example..."
[Received guidance from a senior, graphics experience +3 (due to the skill's effect, the modifier has been adjusted to 2.5x)] [Ding!] [Successfully mastered]: Technical art [Skill acquired]: [A Good Place to Change Jobs]: [Technical art +10, graphic design +5]
Vivian did not notice Lin Lixin's momentary lapse in attention and continued earnestly explaining the material in the book.
"So we can use this to read from and write to the PPU through CPU memory, but this is usually done during..."
Lin Lixin, who had been listening attentively all along, suddenly spoke up, picking up where she left off:
"During V-Blank, because it affects the addresses used for rendering."
Vivian froze and looked at Lin Lixin in some surprise.
What he said was completely correct, but she had not gotten to V-Blank yet. How did he know?
"I get it. So that's how it works." Lin Lixin suddenly slapped his forehead, and all the knots in his thinking instantly came undone.
Then he picked up a pen and began rapidly scribbling in his class notebook, actually writing out a rough piece of code by hand.
Although most of it used shorthand and pseudocode that only Lin Lixin himself could understand, Vivian quickly identified what it did.
It was scrolling technology.
The core idea was to treat the entire game world as one enormous background image, while the screen was merely a fixed viewing window.
Every frame, during V-Blank, the CPU would tell the graphics chip which coordinates on that image the window should face in the next frame.
Rapid refreshing created the illusion of a smoothly moving image.
Vivian was utterly dumbfounded. Even students in her major would struggle to pull off the techniques this required without studying them seriously.
Yet this newcomer, who had still been babbling cluelessly half an hour ago, could already independently design a mature scrolling implementation after reading just a few pages of relevant magazines?
"This is unbelievable..." Vivian even began to wonder whether this guy had deliberately pretended not to understand just to mess with her. "I thought math was what Asians were best at."
Vivian was a local, and her understanding of Chinese people came entirely from stereotypical hearsay and portrayals in film and television.
Now it seemed those rumors were correct, but incomplete.
If all Asians had this kind of learning ability, was there really any room left for people like them, who still had not mastered even the basic techniques after two years of studying graphics?
She had even planned to head to Silicon Valley after graduation.
Well, great. Vivian suddenly felt a pall settle over her future.
"Thank you so much, Vivian." Lin Lixin sprang to his feet and thanked her with the utmost sincerity. "Come visit our shop if you get a chance. Everything will be free for you."
Leaving her with those words, he scooped up several books and rushed to the librarian's counter. After hurriedly checking them out, he sprinted back to his apartment at full speed.
Friday.
Lin Lixin looked Sam up and down. He was so exhausted that his face looked different, and Lin Lixin kept feeling as though the guy had lost several pounds.
Over the past few days, Sam had spent every day either attending classes or running around, getting most of the paperwork taken care of.
The shabby arcade, once covered in greasy grime and left with only one working light bulb, had also been cleaned up. The Tetris prototype stood in the most conspicuous spot in the middle.
Leaning on a mop whose head had nearly lost all its strands, Sam looked at Lin Lixin with a pale face.
"It's cleaned up... Everything's cleaned up..."
Lin Lixin nodded in satisfaction and waved the black chip in his hand, which had a row of pins on either side.
It was an EPROM loaded with the new game he had just finished debugging.
"Here. The new game I told you about."
At the sight of the surprise he had been anticipating for a week, Sam suddenly seemed to get a dying man's final burst of vitality. He tossed aside the mop and hurried over to a Xevious cabinet.
"Like you asked, this Xevious machine's been repaired. Let's use it."
Lin Lixin had made a special trip over on Wednesday, picked out several machines in relatively good condition, and drawn up a list of problems for Sam.
Lin Lixin unscrewed its back panel, replaced the EPROM, and plugged it in to power it up.
Scan lines flashed across the CRT screen, and a title appeared in large letters.
"1942"
After weighing a number of factors, Lin Lixin had shifted his development direction from Salamander to 1942, which was better suited to the domestic American market.
Or rather, he had combined the strengths of both.
In the original timeline, Capcom Bitch had released this game on November 11, 1985, more than a year from now.
Unlike a series of new scrolling shooters from the same period, 1942 abandoned a fictional setting in favor of realism, using the Pacific Ocean theater of war as its backdrop.
The player took the role of an American pilot, flying a fighter against Japan's air force.
This game was undoubtedly a success, even a crucial one.
The reason was very simple.
In 1983, the fledgling Capcom decided to enter the video game business.
Its president, Kenzo Tsujimoto, recruited an equally young game designer for the immature startup.
His name was Yoshiki Okamoto.
In later years, he would also be known as-the Father of Street Fighter.
And 1942 was the first game project he headed, as well as the smash hit that gave Capcom a firm foothold in the video game industry.
Sam excitedly threw himself in front of the machine and started the game without waiting for Lin Lixin to explain anything further.
But as soon as he got into it, some of the excitement faded from his face.
This was just Xevious, except the map had been changed to an ocean.
Scrolling maps were also a technique Xevious had used long ago.
At first glance, Sam had only one word in his mind: disappointment.
He had thought he would see a phenomenal game that would dazzle him the way Tetris had.
But all Lin Lixin had given him was a reskinned Xevious.
"Jesse, this is the new game you were talking about?"
He sighed. It seemed Lin Lixin had only stumbled onto the right direction by chance when he made Tetris.
How could miracles possibly happen twice in a row?
Fortunately, they still had a masterpiece like Tetris. Otherwise, he would really have lost a fortune on this investment, and if his family found out, he would definitely have more trouble than he could swallow.
"Give it a try. You'll definitely like it."
Lin Lixin was in no hurry. Xevious was indeed enormously influential, and traces of it could be seen to varying degrees in every scrolling shooter of the period. That was perfectly normal.
But the reason those games had each become smash hits was naturally not that they wore Xevious's skin, but that they had one crucial new system.
Pioneered by Konami's Gradius, it was the true core gameplay mechanic of flying shooters that would remain in use well into later years.
The fighter upgrade system.