Absolutely! I think that's what the author meant when he said "In my prototype, your hand at the bottom of the screen is a background (similarly, in my E-Reader solitaire game, all of the cards are drawn into a background instead of using sprites)."
Thanks for the clarification (I'm the blog author). If one were to really make this game, how the cards would ultimately be rendered is hard to say. Sprites are nice because you can overlay them and form many card variations from just a few sprites. Tiles rendering into a background doesn't account for transparent pixels, so building up tiles into a single background is not possible.
One way to handle that is to provide all the possible tile variations, but that would take up so much space. So you'd have a set of tiles for a regular Ace of Spades, and an entirely different group of tiles for a Lucky Ace of Spades for example.
The GBA has 4 backgrounds, so it would be doable to grab three of them and use them to render cards. That would only leave 1 background left for, well, the background :)
Another option would be to use a memory buffer and implement tile rendering yourself that accounts for transparent pixels. That would be the best of backgrounds and sprites combined into one. That would solve many problems, at the cost of the implementation would probably take up a lot of space. My hunch is this would be the best approach.
This right here might be why I find this platform so interesting. It's very limited, and the limitations usually bump into each other and you often steel from Peter to pay Paul.
Oh and the post didn't mention debuffed cards (they have a red X drawn over them). That'd be yet another card layer to throw into this mix.
the emphasis on self-help snake oil leads me to believe you know that this system would fail under the weight of actual information. if you find success, it will be on the backs of marks you conned.
Not all self help books are like that. Self development changed my life. And that's just one of the categories we have. You can check psychology, history, science, startup books too. And we are adding more.
Everything still works great, except the original monitor died many years ago. I hope to replace it one day, but $200 for a used 12" monitor is more than I want to spend right now (I have a tractor I am restoring that takes precedence).
the sentence in the article "The jail terms were scrapped in 2012 amid human rights concerns, but not retrospectively – leaving almost 3,000 people languishing in prison with no release date." tells me that there is not an amount of danger which justifies this behavior from the state. if we have been able to live without this law since 2012, then there are other answers available which do not include this treatment.
it is important for us (the nerds with skills) to appreciate what the internet is like for those who aren't in the know. you and I will never see an ad, our grandparents will see thousands.
It's insane to me anyone would downvote this comment (edit: or flag my disbelief for being somehow irrelevant to conversation). The public library system is quite possibly the best thing this country has ever invented.
It is true that there have been some level of public libraries available throughout history. I am referring to the wide availability of public access that effectively democratized literacy (in concert with the public school system, of course).
The problem with the statement is it's naive insistence that i live in op's world. It's the inane insistence that we dont live in the third largest country and the insistence that everything has been homogenized and is one simple vanilla flavor.
Frankly at this point it's just virtue signaling on the order of "I'm not a raging consumerist like you, I use a public good instead." The demand to be thanked, and the refusal to be criticized are part-and-parcel of the virtue signal.
I don't see a societal benefit in people borrowing video games and watching DVDs that aren't educational. At least non educational books might expect the reader to expand their minds, and to a lesser extent movies.
But the majority of video games and movies being produced are empty wastes of time. It seems to me loaning those items is just an attempt to stay relevant lest libraries become vacant and useless. What other value is there in loaning out PlayStation games?
Off the top of my head, it seems like a great way to give access to content (games, movies, etc) to those that may have been able to afford it on their own. It may not have a ton of educational value, but some mindless entertainment goes a long way towards happiness sometimes. A happy citizenry is probably a societal benefit.
Without video games exposure as a youth I’d likely be an unemployed failure. It stoked an interest that has since sustained a twenty plus year career. Piracy gained me that access back then, glad to hear it’s now more easily available to fuel the passion of a new generation.
"I don't see a societal benefit in people borrowing video games and watching DVDs that aren't educational."
"loaning those items is just an attempt to stay relevant lest libraries become vacant and useless."
you have answered your own question.
We should not accept this at the end goal though. Libraries were needed when there were physical things you had to store that were impractical to have in every home and could only be duplicated with significan effort and cost.
In the digital age it's absurd to say that we should have to rely on public libraries to access our culture when we have the means for everyone to have their own personal library in their pocket.
It doesn't help that libraries that do carry digital content have fully embraced DRM, thus giving a pretense of legitimacy to anti-user technologies and absurd laws that give them teeth and thereby weakening attempts to correct problem.
