I wanted to make something like this a few years, really cool to see someone actually go out there and do it.<p>This design seems to be framebuffer-based, a straightforward hardware acceleration of the method you would use for software 2D rendering. If you aren't aware already, you should look into how the classic 2D graphics chips on consoles like the NES worked. They evaluated the background and sprite rendering logic as the video signal was being scanned out, causing some hard limitations on e.g. the number of sprites per line, but generating the signal with less latency and without requiring an expensive (for the time) framebuffer.<p><a href="http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/PPU_rendering" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/PPU_rendering</a><p>Obviously the approach falls apart if you want to introduce scaled/rotated sprites or go 3D.