Stay within the console's limits¶

A Mega Drive does not draw your character as one picture. It shows it as hardware sprites: rectangles of up to 32 by 32 pixels, made from 8 by 8 pixel tiles stored in video memory. There are limits on how many fit, and when a pose asks for too much, parts of it flicker or disappear. The budget overlay shows you this while you draw.

The Frames tab with the budget overlay: the slash pose outlined in yellow hardware sprites, with a readout of sprites, tiles and the busiest line — The slash pose needs 16 hardware sprites and 41 tiles. Its busiest line uses 10 of the 20 sprites a line can show.

Turn it on¶

Choose Budget in the view bar of the Frames, Animations or Timeline tab:

MD H40 is the Mega Drive's wide mode, 320 pixels across, used by most games.
MD H32 is the narrower mode, 256 pixels across.

The editor remembers the choice for each tab.

Read it¶

Every hardware sprite the pose needs is outlined. A part bigger than 32 by 32 pixels is split into several. Lines where too many sprites meet are marked in red: on the console, sprites would drop out there.

The readout in the corner counts:

	Mega Drive H40	Mega Drive H32
Hardware sprites on the screen	80	64
Hardware sprites on one line	20	16
Sprite pixels on one line	320	256

It also counts the tiles the pose uses. Tiles are video memory, shared with the backgrounds and everything else on screen. The same tile used twice, or a part flipped, costs nothing extra.

These limits are for everything on screen together, not for one character. Leave room for enemies, effects and the player's shots.

In the Animations tab, the inspector names the animation's worst step. In the Timeline tab, the readout counts everything in the scene at the playhead.

Tips for artists¶

Fewer, bigger parts use fewer hardware sprites. More, smaller shared parts use less memory. Auto Modularize finds a balance with one slider.
A part 33 pixels wide becomes two sprites. Trimming one column can halve its cost.
Wide poses are expensive on a single line: a sword swing stretched across the screen can use many sprites on the same lines.
Reuse parts flipped instead of drawing mirrored copies. The console flips hardware sprites for free, so they share tiles.
The numbers follow the Mega Drive exporter exactly, so they are what the game will use.