Dynamic Z

Dynamic Z is a patch for Super Mario World that allows performing a variety of actions during V-Blank. It was made by anonimzwx. Dynamic Z is meant to be a replacement for DSX as both allow coding dynamic sprites.

Dynamic Z does not require a buffer for coding dynamic sprites, which significantly reduces the slowdown caused by these type of sprites. Additionally, it can create sprites with a 30FPS animation synchronized with each other; this allows having twice as many dynamic sprites on-screen compared to DSX.

Features

Graphic changes
Color palette changes
Color palette and graphic changes on the player
Tile changes
Support for Dynamic, Semi-Dynamic and Giga-Dynamic sprites
A special DMA mode, which grants 50% more transfer capacity by removing the game's original DMA code
Player DMA optimizations that gives more time during NMI and slightly curbs slowdown
Compatibility with DSX sprites

How it works?

Dynamic Sprite Support

Dynamic Z have tables to define transfers to VRAM between #7400 and #8000. Every Table have 1 slot for each space of 16x8:

DMA Resource: This Table is used to know in what RAM Address starts the source that will be transfer to the VRAM.
DMA BNK: This Table is used to know in what Bank starts dma must find the DMA Resource.
DMA Length: This Table is used to know how much data must send to VRAM.

Each slot of the tables is mapped to a value on the VRAM, the first slot start at #7400 and the last starts at #7FE0, Between 2 consecutive slots, there are 20 address of diference on the VRAM (40 bytes of difference).

To know what slots read of the tables, Dynamic Z use a table called DMA Next, each slot on this table indicates a link between a slot and another slot, for example, if slot #$00 have the value #$20, then after load slot #$00 on the VRAM, the patch will loads slot #$20, if a Slot have the value #$FF, if the patch read that slot, will finish the transfer to VRAM.

To know what is the first slot, there is a RAM Address called First Slot, if this address is #$FF, then Dynamic Z won't load anything on the VRAM.

With the table DMA Next, Dynamic Z create a data structure called Linked List. To add DMA Transfers at the end of the list, there is a RAM Address called Last Slot that have the last slot that will be loaded on the VRAM.