Yoshi's Island keeps the current level's title card in video memory until it is overwritten by other graphics. this is what you get when you approach the first message block in 1-1
on a more technical note, it's fascinating to see how this game copes with the SNES's hardware limitations. you only have access to 512 sprite tiles and a limited window in which to DMA graphics to VRAM every frame. the game reserves a 128x32-pixel space for the majority of the Super FX scaled and rotated sprites, such as the message block above, which means you can have a maximum of four 32x32 sprites1 on-screen at any given time (or sixteen 16x16 sprites, though i don't know if the game can actually handle that many). there are a few places where this limit is exceeded, and if there are no free slots, the game will gracefully fall back to using normal sprites (e.g. if you spit out a Shyguy, it won't roll away like it usually does). in levels where there are a lot of large scaled sprites, like the Chomps that fly out of the background, they'll even do stuff like replace the flowers with less-animated (but technically more complex) versions that don't rely on the Super FX chip. the whole damn game is a technical marvel and it's amazing that it manages to juggle all this stuff and still maintain a solid 60 fps on a console with a 2.68 MHz CPU.
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each of which is technically four 16x16 sprites, if we're referring to the hardware definition of "sprites". i kinda hate that everyone uses the same word for both, but what can ya do
