Before drilling down into technological stuff I want to share some basic concepts.

Collision detection is a very common concern in games. It consists on determining whether two objects have come into contact with one another. In games, this is necessary in order to make decisions, for example, in games like Mario Bros., it is important to know whether a Mario has collide with a tortoise or a coin. In order to detect collisions, each object  has a bounding box, that is an approximation of  the object’s surface.

A sprite is a a small bitmap image (or set of images) used to visually represent . Another kind of bitmap is a tile, which is usually used for background maps.

During the drawing process all the sprites and tiles are drawn incrementally into a buffer and then this buffer is dump at once into the low level buffer that will impact on the screen. This technique es called double buffering.

To be continue…