There's a FMV player for the 8-bit Sega Master System ( https://github.com/bravesoftdz/tiler ,) which compresses to a fixed number of dynamically updated tiles. The codec in TFA and Tiler seem very similar, with Tiler also taking advantage of the SMS's ability to flip tiles horizontally or vertically.

A higher spec version of Tiler is available as TileMotion, which has a JavaScript demo decoding 1080p video in software here: https://gligli.github.io/tilemotion/demo/

Once you see the tile map of this in action, you realize how genius and simple this idea is. You can only update 32 tiles a frame but it can preload tiles in advance of them being displayed provided there is low enough motion and spare space to allocate.

Would love to see something like this ported to similar systems such as Amiga, Mega Drive and Neo Geo. All 68K, all tile based.

Also seeing that gameplay at the end, absolutely wonderful. Would not have figured it was even remotely possible on a system like that, but there it is.

I wanted to see how big the example clips encoded down to. Or is this just a technical test to see what it's capable of playing back, not an attempt to optimize the video size?

> Each 8×8 block is turned into a short DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) feature vector; distance is measured there instead of raw pixels.

Was this your idea or the agent's? Because it feels peculiar to essentially describe JPEG, modulo the entropy coding, without mentioning its name. It was released in 1992 -- before C+C. Which makes me wonder why Westwood didn't just use JPEG too...

Fun fact, DCT's inventor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Ahmed_(engineer)