Wraparound

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What Does Wraparound Mean?

In video gaming, wraparound is an innovation in display screen strategy that eliminates the conventional boundaries of a single screen. Items going outside the boundaries of the screen come back in on the opposite side of the screen.

Techopedia Explains Wraparound

In terms of modern sophisticated gameplay, wraparound was a feature that came on the scene relatively early. Even basic games like the Atari 2600 Asteroids, Pac-Man and others provided wraparound features well before templating and 3D graphics revolutionized the user experience. At its core, wraparound simply utilizes some basic mathematical functions — that means even flat two-dimensional characters in relatively primitive games could move in a wraparound screen.

In terms of its overall context in IT, wraparound has been replaced by a more sophisticated point-of-view display. By creating large libraries of visual display data, modern video games are able to offer a much more advanced scrolling point-of-view experience that is much more versatile than a wraparound display.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.