There's probably a better board out there for asking this question, but maybe someone here knows:

Part of the reason that Buck Rogers was a relative latecomer to MAME was that it had "analog sprite scaling circuitry", and that was a difficult thing to emulate.

It occurs to me I have no idea as to what this actually means, and I'm kind of curious about the details. How exactly could you use analog circuitry to scale a sprite? It doesn't quite make sense.