I was thinking about platforms and enemies moving in circles in old 2D games, and I was wondering how that was done. I understand parametric equations, and it's trivial to use sin and cos to do it, but could an NES or SNES make real time trig calls? I admit heavy ignorance, but I thought those were expensive operations. Is there some clever way to calculate that motion more cheaply?

I've been working on deriving an algorithm from trig sum identities that would only use precalculated trig, but that seems convoluted.