doron Posted February 6, 2003 Share Posted February 6, 2003 Someone has to do it, just to prove it can be done. With colors too. dor-x P.S Star trek the motion picture picture, or James bond in Moonraker, or the Black hole or anything from the seventies area would be just great. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Godzilla Posted February 6, 2003 Share Posted February 6, 2003 It was done, there was some basic code and other stuff somewhere... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted February 6, 2003 Share Posted February 6, 2003 Yeah, there is some kind of interlacing demo...probably at The Dig. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
doron Posted February 8, 2003 Author Share Posted February 8, 2003 Well, I think I tried that demo and it showe a bunch of lines and dots and stuff, not actual picture. Sure, it was high resolution, but hi resolution junk (graphical junk, no insult intended). And it didn't move. Am I right or what? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 Well, I think I tried that demo and it showe a bunch of lines and dots and stuff, not actual picture. Sure, it was high resolution, but hi resolution junk (graphical junk, no insult intended). And it didn't move. Am I right or what? My recent Dancing Baby demo shows high resolution animation, and postings to the stella list show some experiments with wider bitmaps. Why not explore the capabilities of the machine yourself - then you'll understand why you don't see high resolution colour bitmaps. Cheers A Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Slocum Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 What about Andrew's dancing baby demo? http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19379 -Paul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Slocum Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 Whoops we were posting at the same time! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
doron Posted February 8, 2003 Author Share Posted February 8, 2003 Yes, I know, quite an achievement, BTW I'm for the baby fighter graphics, which will make the game unique among all systems and not just the vcs. I don't seem to find the updating thread on this anymore. And I would love to explore the vcs, but I lack resources at the moment. But what I meant, was actually: What is the best possible picture the vcs can produce? The baby's animated, so if you cut that out you might be able to create a color baby, or, prefareably, a Sam Fox. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 The baby's animated, so if you cut that out you might be able to create a color baby, or, prefareably, a Sam Fox. Sorry, won't work. The animation calculations can be done outside the time critical display kernel. Changing the colors has to be done in sync with the TV's electron beam and there is defintely not enough CPU to do this in a high resolution kernel. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Slocum Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 And I would love to explore the vcs, but I lack resources at the moment. The Stella Programmer's Guide explains 2600 graphics: http://www.atarihq.com/danb/files/stella.pdf -Paul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Slocum Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 The animation calculations can be done outside the time critical display kernel. Changing the colors has to be done in sync with the TV's electron beam and there is defintely not enough CPU to do this in a high resolution kernel. There is enough time to change the color on each line, right? But that's not enough to be very useful. I wonder if you could use playfield graphics underneath to give a little more color? -Paul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 I wonder if you could use playfield graphics underneath to give a little more color? Yup, there are some (quite limited) possibilities here. My Boulderdash demo is using that. BTW: Might be another trick for your guide too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 I wonder if you could use playfield graphics underneath to give a little more color? Yup, there are some (quite limited) possibilities here. My Boulderdash demo is using that. BTW: Might be another trick for your guide too. Aaaaactually, reasonable bitmaps may be possible. Expect a titillating demo from me sometime soon Cheers A UPDATE: I've just posted a Samantha Fox demo to [stella] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 Aaaaactually, reasonable bitmaps may be possible. Well, depending on the acceptable amount of flicker the VCS could even do multicolored 160x~200 pixel bitmaps. Though trying that may cause some serious headaches. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 You can display any static picture you like in any amount of colors as long as you're okay with only having 12 pixels per scanline, or 24 pixels with a sort of HAM-like effect and 30Hz flicker. I haven't found an actual use for this yet, of course. Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 12? The horizontal resolution is 40. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
doron Posted February 8, 2003 Author Share Posted February 8, 2003 Well, If I understand, what you guys mean with "your latest trick" is to have a decent monochrom resolution in the foreground, and low res color in the background. Well, that's how the ZX Spectrum has done quite a few fine pics, and the Vcs does have a wider color plate... I can draw quite well, If anyone needs a pic. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 12? The horizontal resolution is 40. Not if you want to be able to display each 'pixel' in its own color, which entails hitting the background (or playfield, I guess) color register with a new value as often as you can. You can do shorter stretches of higher resolution different-colored pixels (c.f. Acid Drop, or the Rubik's Cube 3D thing) by mixing in playfield and player graphics, but to cover the whole screen you're looking at about 15 pixels per color change. (I say "about" because while it seems to me each color change should be 15 pixels, I seem to be displaying 12 colors which would come out to 180 pixels across at that rate.) LDX #$09 STX COLUBK LDX #$07 STX COLUBK LDX #$05 STX COLUBK LDX #$03 etc.... Of course you can use COLUPF instead and have multiple pixels inside each color change, and that might well be preferable aside from not having time to make the playfield asymmetric, but to actually make a full-screen full-color 'bitmap' the best you could do would be 12x192 or flcikery pseudo-HAM 24x192 as I described (and it would be completely static, with nothing else going on, and I'm not even sure you could do that vertical resolution in 4K, I haven't tried it yet.) I'd love to see someone prove me wrong Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZylonBane Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 Anyone else here familiar with the ColorView system on the 8-bit Atari computers? Basically it allows you to display 80x192 4096-color images by splitting the image into 16-color red, green, and blue images, then displaying them in a rolling interlace pattern, like so-- Frame 1: scanline 1: Red line 1 scanline 2: Green line 2 scanline 3: Blue line 3 Frame 2: scanline 1: Green line 1 scanline 2: Blue line 2 scanline 3: Red line 3 Frame 3: scanline 1: Blue line 1 scanline 2: Red line 2 scanline 3: Green line 3 And repeat... (Neep: Internally, what normally happens is that the R/G/B data is interleaved so that each frame's display data is physically contiguous. Save a lot of jumping around in memory.) So using this scheme on the 2600, you could realize a freeform (if somewhat shimmery) 48 x Y 8-color image. Those colors being: black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 Talk about flicker. If that was done the screen would be running at 20hz, right? BTW you can't get 48 across...and if the pixels were to be colored independantly, it would give you even less (see post above) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZylonBane Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 BTW you can't get 48 across...and if the pixels were to be colored independantly, it would give you even less The pixels aren't colored independently... the scanlines are. And it's more of a shimmer than a flicker. At any given jiffy you've got a complete interlaced RGB image onscreen. The interlacing is just done to increase the vertical resolution and blend the colors together. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 I must be missing something ( big surprise! )...but you can already make each scanline be a different color (out of 256...or is it 128) without using any interlacing. How would this help create pictures? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZylonBane Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 Where did you get "without interlacing" from? This method requires interlacing and I've mentioned it several times. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 lol That's not what I was asking...I was wondering why you would want to do such a thing, since it wouldn't help you create hires pictures (from what I can see). The 2600 can display a seperate color on each scanline already...why would you need to incorporate 3 frames into one? Just to increase the color pallette? You would still only have one color per line, right? :? I'm still in the dark, sorry. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZylonBane Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 Ok, I'm not really going to have to explain the concept of additive color blending, am I? Haven't you ever looked at a color TV really close? "The TV can display a seperate color on each phosphor already...why would you need to incorporate 3 phosphors into one? Just to increase the color pallette? You would still only have one color per phosphor, right?" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.