16 colours is STILL plenty :)

[oky2000]

One of my favourite quick go sort of games is level 1 section 3 of the Sega Genesis/Megadrive game Castle of Illusion with a certain disney character in it. This game uses a lot of colours and has a neat parallax effect but I have whittled it down to a mere 16 colours and converted the sprites of Mickey down to just 4 colours (leaving 12 for the background/foreground) and it looked so good I wanted to share

 

I plan on doing this section of the game for 3 different machines and all have to be done in a completely different way but this is how it could look on a regular 520ST launched half a decade before the 16 bit Sega console and it would still look as cute as the 64 colour version

[oky2000]

And here is a couple of 16 colour mock-ups from my favourite level of my favourite 80s arcade shmup...Vulcan Venture

 

A fair bit of manual pixel swapping to map colours by hand to fit a 16 colour palette but I was surprised how good it could look so decided to tack these on too. I think we can all agree they look a million times better than Venom Wing by Thalamus lol

[swapd0]

looks great!!!

[oky2000]

Cheers

 

I was reading up on AMOS game making book PDF I downloaded and it mentions the loading of oversized screens and the memory pointer to place the real screen window inside it. If STOS has this can anyone tell me if having a blitter equipped ST would be able to scroll the screen faster or if I need an STE with the scrolling specific hardware?

 

As soon as I find a cheap Mega STE I will start doing some test coding and STOS compiling for blitter equipped machines and see how the Micky mouse thing goes.

[swapd0]

I don't code for STOS for ages but when you use the scroll commands it scrolls just part or all the screen, you can't define a screen bigger.

 

Maybe you can define a screen bigger using the STE extensions, I never used it because I've a normal ST.

 

Now that I've a mist hope to start to code again...

[MrMaddog]

Cheers

 

I was reading up on AMOS game making book PDF I downloaded and it mentions the loading of oversized screens and the memory pointer to place the real screen window inside it. If STOS has this can anyone tell me if having a blitter equipped ST would be able to scroll the screen faster or if I need an STE with the scrolling specific hardware?

From what I remember of my STOS coding days, you can use the Blitter extension in place of the 'screen copy' command to move the screen around. I think it's around 20% faster because the CPU is not doing the work. You can also use the STE extension for hardware scrolling but it's really tricky.

 

And of course there's the Missing Link and Misty extensions for regular ST platforms, but bear in mind that to do smooth scrolling with that a 200x200 area is more optimal than 320x200.

[oky2000]

So even with the STE extensions you think would not be easy to do 320x200 screen smooth scroll via STOS extensions then?

 

Does number of colours being scrolled help, for example the parallax overlay spiders webs can easily be reduced to just two colours (3 with transparent area included)

Edited August 30, 2013 by oky2000

[calimero]

So even with the STE extensions you think would not be easy to do 320x200 screen smooth scroll via STOS extensions then?

 

Does number of colours being scrolled help, for example the parallax overlay spiders webs can easily be reduced to just two colours (3 with transparent area included)

Maybe you should ask this at atari-forum.com

 

There is a thread about scrolling on ST. Very detailed!

[oky2000]

Maybe you should ask this at atari-forum.com

 

There is a thread about scrolling on ST. Very detailed!

Thanks, will have a search

 

If I could use the blitter at least it could be run on regular Mega's not just STE's