3D Checkers?

[+atari2600land]

SpiceWare's post in the website forum section got me reading the Alan Miller interview. At the end of the interview, it says "3D Checkers." That would have been interesting. Kind of like what the Master System did.

"Description: Programmer Alan Miller actually worked on a true 3-D version of his Checkers game, but eventually abandoned it. Fron Alan Miller: "The 3-D just didn't work well enough on the 2600. As I recall, there were two main problems with using the red/blue (anaglyph) glasses on the 2600. The first is that the 2600 is only capable of 160 pixels of horizontal resolution. This didn't allow much precision in the horizontal offsets between left and right eye needed to position objects in 3-D space. Secondly, television sets of that era didn't consistently render the colors, so the blues and reds in the display wouldn't exactly match the blue and red eye filters. On many sets, this caused a serious ghosting problem, in which each eye would still see a ghost of the other eye's image."

So would this work on a PAL TV since it is bigger?

Edited August 29, 2014 by atari2600land

[Rybags]

PAL isn't "bigger" but it has better vertical resolution. But that's not the problem, 2600 can do the same vertical resolution as any other old console that does progressive rather than interlaced video, ie most of them.

Horizontally, PAL/NTSC the same.

 

PAL loses out with colour representation on 2600 though, with only 104 vs 128 colours.

 

IMO the way to go about it would be to allow the user to change the colours so that differences in individual TVs could be catered for.

[Video]

That would be a bit difficult to do, even before you account for the extra sprites to do the red, or blue (or both) sides of the checkers to create the alternate field of view when using 3D glasses, you still have to have up to 4 sprites in a scanline (up to 12, with r/b anaglyphic 3D added) This would be a flickering mess and a nightmare, and I'm not sure how the flickering and alternating scanlines (and other tricks to get it to fit) would work with 3D. It would probably just cause you to grow an instant brain tumor.

 

Now, maybe it could have bee tried with a game a little more to the speed of the 2600, like tictactoe or something. Only 3 sprites per line (or up to 9 if you needed both anaglyphic colors) But even there, that's probably a bit much for the 2600.

 

Maybe start with a racing game or something, vertical scrolling. A single player controlled sprite could be done in 3D to appear over the playfield, and the enemy cars could scroll from the top, one car per scanline, maybe alternating scanlines for the anaglyphic aspects and a solid color for the car itself. That might be doable.

 

As for the TV, I'll tell you, I've NEVER had anaglyphic 3D work on ANY TV with stock out of the store tuning. Old TV's were actually a LOT more friendly to having individual colors and brightness tweeked to allow for proper viewing of movies and such. (I'm one of the few that as a kid, actively kept my TV's set to properly display color)