Mind Master Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 ...What's with all these "video wafers"? Pac Man, Ms. Pac, Dodge 'Em, they all seem to use dashes rather than dots. Why? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 ...What's with all these "video wafers"? Pac Man, Ms. Pac, Dodge 'Em, they all seem to use dashes rather than dots. Why? The playfield resolution of the Atari 2600 is only 40 pixels across the whole screen, and a single colour, at that. All the pacman-type games I have seen use playfield to draw the dots, and so they end up being at least the width of a playfield pixel (ie: big). The vertical resolution of the Atari 2600 is much higher, however - effectively 4 times the horizontal resolution. Depending on how many lines each dot uses, that makes them either very wide and thin, or very wide and thick. Cheers A Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rasty Posted March 23, 2003 Share Posted March 23, 2003 Actually there are several less-popular maze games on the 2600 that have dots instead of wafers thou: Alien and Cat Trax to name a few.. But of course the drawback is that such dots, usually generated using Missile and Ball graphics, are subject to several visualization limitations (such as appearing on alternate lines to reduce flicker)...! Regards, Rasty.- 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EricBall Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 Also recognize that many coin-op arcade games (like Pac Man) used a vertically oriented monitor (equivalent to a TV on its side). This means for a home translation the graphics get vertically squeezed, resulting in lines rather than dots. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vic George 2K3 Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 And, of course, there's Mountain King, where you're scooping up clusters of dots (supposedly diamonds) in order to find that dancing Flame Spirit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 Also recognize that many coin-op arcade games (like Pac Man) used a vertically oriented monitor (equivalent to a TV on its side). This means for a home translation the graphics get vertically squeezed, resulting in lines rather than dots. That's not really the case, since you are not "importing" the graphics from an arcade game. The answer above was correct...the background graphics for the 2600 is limited to what it can do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StanJr Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 Is that how they do the "diamonds" in Shark Attack? Using Missle and ball graphics I mean, because they (the diamonds) blink sometimes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 Yup. The diamonds are too small to have been done with playfield graphics. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Room 34 Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 As long as we're discussing weird graphics on the 2600 in arcade conversions, what's up with the "oscillating square" (for lack of a better description) effect used for both the coins in Mario Bros. and for some of the "meanies" in Burgertime? (Sorry... way to derail the thread, right?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisbid Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/...i2.shtml#burger This is the story of burgertime from the Blue Sky Ranger homepage... DEVELOPMENT HISTORY BurgerTime was a priority for the Marketing department. After losing out on the best arcade licenses to Atari and Coleco, Mattel Electronics made a deal with Data East USA to put their arcade games onto Intellivision. Data East had limited distribution in the United States, so none of the games Mattel Electronics obtained were very well known. But BurgerTime was so good that Bally/Midway, the largest arcade game distributor, licensed the title from Data East. Soon BurgerTime was in arcades everywhere. Mattel had accidentally acquired a hit. Not wanting this to go to waste, Marketing decreed that BurgerTime would appear on every platform Mattel supported: Intellivision, Atari 2600, Colecovision, IBM PC, Apple II, Aquarius and handheld. Ron Surratt, manager of Atari 2600 programming, inspected the game and came to a conclusion: it couldn't be done on Atari. Marketing asked what additional programming resources would be required. None, Ron replied, it can't be done. What hardware modifications needed to be made to the cartridge? You're not getting it, Ron said, it can't be done. No, Marketing came back, you're not getting it: BurgerTime WILL be released for Atari. Ron set about programming the game. A hardware scheme to give him more memory to work with was devised (see Comments), but complicating matters was that the game was not allowed to flicker. A hardware restriction of the Atari 2600 is that when too many moving characters - sprites - are in a row on-screen, they begin to flicker. In the original M Network games, APh Technology Consulting did a great job of orchestrating sprite movements to minimize this flicker - far better than Atari had in their own original releases. Marketing had jumped on this, pointing to the lack of flicker as proof of M Network superiority. Of course, this meant that all new games had to meet the standard of the early ones: no - or very little - flicker. Unfortunately, the highest scoring move in the game, dropping all of the bad guys - nasties - at one time, requires that they all be in a row. So how could he keep a row of sprites from flickering? Ron used something of a cheat: a regular sprite's look is defined by the programmer, but there is also a special sprite - a missile - defined by the hardware. A missile is simply a rectangle intended, as its name implies, to be used as the graphic for a projectile. The programmer cannot change its shape, only its color and width. Despite its graphical limitations, missiles do have one advantage: they don't flicker when in a row with other sprites. So Ron made a square missile orange and called it a slice of cheese, made another square white and called it an egg, and made a thin missile brown and called it a bread stick. Voila: no flickering. Some fans of BurgerTime were disappointed to find that the chef was being chased around the maze by colored squares and sticks, but most were happy that the gameplay was quite faithful to the original arcade version and to Intellivision BurgerTime. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Room 34 Posted March 24, 2003 Share Posted March 24, 2003 Thanks for the info! Great explanation! I agree... the gameplay on BurgerTime for 2600 is fairly good, despite those graphical challenges. Of course, BurgerTime is one of the few games that I think is actually fun to play on Intellivision too (and one that I can actually manage fairly well with that stupid disc), and since I have my INTV hooked up to the same TV as my 2600, the 2600 version gets slighted... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ranthulfr Posted March 25, 2003 Share Posted March 25, 2003 ...What's with all these "video wafers"? Pac Man, Ms. Pac, Dodge 'Em, they all seem to use dashes rather than dots. Maybe they were trying to give us more for our money? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Godzilla Posted March 25, 2003 Share Posted March 25, 2003 why does this subject sound like a joke waiting for a punchline... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
D.Yancey Posted March 25, 2003 Share Posted March 25, 2003 I would be willing to turn my TV on its side if it meant graphics could be drastically improved! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted March 25, 2003 Share Posted March 25, 2003 Kinky Reminds me of the old old Apple II ports. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mind Master Posted March 25, 2003 Author Share Posted March 25, 2003 why does this subject sound like a joke waiting for a punchline... I enjoy setting 'em up and watching all you guys knock 'em down... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted March 29, 2003 Share Posted March 29, 2003 I would be willing to turn my TV on its side if it meant graphics could be drastically improved! Well, then instead of dashes you'll be eating vertical bars.... Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+darryl1970 Posted July 15, 2011 Share Posted July 15, 2011 Actually there are several less-popular maze games on the 2600 that have dots instead of wafers thou: Alien and Cat Trax to name a few.. But of course the drawback is that such dots, usually generated using Missile and Ball graphics, are subject to several visualization limitations (such as appearing on alternate lines to reduce flicker)...! Regards, Rasty.- I recently found this thread through Google, as I was wondering why so many 2600 maze games use wafers instead of dots. I couldn't remember the name of the game (Cat Trax) that I saw with dots. I didn't notice a heavy amount of flicker from using this technique, although the play field looks a little "lighter". Why do the dots themselves not flicker. Is there one or two missiles dedicated to dots? Would the program gave to remember what dots were left in each vertical column, assuming the same missile is being moved horizontally across the screen? I am assuming collision detection is only helpful for whether the cat eats a dot, then math would be used to find where the collision took place (kind of like the NES light gun)? Would this have been useful for a better Pac-Man? From my experience with Ms. Hack, I would probably rather have all of the colorful characters than worry about actual dots. However, it would definitely add to a pretty awesome achievement to change Ms. Hack wafers to to dots! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SpiceWare Posted July 15, 2011 Share Posted July 15, 2011 (edited) They do flicker, but only at 30 Hz. They draw all the dots on the one side, then all of them on the other. They reuse the missiles and ball (missiles are orange and pink, ball is blue) multiple times as the screen is being drawn to draw additional dots. The black bars on the left are where the dots are being shifted left/right. There is no additional flicker when reusing objects vertically down the screen like this. Edited July 15, 2011 by SpiceWare Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rex Dart Posted July 15, 2011 Share Posted July 15, 2011 ...What's with all these "video wafers"? Pac Man, Ms. Pac, Dodge 'Em, they all seem to use dashes rather than dots. Why? Tramiel got a big ole sack of 'em real cheap. Ain't gonna buy no dots when he got perfectly good dits. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
supercat Posted July 15, 2011 Share Posted July 15, 2011 I wonder what the creators of Burgertime thought they'd be able to manage? It doesn't use anywhere near the whole 2K of RAM, but some testing I did would suggest that it would be possible for a kernel that did use that much RAM to draw fancy shapes with the missiles and the Ball, in much the same way that other M-Network games do. Getting a game working with such a kernel, including having getting all the necessary non-kernel stuff to fit in vblank, would be tough, though. I wonder if anyone was planning on using the extra RAM to produce fancier graphics than were in fact achievable. 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.