Barnacle boy

So far Frenchman seems the nicer of the two, and he is right. What a surprise. The guy who earlier wrote: ...leaps in to side with Frenchman against someone he has decided is potentially anti-Atari. Pete, there's something you should know about Frenchman and Atarian63, something the regular posters on this board probably won't tell you due to politeness and diplomacy. Basically, those two are possibly the biggest frothy-mouthed fools you'll find on these forums. You're better off not engaging with them. They're not interested in discussion. They've staked their tents somewhere far beyond that. Also, lol at the accusations trying to sniff out Pete's c64 sympathies. Show us the code! Prove you are not a counter-revolutionary! Guards, arrest that man!

José, I don't want to offend you mate, but as a casual observer I've noticed that this is exactly what you do to other people's comments. In the WotEF thread, you were coming up with all sorts of ideas about how to handle the game on Atari, apparently without really checking how the game played on the c64. Even after Pete suggested that you try the c64 version in an emulator to see that the 2 players can completely overlap, you still made a lengthy post proposing an idea that is unworkable (as far as I can tell) as it still relied on the erroneous assumption that the players in the c64 version only ever overlapped each other to a max of 8 pixels across. Things like that don't encourage people to take your ideas on board. And then you started up that whole Ikari Warriors thread with that map, claiming that the guys in the 7800 forum said it's from NES version, but you got that wrong too. The map is actually from the 7800 version of the game - the guy posting merely commented that it looks a lot like the Nintendo map for about the first 2/3. But either way, just having a map of a game doesn't even come close to warranting the response of: "A NEW GAME ON THE WAY? WHO WILL TAKE THIS?" I don't mean to nitpick, but I get the impression that you get all excited and barely read other people's posts, and then get depressed and maybe even annoyed when people don't fall over themselves in a rush to adopt your ideas. So what I'm trying to say is, maybe you should slow down a bit (smoke a cigar!), and read more carefully the responses people do give to your suggestions, because you might find they're telling you something useful.

Pete, my advice is to just read every 'corrective' post in the voice of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. It's much more fun that way.

I think the range of the c64 palette is pretty good, actually. Sure, it'd be nice to have more than 16 colours, but not if it meant facing greater restrictions in other areas. It's all very well for emkay to change the colours in those screenshots, but given that we're limited to 16 colours, I think the current palette is a fair compromise, especially when it comes to typical game graphics. A 16 colour palette with 4 pinky/purpley shades (as seen in the first example) just wouldn't be very practical - not unless you needed a lot of nudity in your game. Or a lot of cotton candy and marshmallows. Ideally, I would have liked to have seen the option to select the c64's 16 colours from a wider palette, but again, not if that meant more restrictions on colour placement, or fewer sprites, or narrower sprites, or needing to use 2 sprites just to make one multicolour one... you get the idea. @Pete, I wouldn't take it too personally when people correct you, though I agree that Lazarus could have made the effort to see if anyone had beaten him to it. But the thing is, if you make incorrect statments about the c64 or its games here (where people mightn't know any better due to being unfamiliar with the platform), it's only reasonable that someone says 'Hey, wait a minute... that aint right!' And you have to admit, saying that Enforcer 2 doesn't seem to show more than 8 sprites at once was pretty far out there in wrongland. BTW, after playing the demo a bit more, I'm not too sure about your suggestion that it doesn't use a multiplexer. I mean, you have a few enemy bullets that can travel through any zone of the screen, plus the large asteroids break into separate sprites that cross all the zones. It's hard to say, really. edit: but then again, maybe those 'broken asteroid' bits just count as enemy bullets - as in, maybe no other enemies will fire until those asteroid fragments are gone. Dunno. @Lazarus - while we're correcting people, I might as well point out again that the player ship actually uses three sprites.

Yeah, on that last logo with the interlace (@ Rybags, OK, not really interlace... we need a better term for alternating between 2 pics every frame!) you're going to get flicker under vice unless your monitor can be set to a 50hz refresh. Assuming your monitor has a 60hz refresh rate, one thing you can do to get a better idea of how that last logo screen should look is go to the options menu in Vice, then maximum speed > custom, and set the max speed to 120%. You'll still get roving bands of ugly flicker, as Vice won't necessarily sync perfectly with the monitor refresh, but at least you should get a few glimpses of how it is supposed to look. You can experiment with enabling v-sync (under settings > video settings) and viewing it in full-screen mode too.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you are wrong on that one, Andy. Regardless of whether a sprite is MC or hires, if the sprite to background priority bit is set for that sprite, it will be drawn under colours 2 and 3 in the bg, but over colours 0 and 1. The way you're proposing of using an x-expanded hires sprite under a 'foreground' object would only work if the foreground object in question used only colours 2 and 3. In the Last Ninja games on c64, they use some kind of software masking from the looks of it.

I only just read this post, but wha...? That is so wrong it hurts! I'm in pain right now. Why do you do this to me? OK, I shall climb down from my Enforcer 2 high-horse now. (In fact, after reading Oky's comments, I am now sitting firmly astride my Armalyte high-horse. It's very high indeed. I think it might actually be a giraffe.) I too presumed the lightning in Enforcer 2 was chars at first, and was a bit surprised to find they had used sprites, but I guess it's kind of a non-essential frill. Because it only has to flash on the screen so briefly, the coders probably thought: why not just slip it in when there are some sprites free? If there aren't enough sprites free, just don't show the lightning, or show one of the shorter ones instead. In regards to Enforcer 2 not displaying many enemy sprites per split, I guess part of the problem is that they used up 3 sprites just for the player ship. Add to that a couple of 'free roam' sprites needed for enemy bullets, and you're not left with much to play with. Yeah, the ship looks nice and all... but 3 sprites!? You can make a pretty nice looking ship with just one! Still, at least they didn't make it 2 sprites wide, Katakis style. And I agree that Armalyte is a more impressive example, sprite-wise (and gameplay-wise too!). Sure, it might rely heavily on fixed sprite paths, but it works so damn well. Oky, why do you keep saying that Enforcer 2 has 3 layers of overlaid parallax? Can you explain how you arrived at three, because I only see two - all the red stuff being the 'back layer', and everything else being on the 'front layer'. I think he's talking about the level 1 demo where it's got the parallax ala the red stuff on level 2, the foreground AND some fast moving star looking 2 character wide stuff over the background ooooooo I wondered if he's somehow interpreting the blue and purple stuff in level 2 as being on a separate layer to the metallic stuff. I thought maybe the fact that the blue and purple stuff serves as kind of a background (being non-collidable) made him overlook the fact that it scrolls at the same speed as the metal foreground stuff. I see now that he has been banned for a week, so I guess it will remain a mystery forever more. Or for a week.

Emkay talking c64: Emkay talking Atari: Well, it's emkay.

This screenshot, taken from near the start of the level 2 demo, shows 24 sprites on the screen. I wonder if the posters here can spot them all: Pete, did you actually try playing the demo? Because frankly I'm surprised that any demo coder could be so far off base. Oky, why do you keep saying that Enforcer 2 has 3 layers of overlaid parallax? Can you explain how you arrived at three, because I only see two - all the red stuff being the 'back layer', and everything else being on the 'front layer'.

Some of the stuff going on here is pretty funny/fascinating... Let's consider this comment: ...fair enough, right? Yet if we look at the 'bullcrap' trail from its first appearance in the atariksi vs JamesD debate in this thread, we get this is msg#5758: ...and in msg#5783: ...so in msg#5793, JamesD calls him out for writing off counter arguments as 'bullcrap' (and also straw-men): Unfazed, Atariksi decides to turn that around and give this odd advice in msg#5797, almost as if James is the one who has been labelling things bullcrap: And then, in the same post: So in msg#5804, James says: Notice that James has not once called Atariksi's arguments 'bullcrap', but he has referred to Atariksi calling an argument bullcrap. Yet after all that, we get this choice nugget (bold emphasis mine) from Atariksi in msg#5815: At this point, can I just say HOLY CRAP! I mean, that is one helluva thick skin. Anyway, so James points out that he only mentioned bullcrap when repeating what Atariksi had said: ^ I really like this: 'You also claimed a general "crap" on post #5804 without the "bull" prefix. Reading that, you could be forgiven for thinking that JamesD must have said one of Atariksi's arguments was 'crap', but in fact Atariksi is referring to this: You sly dog, Atariksi! Amusingly, Atariksi also says "Regardless, point is once you state mislabeling them as rants or other similar words without factual basis, I can at least call a spade a spade". Of course, never mind the fact that JamesD didn't use the word rant until msg#5804, which was well after Atariksi had started calling JamesD's arguments 'bullcrap' back in msg#5758. That little problem is what the "or other similar words" parts is meant to cover. What's even funnier is that Atariksi also complains that JamesD called his argument a 'straw-man'. It seems that this complaint is just thrown in as a diversion. Either way, if we then follow the 'straw man' trail, it unfolds in a strikingly similar manner to the 'bull crap' trail: ---- Atariksi (msg#5782): "...JamesD, you are making straw-man arguments...." Atariksi (msg#5783): "Straw-man argument useless as explained in my previous message." Atariksi (msg#5783): "...Straw-man argument. Actually, you can start a new topic on that. I can produce a better shaded pencil and move it better with ANTIC chip than IIGS and Plus/4..." Atariksi (msg#5783): ">Look, just because I agree that the the Plus/4 and IIGS can put up a better pencil picture doesn't mean I think they are a better machine in every way. Strawman argument." JamesD (msg#5793): "atariksi, you are real fond of saying things are strawman arguments. You are even saying statements I'm making about what I'm saying are strawman arguments. So I'm making up an argument that I'm not making and proving it wrong to make me appear wrong??" Atariksi (msg#5797): "...your constantly pointing out (in the post you replied to) of superiority relating to pencil imagery is straw-man argument. Your mentioning pencils again above is part of the straw-man argument." Finally, in msg#5818 , James directly accuses Atariksi of using a strawman: "You are using a strawman argument... again. I said 100% register compatibility. Read my statement on the read modify write cycle "most software doesn't care"." ...which leads us to: Why, sir! How dare you call my argument a straw-man after I have labelled your arguments straw-men and bullcrap time and time again! This now gives me the right to remove the gloves and call a spade a spade! Which, rightly or wrongly, I have already done! HAH! Atariksi, if you ever become a super-villain and need a catchy name to go with your new outfit, I suggest something like "The Twister!" or "The Slippery Eel". Or maybe just "The Chewbacca Defender!". edit: After all that, I spelt 'defender' wrong.

heh. Don't get me started on the speccy or the amstrad. I could complain all day about them.

That's exactly how I feel. I can live with being limited to 16 at a time (though more would be great), but it would have been awesome to have those colours selectable (I'd really like a darker green sometimes). However, obviously there are compromises made in the design of these machines, and if going for a broader palette had meant that the sprites would have less colours, or be significantly narrower, or be fewer in number, then forget about it. If it had meant they had to get rid of the colour RAM, then forget about it. If it had required just a small compromise (or none at all!), then that would have been brilliant. (As an aside, I wonder if they could have trimmed the sprites from 21 lines high down to 20, so freeing up three bytes per sprite, and then perhaps they could have used 1 of those bytes to let the two colours that are shared across all sprites be selectable instead. Maybe the other two bytes could have been used for better collision detection, keeping track of which sprites it was colliding with... I dunno if any of that would be possible, but one line off a sprite wouldn't be a big sacrifice.) Because he's just trolling for a reply so someone will mention a more colorful Atari version try to explain how the colors help (Archon mentioned earlier), and he'll argue the colors don't matter because the playability is the same. Old news now, really. With this line of reasoning, he should "upgrade" from those 16 colors to 4 colors or monochrome, then. Just an arguement to try to convince Atari owners that 16 => 256. He's setting up, ready to ambush someone who thinks 256>16 and believes it improves the games **to them.** I think you and cyrano are being way too defensive. (Frenchman, on the other hand, is just being an opportunistic ankle-biter.) You interpret everything through a filter of 'Is he trying to put down the Atari!? HOW DARE HE!', so instead of looking at what someone like popmilo is actually asking or saying, you turn it into a game of 'What is he getting at? We must preemptively neuter the attack that he must surely be building.' Cyrano referred to popmilo as being in 'attack mode', but it would be closer to the truth to say that over the last few pages he has been in 'being attacked mode'. For my part, I think that popmilo's question is difficult to answer. Fewer colours can affect the playability of a game in ways that are difficult to quantify. For example, the coloured tiles in Trailblazer could be replaced with patterned tiles of the same colour, and it could still be played, but it would most likely make discerning which tile is which more difficult (See the Speccy version, though admittedly it's only 2 colours - which is less than popmilo's 4 colour minimum). And then there's the way colours can add to the ambience of a game, without necessarily having a definite effect on the gameplay mechanics. It's such a fuzzy area, and half the time it's just going to come down to the experiences/perception of the individual. But what I find interesting is that in the process of attacking popmilo's question as an 'anti-Atari' question, the Atari appears to have somehow been represented as the colourful game platform. I take the point others have made regarding the way the large palette means that different games can establish a different 'texture' with different colour choices. I also agree that games like Crownland demonstrate that more is possible. Yet one of my main reservations about the Atari is that the games tend to lack colours. Apart from a few horizontal colour-band heavy games, the most colourful Atari games usually only manage to be comparable to the c64, while there are far too many 4 colour jobbies filling out the library for my liking. If you want to get mad at me for saying that, so be it.

Hmm... - popmilo specifically asks for an example of a game that would suffer in terms of playability with less colours. - Cyrano responds with a Jeff Minter lightsynth toy/app/whatchamacallit - popmilo praises it, but points out quite politely that it isn't really a game. - Cyrano calls him a c64 troll, frenchman says popmilio's post 'backfired' (though god knows how he arrived at that conclusion), and wood_jl starts shouting "IT IS SOMETHING THAT CAN NOT BE DONE ON A C64. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS." Way to go, guys. Stay classy. @MaPa. Nice work with the pencils. Now I'm going to have to resist the urge to spend next week drawing a totally over the top piccy with pencils all at crazy angles.

heh. Otherwise known as 'The Minter Effect'. Come to think of it, it isn't really fair of me to use that gate shot as an example. It's not hard to picture how they could have used those gradients more effectively. For starters, they could have made those buildings a different colour (and hence a different gradient) to the ground. Even if they had just filled the buildings with the greys that you can see in the mountains and in the edges of the gate, it would have separated it nicely. Other shots from the game certainly show much more effective use of colour bars.

What if I called it an 'ALL NEW CHALLENGE!'. Would that help?

Do you guys really like that style, where most of the colour is just horizontal bands? Don't you think it makes the background look transparent? When I see things like that, I get the impression they're just going for loads of colours/shades using DLIs at the expense of visual design and effectiveness. (Mind you, the c64 version of this game is no supermodel either. Alternate Reality: The Dungeon makes better use of the machine.)

lol. Try adding sprites flying around on top of the Atari vertical pencil image, full stop. It's already multiplexing a bunch of PMGs to get those colours (with only 10 pencils, might I add). Meanwhile the c64 one could have a whole flock of sprites flying round the screen... but oh me oh my... at certain points one or more of the colours in a sprite might be the same as a line of pixels in the background under that sprite, so it is all ruined. Ruined I tell you! I'd rather have no sprites left than have to put up with that!

@Rybags: Fair enough... interleaved. So TIP is an interleaved mode, I take it? Does it have obvious scanlines too? (apologies if that's a silly question. it's hard to keep track of all these atari modes.) Not sure if a responding to a non-interleaved mode like FLI with an interleaved mode like TIP would really be a 'Game Over' situation, to be honest. What res is APAC? 80px across? Would that also be interleaved?

But isn't TIP an interlaced mode? If we were going down that route, I could always go for iFLI and so drastically increase the perceived number of colours. Even just interlaced MC mode probably would be enough.

@MaPa: Very nice indeed... ...but someone has stolen one of your pencils! Well, you can borrow some of mine if you like. It's OK... I have plenty! Still standard multi-colour. If I was doing this seriously, I'd consider switching to FLI mode to let me handle some of those shadows with greater flexibility.

I would be very interrested to see it the A800 is able to do the same thing but putting pencils vertically! It would be interresting... as it stands now, it is nice but no very impressive. Indeed. There's no doubt that the Atari can do some extremely nice horizontal colour bars, displaying a far greater range of colours than the c64 is capable of. showing. But versatility is also a key factor, possibly the most important factor, which is why I'm sure the Atari will have no problem matching the following plane jane standard multicolour c64 effort... Right? Now that I've said that, you guys probably will match it one way or another, you bastards!

Even without interlace, it looks like that method has potential. That bee image probably counts against the technique a bit too, considering it has such a busy background with so many discrete areas of red and blue, which makes the horizontal lines more noticeable. The purpley colour in the head and the lighter shades in the wings come across pretty well. How many different shades can there be in one horizontal line? 4? 5? It would be interesting to see it applied to a not so busy and less 'fragmented' (in terms of colour) image.

You don't download the uncensored stuff? Ah, now that's a topic for a whole other 200 page thread. @wood_jl: lol. yeah, I didn't want to risk being accused of vulgarity again. I thought of 'wet bits', but then I thought of all the... well, maybe it doesn't matter what I thought of.

That's certainly an interesting technique with the alternating between red/green/blue shades per scanline, however the low resolution is a little off-putting when viewed fullscreen... gets a bit like trying to see the rude bits in a typical Japanese porno. Are there any examples that do a similar thing at 160 resolution? Even though it would be restricted to less shades per line, perhaps it could still create an effective image, particularly if some careful dithering was used.

On Frenchman's facebook profile. Holy crapoli. I thought you were kidding!