STE'86
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Posts posted by STE'86
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The US version seems to be better somehow. At least the gamescreen is 320(160) wide. While the "preferred" version only has 256(128) pixel width.
That's because the actual arcade game used a monitor turned 90 degrees so it's resolution was akin to 200x320 not 320x200
Most v-scroll arcade games used this format and even on pixel perfect conversions on the PSP you either have to turn the console 90 degrees or live with the black borders or zoom in (zoomed in being the worst choice as you can't see the enemies coming so gameplay is affected)You really believe in your words ?
If I were about to build such game in the "original" aspect ratio, I'd open the borders in the upper and the lower range of the screen.
OK, a hard job for the C64, but not impossible. The working gamescreen could have been 128x200 (ratio then 1: 1.19) for better calculations we stick to 256x200 (1.28:1)
But the used screen size is 256x168 (1.52:1)
Original size: 320x200 (1.6:1)
The Ratio of Ikari Warriors is more about 200:320 (1:1.6)
As you might see: In no way the aspect ratio is corrected to the game.
It would turn into that direction, if someone used the Sprites of the C64 to "adress" the ranges on top and on the bottom of the screen.... which seem to be done....
But what have they done?
The screen is shrinked horizontally, and also vertically, having the scoreboard with a huge black border...
I'd bet that the huge black border is an indicator of saving cpu time for the raster interupts, plus handling the scrolling and the reused Sprites.
The first official release with sprites in the border I can think of is Delta...a lot later than Ikari. Also you can't 'open the borders' on the C64 only sprites can be displayed on top of the border as far as I know so thats not applicable to trying to make a scrolling game in the mid 80s using char graphics in the border.
More daydreaming by emkay...now daydreaming bullshit about what is possible in his dreamworld on the C64 as well as the A8
very true. no character positions in the borders. sprites only (and therefore no colour ram options) and with a side panel, probably an extremely crappy ST type "judder" scroll because the scroll couldnt be hardware. hardware scrolling is an all or nothing deal when going vertically (no vertical rasters remember?). so to do a side panel, either you:
A) do the panel in sprites which will REALLY help your in game multiplexer
)B) you waste shedloads of cpu time or character definitions to physically rotate the chars in the panel back down in the opposite direction of the scroll at the same rate.
or option c: scroll the whole screen and define your graphics to suit the new aspect ratio.
option c wins hands down for something u would actually want to play.
game over.
Steve
edit something in the back of my mind says you could put one single repeated char in the border before anyone chimes in with this. Pete can probably illuminate this more. it was his field afterall.
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And.. I asked you if you had a relevant question.. obviously no as usual. You need to find a better way to argue Barnacle Butt. You have no arguement as there are tons of example of how awful the c64 was during the 82-84 time period. Heck there are even some in 1988
Amazing! I can post some for you if you like however you seem familar with lemon. Maybe you should go back there. Lot of other sources just as easy, you must have missed my Atari 2600 vs C64 post today. Though kind of in jest it is amazing how bad c64 was.
We use to laugh and laugh at my retail store when c64 came out
one would assume u laughed your asses off until the 64 sales went stratospheric, all the games coders jumped ship and the atari sank without trace?
must have been one hell of a year for u. a real hoot.
what did u do after 1985? did it involve asking "do u want fries with that?"
Steve
You know I'm still laughing my ARSE off how in the UK, the awful Spectrum, which wasn't even considered a computer outside UK, outsold the C64 by 3 -1
yeah incredible isnt it? all those good games it had must have made the difference. mind u if your figures are correct and it outsold the the 64 in the UK by 3:1 and the uk market was one of the bigger 64 markets. makes u wonder how many times it outsold the atari by then doesnt it?
about 10:1? maybe? who knows coz atari never publish their sales figures apparently. suspicious that, to someone working in the advertising industry.
Steve
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And.. I asked you if you had a relevant question.. obviously no as usual. You need to find a better way to argue Barnacle Butt. You have no arguement as there are tons of example of how awful the c64 was during the 82-84 time period. Heck there are even some in 1988
Amazing! I can post some for you if you like however you seem familar with lemon. Maybe you should go back there. Lot of other sources just as easy, you must have missed my Atari 2600 vs C64 post today. Though kind of in jest it is amazing how bad c64 was.
We use to laugh and laugh at my retail store when c64 came out
one would assume u laughed your asses off until the 64 sales went stratospheric, all the games coders jumped ship and the atari sank without trace?
must have been one hell of a year for u. a real hoot.
what did u do after 1985? did it involve asking "do u want fries with that?"
Steve
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Damn. what a devastating loss to a8 coding that is. do we take it the 3d dropzone has been shelved then?
Reality must be hard for you, but the coding of that 3D Dropzone is a reality of your C64 washed brain. Not the real thing just like real colours and music above 3.5kHz.
So, take it easy ...
Not reality? surely not? but u discussed it so eloquently a few pages back. u made it sound so easy i thought it would only take u a couple of weeks. and i was SO looking forward to seeing it.
also the sequel to your hangman game with presumably 256 colours in full screen with 11khz sampled mp3 soundtrack. assuming of course u could find another Bob Stevenson image to rip off and use in it. (u did of course realise that image was "Juno" that u used and originated on the terribly rubbish c64 hardware? and with all that classy a8 art to choose from too. shame on u.
carry on
Steve
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Damn. what a devastating loss to a8 coding that is. do we take it the 3d dropzone has been shelved then?
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But the atari sts and stms werent what u could call "mass market" were they? they, and the a1000s were "enthusiasts" machines. they were outside the price range and availability of pretty much most computer users until the arrival of stfms and a500s. i remember in 87 my stfm costing £350 which is almost double what a 64 cost me in '85. my amiga fortunately was a freebie to develop on (which i never did i always preferred the ST design apps)
anyway what i am saying i suppose is that the c64 art had an extended lease of life because of the availability and affordability of the "next gen" machines.
and as to your last, somewhat "barbed" comment, i would say that its MUCH easier to produce something that looks reasonable on the c64 than any other 8bit because of its superiority of multicolour bitmap display.
however, as i have said MANY times before, the artist who i thought was the dogs bollocks of any computer artist was Dave Thorpe who was a spectrum specialist, and did the loaders for ocean/imagine and US gold.
Steve
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Devil's advocaat for a moment, perhaps more artists went for the C64 because it's the more flexible machine to work with...
Nah - that's clearly not the case - by the time great pixel artwork was really underway (1984/85) the next generation of systems were with us (PS/ST/Amiga etc) - at least a couple of those were far more artistically liberating than the C64 - just MUCH more expensive!
The C64 was cheaper, more readily available, better marketed with a broad range of software, it was an appealing system, and as a result fell into the hands of many creative people as result of it's ubiquity, if the A8 had sold as many units then there would be a huge archive of wonderful pixel art for that too I would think...
sTeVE
actually mate thats not strictly true (in UK anyway) the ST didnt really become available in its stfm form to the mass market until 1987 and the amiga a500 about 12 months later, so for 2 years the c64 was the machine of choice for any would-be graphic designer because it was the best platform available for anyone with any aspirations of working in the industry. As i say i can only be certain of these facts in relation to the UK, but as, during the period the best art was produced on the 64 in the uk, i feel confident enough to post this.
Steve
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try derezzing and decolouring it and see how much of that sky is left.
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Here the result.
Ok, without ulterior motives, which one reproduces better the impression?
(16 colours, typical rez)
How many times do i have to say "i don't rate any wired port jobs" before it sinks in?
i am not going to discuss which is the better screen out of two wired nasty looking ports.
you have once again attempted to twist what i said onto some other tangent. the quote that u posted from me was me replying to your statement that the original had little tonal range, NOT saying that u needed to dither or not to dither to get a good result.
Steve
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LOL dammit i nearly fell for that!
u hadnt moved off tactic No.1 at all it was just a smokescreen to get me of the subject of your horibble port jobs and onto talking about real paintings instead!
very nicely done but i won't play sorry. i will not be moved off the subject of crap wired art onto real art.
10/10 for that attempt tho.
Steve
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show me the version monet did with no gradient of tonal values and blocks of flat colour?
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IMHO there is not much gradient in e.g. 'The Regatta at Argenteuil (Régate à Argenteuil)', but I also see trees volumetric. Artistic freedom is a nice thing, isn't it?
thats why computers have dithering.
If you had said 'computers restricted to <20bit colours benefit from dithering to bluff more colours' I would agree.
no tonal range in that? u think?
try derezzing and decolouring it and see how much of that sky is left.
i see however u have gone to forum tactic no.2 "if u cant deflect them on to a tangent then revert to pendantism"
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mate that is bloody awful. it looks like a pc svga screen stripped down without dither to a 16 colour gif.
Could it be that you don't like pictures of 'Monet' too? No dithering and no false colours in his artwork...
nice try but i am well wise to the atari forum tactic no.1 "if the argument is being lost then deflect it off on another tangent at all costs"
i stand by what i said, that pic is a NASTY piece of derezzed, decoloured tat. show me the version monet did with no gradient of tonal values and blocks of flat colour? thats why computers have dithering.
Steve
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mate that is bloody awful. it looks like a pc svga screen stripped down without dither to a 16 colour gif.
its all very well saying "well the c64 cant do it" but basically no bloody self respecting c64 artist would post stuff thats as crap as u keep posting in 64 colours.
the fact that the 64 cant display those colours is pretty immaterial if u cant post an a8 screen that uses the colours, which looks as good as a good 16 colour 64 one.
edit this was not in reference to the turrican thing but the previous page.
Steve
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in all honesty mate, even in '86/'87 that pic if done on the 64 would have been just "average" and lost amongst the many other better ones of the time.
64 colours it may be but its still just average quality.
oh and my take on all the "cpu assisted" crap on all machines is "if u can't draw in it and have to wire it, it's bogus"
edit: ah star raiders 2 that was a nice looking game. lacked the play depth after a few hours tho, compared to the original. but didnt they make a right fck up of the 64 version? i remember seeking that out amongst a load of pirate stuff and laughing at it.
point 2 is how the hell did that castle wolfenstein get that high a score. the programmer must have a lot of friends who go to lemon.
Steve
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Can you end the offtopic please? It's about "Atari vs. Commodore" and not about "C64 nerds know each other".
Thanks.
hmm well heres me thinking we are discussing readily available graphics which some decent coder could turn into a viable atari great courts conversion.
obviously not u tho as u are too busy prototyping a viable 3d dropzone. let us know when thats ready. should be really good if u can code half as well as u talk about coding.
Steve
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Tennis should be pretty simple. I suppose you could still get overlapping players if they both stood right at the net but you could get around that quite easily. The PRIOR stuff is ideal to have one player behind the net. I was working on Great Courts on C64 before I quit my job at that company. Ste (STE 86 on here) did the graphics for it, doubt he's still got any of them though.
Pete
Guess again.
i have the sprites as PCX format double pixel jobs from the amstrad/c64 version. 3 colour sprites. white, brown and flesh. cant remember if i have the court tho. i will check when i get home from work. should be no real problem to snapshot the 64 version with the players in flat colour areas tho.
Steve
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LOL Emkay u really are 100% mad as a fcking snake arent u?
u are such entertainment. shame really u never put all this effort into actually producing anything decent for this "wonder machine" u believe the atari line is.
Steve
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tbh i think the most useful app u guys could wish for is VICE for the a8.
Steve
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And since i was one of the people who kept the machine going after the companies pulled out, that's one of the reasons i'm failing to see why people didn't step up from the A8 community to do the same thing.Two questions: who and how? I never felt there was a real Atari 8-bit community in the UK to begin with...
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Atari Frog
hmm. well in 25 years the atari community the world over has hardly inundated the scene with classics has it?
Steve
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Panther yeah it's ok on A8, but not great on C64 either, plays a bit ropey for my taste.
As for the decline of quality of A8 software?
Dunno, SSI, Infocom, Microprose, etc, they released excellent games on A8 until they suddenly stopped doing A8 softs. Sons of Liberty is an excellent final game for A8 from SSI. Infocoms Plundered Hearts again a great final game for A8. Origin's Ultima V, excellent last game from the RPG guys for A8. Pondering about MAX is a great USA produced game for the A8 in the very late 80s/early 90s. Can't complain.
I would just like to say that as i own originals for pretty much the entire microprose catalogue from 83-92, i actually looked up the atari releases by this company on atarimania. and saw that they stopped producing games with conflict in vietnam (which is decent dont get me wrong). however u quote this company like they were some kind of yardstick for sw whereas in actual fact NONE of the stuff which actually made them great ever saw the light of day on the a8.
no gunship
no pirates
no airborne ranger
no project stealth fighter
the REALLY good stuff that made it to the a8 was basically Silent Service and Kennedy Approach and i hate to burst your bubble but silent service looks really shoddy compared to the 64 one.
flame away
Steve
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Yup, same with Ghosts 'n' Goblins, the maps it does have are all interleaved into one big uncompressed area from what i remember. Elite's policy towards just about every 8-bit was "get 'em out the door" really, that's why Airwolf was just a re-badge of Blue Thunder on the A8, explains why Airwolf 2 was just a scrolling shoot 'em up on everything and as for Ghosts 'n' Goblins and Commando on the C16... eek!
yeah i know well how they worked
they were based about 4 miles from where i live. i knew a few people who passed thru their doors over the the years in fact PeteD was a "trainee" there during his formative youth.
Ask him about the several dozen copies of "space Invasion" he had scattered about his home at one time
(Space Invasion was the demilitarised version of Commando for the German market way back when u couldnt sell "army" games there in open sale)
Steve
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Yeah, but the C64 version runs from 64K so it's still a major difference... if they'd had the option of a RAM expansion or even a multiload, it would've been able to look significantly better than it does and as Andy says the same goes for Space Harrier.
Wasn't Space Harrier written in a matter of weeks by Chris Butler and wasn't it his first 3D Sega style game?
i'm not sure about the matter of weeks (i remember some previews and so forth in Zzap! so presumably it was spread out over a couple of months) but it was certainly Butler's first foray into Sega 3D porting, yes. It should probably be noted that using a bitmapped display wasn't an option because Elite seem to have been insisting on everything being crammed into a single load at that point (look at his other work for them, Ghosts 'n' Goblins and Commando both dropped stages because there wasn't space for them in the memory at once).
well at the time space harrier came out, the average game programming techniques were most definitely not up to using bitmap graphics in any shape or form in game, this did not appear really till at least a year later and even then it was static stuff like cybernoid. at the time of space harrier and outrun it was character set and colour map or nothing.
commando in all honesty was a travesty of a conversion with only 3 levels. which i assmume were uncompressed and stored as whole maps in memory rather than tiled modular maps. i know the Hubbard music took him by surprise because it was bigger than he expected so he had to lose a level but even so, the backgrounds were only 4 colour with no colour ram, and the speccy version got all 9 levels in.
actually so did "who dares wins" from alligata which came out at the same time as commando and which really pissed Elite off at the time. apart from the music, Who Dares Wins drops on Commando from a great height as a Commando clone.
Steve
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Word of mouth, that's what sold machines. Person A got a C64, A8 Spectrum or whatever, Person B saw and listened to it and said "ooh, want!" and the cycle perpetuated; Spectrums sold en masse for the UK market because they were cheap, cheerful and backups [ahem] of games on C90s were traded around the playground (i've always said that machines where the games could be pirated usually fared better than when they couldn't back then, very few people could afford a machine and more than one or two games at the same time so being able to get a tape full from a friend was a selling point).After the first selling by good commercials and professional software developers, words of mouth may do well. But, YES , particular pirate copies were the driver of further success of any comptersystem.
Most benefactored system was the C64....
While I bought 100s of games for the A8, everywhere I saw a C64 , you would found 1000s of copied games, but no original there. From the worker's son to the child of a dentist, they owned 1000s of pirated games.
I'd bet that the firstly used tapes for spreading games made it easy to copy the games (Just connect two Cassete Recorders). After a good Userbase was there, the spread via Floppy was growing.
That's why, later in time, even cheap games didn't bring the richness to the software developers. But, depending on the huge userbase, the progress of dying was longer than with the A8.
You are correct! As a dealer for both back in the day c64 customers would actaully tell me they would not buy software,they were just coming in to get the machine and then get all the software from their buddy. Yes A8 did this too however it was sooo rampant on c64. A8 software sales stayed pretty good long after they should have been dead or at least until the stuff was just poor port jobs. C64 software sales never amounted to much due to the rampant piracy. We could sell hardware add on's just fine. It was disgusting. I talked with many software reps and they knew it too. Ended up with over a 70% stock balance rate. (that was where you sent back software that did not sell for credit) most other platforms were 20-30% monthly. That was where the software writer/companies got screwed on c64. It should have been much more lucrative considering the base of machines.
yes the copying was rampant from what i remember, but still huge numbers of us bought software every week. and on the 64 there really was at least ONE thing worth buying each week. but i question your outlook that it caused such a stock imbalance. because mate, if this was true, how the hell did the 64 stay a primary developing machine up til 1990? if your scenario was true then it should have, and damned well would have prevented any viable sales therefore nobody would have written for it.
and when i was on the flipside:
there were an awful lot of software writers who made a fair whack of money from 64 games. tbh it was never joe public who u felt ripped off by, when it happened it was always some poxy sw house boss or a distributor. ( the oh so smug middle men)
Steve
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I think u have all missed one VERY big reason for the explosion of c64 stuff from "bedroom" programmers.
We had COMPUNET. a showcase for talent and enthusiasm like of which was not seen again till the late 90s on the internet.
It was cnet which kickstarted most "amateur" programmers/artists/musicians into the industry. it caused a absolute flood of new blood to the 64 starting in late 1985. pretty much ALL of the well known cnetters in all fields became producers of software on 64 and 16 bit. many are still in the industry.
i think it was this wave of enthusiasm which prolonged the 64 well in to the early 90s. where most other computers only had a "shelf life" of 4-5 years, the 64 had at least 8.
no other machine had this unique phenomenon, the British were into the scene deeply, the europeans were desperate to be in it by proxy (copy parties and swapping).
if your stuff wasnt on cnet u weren't "there".
it was like how people describe the music industry of the 60s.
and Emkay, we still did it for FREE for several years regardless of what u say or think.
Steve
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I was in computer retail during the C-64/A8 wars (yup, I'm old) - we use to throw games up on both machines on a regular basis and do comparisons (yeah, plastic zip locks rocked). I was so disappointed when later releases (particularly apple ports), were not taking advantage of the Atari. When Synapse started pumping out games on the 64, I knew it was time to worry. I will say, that I did admire this Star Raiders-like game Synapse released excusively the 64 (forgot the name now). One thing I do remember, was playing games on the 64 always felt "off" - like you were moving a joystick through mud. Not sure if this was mentioned, but wasn't "Pogo Joe" one of those great 64 games that was later ported to A8, and visually, took a nose dive?
My first post - so hello to all!
That would be "Sentinel"
it can be found here http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=2261
i remember playing a pirate copy of that on "turbotape" before i even owned a 64
Steve
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Atari v Commodore
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted · Edited by STE'86
Terra Cresta was the one that springs to mind with me too as the first pro commercial game i saw with the borders off. we were used to that by then ofc on the cnet circuit. but it was quite a buzz none the less the see "real" programmers following the demo lead.
TC was programmed by Dave Collier, who was one of the the more technically proficient and innovative of the commercial programmers around at the time. he was responsible for many of the imagine's best arcade conversions. his stuff used to get bought by us as it came out, just to see what he did new in whatever game it was.
Steve