STE'86
-
Content Count
325 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by STE'86
-
-
by jove we have some colour!
a bit bit heavy on the yellow i will grant you, but definitely C_O_L_O_U_R and not M_O_N_O_C_H_R_O_M_E
makes a nice change from the CGA and hercules greenscreen monitor emulations that are so prevalent on the a8.
sooo, if u can do this then maybe myth or ghosts n goblins? shame on u all for not trying them
Steve
-
i think u are being purposefully obtuse again
i will spell it out:
I dont think YOU, who have done NOTHING for your machine in the last 25 years except post bullshit on this forum have any kind of right to critisize ANYONE who has actually produced anything for real.
now is that clear enuf? i am not talking in generalisations about the a8 world or the 64 world i am talking about your PERSONAL contribution to this a8 world.
so either please show me what u have done to help it along or stop posting to me.
Steve
-
mate YOU used it to ilustrate your point. i was asking YOU if you thought it was good.I think its complete TAT that serveral of us could have done far better than on a 64. technically its very childish and it use of colour is rubbish, as i have posted before, ALL objects in that image should be affected by that coloured sky whereas NONE are. so to me its a piece of amateur rubbish.
LMAO
You think that any picture, you have done on the C64 does not look childish?
Particular your Lethal Weapon avatar shows two mature people in a childish style the kids of the kindergarden will recognize it.
It's apparent that the low limited fetures of that old machines always will look somehow "childish" ... except some scans shown in gr. 9 on the a8.
And, well,if graphics on the C64 don't look childish, it looks like some lsd driven crazy Amok-runner has drawn them.
...
by technically childish, i mean the composition is childish, the execution is childish and amateur,any pro artist will know that to make that picture hang together as a whole u would have had to flow the sky colour into all the other elements on that screen. which is the the point i have been making for 3 posts and which u are being deliberately obtuse and ignoring because its indefencible.
such technical aspects are required to make a good image regardless of what media u use to paint in. ow u get the "cut out and stuck on" look that ship has
did i say anything about the technical specs of the machine? NO.
and for someone who it appears has done fck all on their super machine of choice (with the exception of a truly fcking awful Fist tune?) in the last 25 years it does make me smile that u can criticize anyone elses efforts
Steve
-
if indeed u were actually drawing that "for real" based on real life lighting effects, then see those grey sails? they would be a glowy pink colour due to their translucency and their original daylight white colour. and those green trees? not green anymore i'm afraid tinted with pink too.
Just to fulfill your nonsense, here the AMIGA original... The sails are grey there also...
Gras is even green...
your point being?
mate YOU used it to ilustrate your point. i was asking YOU if you thought it was good.
I think its complete TAT that serveral of us could have done far better than on a 64. technically its very childish and it use of colour is rubbish, as i have posted before, ALL objects in that image should be affected by that coloured sky whereas NONE are. so to me its a piece of amateur rubbish.
so please dont try and turn your use of it back on me.
Steve
-
what a great idea! make it look even more bloody mono than it does already.thank god u dont do graphics, u would set the a8 back further than a 2600
There's quite a difference between monochrome and coloured light. Just have a look at the artistic and just added lighting FX in the picture below. I could have chosen other colours, but I wanted to keep it most possible to the Amiga original.
The sky is pink toned, the water is blue based, and you find different hue steps for a better floating in the effect.
right ok. so u think that looks good?
if indeed u were actually drawing that "for real" based on real life lighting effects, then see those grey sails? they would be a glowy pink colour due to their translucency and their original daylight white colour. and those green trees? not green anymore i'm afraid tinted with pink too.
u see its not just a case of whacking some colour on as lightsourcing, it all has to be reconsidered when u do that. daylight colours cannot be left unaffected by new light.
when u add coloured light, it usually does mean that everything else goes monochrome as all your colour perceptions in daylight go completely tits up with sunset.
and in watery winter light
i am really hoping at some point u will realise that i have done this for 25 years and do have a "vague" idea how it happens and stop making yourself look like a tit. (and no these aren't scans they are hand drawn on an st before u even start typing)
Steve
-
Except it can't be because the player sprite isn't a green-ish purple for those screens, the player is a constant colour throughout meaning that the light source doesn't change either and the rocks in that screen must indeed be bright friggin' purple.You're right here. that would be the dot of the I
. Playing with the colours, depending on the lightsource. The atari has enough colours to chose from ....what a great idea! make it look even more bloody mono than it does already.
thank god u dont do graphics, u would set the a8 back further than a 2600
Steve
-
ok this draconus thing is getting boring now.
THIS is why they are using cyan as highlight to the greys, it got nothing to do with moss, or light sourcing its because they are using CHARACTER COLOUR as the highlight colour as follows:
character color: CYAN
Multi 1: mid grey
Multi 2: dark grey
background : black
now on the c64 as anyone on here who has ever coded anything should know, the character colour can only be the first 8 colours. so they have NO light grey available so had to make do with cyan or white. and i absolutely guarantee u that the luminosity of white would have blown that screen right out.
HOWEVER. if anyone with alot of experience would have done these graphics, what we would have done is this:
Character colour: BLACK
multi 1: mid grey
multi 2: dark grey
Background: LIGHT GREY
then the graphics could have been created in slightly "negative" mode but the highlights drawn with background colour instead to give the full colour range. and the black background area filled in with character color (black).
NOW the Atari one in disgustly metallic purple does NOT look good either regardless of what u fanboys insist on. all they have done is tried to inject some vivid colour into a game that was going to look a bit mono in greys. and they have used the usual half arsed lazy way of doing it by picking a single colour and then generating the others by moving a luminosity slider up or down. they COULD have varied the colour mix for each tonal value to create a more colourful look but they havent. they were bone idle so it does look bloody MONO and nothing u can say will make anyone who looks at it think otherwise.
thank u
Steve
-
great idea. it will make a nice change to see u actually do something. which bit are you personally going to do?
edit: actually if it was me i would do the cockpit in black, mid grey, light grey with a white background to provide the numbers and no white on the wheel so u dont have store or manipulate huge masks. the blob on the wheel provided by a pmg and all needles the same.
but hey this is just me and u have probably a way in mind of animating screens created totally unpredictably by g2f right?
Steve
-
I was talking on the phone with PeteD last night and briefly we discussed the problems with fresh coders coming to the A8 who maybe experienced 8bit coders but not have any "hands on time" of the atari systems.
now apart from the fact that some of u are WAY too fast to start getting uptight with anyone who asks any questions which u see as getting "disrespectful" of your baby A8, what we agreed on was this:
that u guys need to start some kind of "repository" of info for tricks, tips and info for games programming on the A8.
now this does not mean copying huge swathes of books to web pages, as these books are generally very dry and tbh "technical information" books by approved sources generally dont mention the problems and downsides to what they talk about. they simply gloss over or ignore them.
what u really need are "how to's" provided by people who have actually done the stuff. a sort of "one stop games programming library". not just code necessarily but detailed theory and "backdoor" methods that atari didnt tell u about. also what u need is a "bugs and problems" list and where possible "workarounds" (i know some of u are in denial about such things but the rest of mankind know they do exist on all machines).
"it is not a bug its a feature" is NOT an acceptable answer to the poor bastards trying to write software.
thoughts?
Steve
-
PLEASE stop posting screenshots of games from "www.shitc64andatarigames.com"
if u cant post something decent just give it up.
i think most of us have no real enthusiasm for comparing an abortion of a 64 game with an even bigger abortion of an atari one (or vice versa)
Steve
-
Interesting, to see how you got it. So I may add, that you have the right thoughts, referring to your personal decision, to do Stuff on the C64 and not on the A8.
Mate there was no concious decision. it was simply the A8 was gone in europe in 86 when i started the only concious decision was c64 Amstrad or speccy. even then later it was all of them but still no a8.
I guess, many people went off from the A8 and settled down on the C64.
Others still "preferred" the C64 due to it's graphics and sound capabilities.
Actually, it was the "better tool" to make graphics & sound stuff, back in those days.
You had less work to do and "everyone loved you with less work involved".
This explains also, why the early Hubbard stuff is doable on the A8.
I'd bet that he did learn to make computer music on the A8 and after the C64 with the SID arrived, he got there to finish his stuff more easily.
everyone loved u for less work involved. well for a customer rather than a producer (see below), how the hell would you know how much work it involved? show me something u have done to illustrate to me u know how much work you know actually goes into anything? (walk the walk instead of just talking the talk for once in here)Well, seeing myself as a customer and not as a producer, back in those days, I encountered everytime people yelling after the C64. Sometimes I was wondering about that. Why do people wine about the C64 and use the A8 ? Just simply to buy a C64 was always the solution.
Artists did it, because they wanted to earn the easy money. And please don't tell me, you have drawn all the pictures and give them away for some warm handshake?
please arise off your backside and go the c64.com link pete provided and there u will see MANY pics done by me and others which were never paid for. Done for the love of it not cash. indeed none of those pics i posted was done for payment. it was called the compunet demo scene. Its what we did for a laugh.
The people who stood still on the A8 side tried to compete with the special C64 features, but in that case the A8 lost in both ways. C64 features were not reachable and the A8 features got underdeveloped/missed.
Believe it or not, I owned a C128 for 14 days. There simply was nothing really impressive, except the deep sounds and the hires colours. Today all the C64 has, is the deep sound and the hires colours. And it's still all what the C64 scene has to offer.
and games obviously. games u lot REALLY want. oh yeah games are hires colours and sound arent they?
The A8 was a "round" machine with balanced CPU powers, graphics abilities, sound, and a good Disk-speed from scratch. But Atari did all wrong with the presentation and marketing.
Actually, I didn't know about the A8, until a friend mentioned it. Til then I only had known computers like the VIC 20 , TI-99 , C64 , Amstrad before, and I knew about an upcoming Plus 4 from Commodore.
The only point to blame Atari, was the spreaded lie that TV sets just cannot display hires colours.
Well, it was an NTSC truth, but not for the rest of the TV world
After using S-Video, the TV still was "unicolour" in hires. So it was the A8 that was not able to show the colours, not the TV set.
and NO games. (see sound and hires colours above as U stated)
All together ends in the logic path that people preferred the C64, have not known the A8, and Artist wanted to make the most money out of their work, making the C64 the "winner".
It seems, particular in GB, Sinclair did well to present his computer there. So, even if looking worse, the graphics were low, the sound was .... where sound? .... people knowed about the computer and the low price made it in the UK...
actually in all fairness to the spectrum it does have colour mapping which does make it alot better at actually displaying colours than the a8 is. personally after fcking around with the Fist graphics for a month i can honestly say that i think the a8 is totally hamstrung by its lack of colour mapping (screen colour ram)
Steve
-
quote:
BTW: I've built a scanner head for my 1020 plotter and 'digitalized' pictures from newspapers with about the same quality about 25 years ago. A clever monkey don't have to wait until 'nowadays'...
that mate is a right load of bollocks. a newspaper picture is in NO WAY greyscale. it is what we call in the trade a "halftone" made up of various pattern of black dots arranged closer or further apart to fool the eye into seeing shades of grey.
now even today if u scan one of these without "descreen" selected u will get an horrendous mess that looks like tartan called MOIRE (look it up). so now i definitely say u DID NOT get any results 25 years ago that looked ANYWHERE near as good as that damned 64 screen I GUARANTEE IT because 25 years ago a bloody scanner didnt have descreen.
i have seen 1985 technology scanning in person. it was crap.
Steve
-
i mean that MY stuff and the stuff of several other c64 artists is only 4 colours and i ask the question why in 30 years nobody has done any A8 to stuff to match it?
have u had no artists around for 30 years?
hm...
I guess, you are one of those guys who can answer this.
Ah right i see, so on this machine u insist was and indeed still is so popular, there have never specific artists that are the equivalent of the 6 or so of us on the 64 who achieved any kind of notoriety?
and of course in the perverse logic of yourself, this would of course be our fault?
not yourselves on here? or the rest of the supposedly massive atari following over the years? but indeed the 64 artists for not working on the atari? right ok guilty as charged. i am glad u pointed that out.
i would however like to say in our defence that every other 8 bit machine had its own set of artists specialising on that format. in fact the guy i admired most did spectrum stuff. a chap by the name of Dave Thorpe. who used to do the US gold and ocean loaders. so the question must still arise...what did u do with your artists? and how come in the the retro atari land everyone here seems very big on "talking the talk" about how to do graphics but not actually "walking the walk" and actually getting off their butt and doing some?
Steve
-
Wow a real achievement indeed, you have just digitalized a picture and then ported it to atari. Nowadays, with PC tools, even monkey can do this
If you are so good and cunning try to draw it pixel by pixel, (like STE did it) and then we will talk. On every 8bit scene (including Atari)you would be a laughing-stock if you bragged about anything like that And here we have a real knowledgeable C64 user.
Digitized, digitizing or digitization
actually if u want to be pedantic, its "really knowledgeable" as "real knowledgeable" would be an american colloquial contraction.
Steve
-
ohhhh the movie posters, greyscaled then derezzed with mosiac on photoshop then maybe overlayed on my pics. i truly am not worthy of your ability. LOL
actually being as how they are only 4 colours u would have maybe thought that some atari artist would have done something as good in the last 30 fcking years wouldnt you really?
I can't tell from your post if you know those are converted to the 16-shade GTIA mode.
i mean that MY stuff and the stuff of several other c64 artists is only 4 colours and i ask the question why in 30 years nobody has done any A8 to stuff to match it?
have u had no artists around for 30 years?
Steve
-
Well, let's see how it works. Atarians rip off an 20+ years old C64 picture, then fix it a little bit with a modern PC tool and TA-DA... what an achivement
:D ...
It's not our fault that the C64 is so dull that a PC program which helps to keep up with the complexity of the machine does make no sense...
That is part of the fun when working with the A8s today!
BTW:
ohhhh the movie posters, greyscaled then derezzed with mosiac on photoshop then maybe overlayed on my pics. i truly am not worthy of your ability. LOL
actually being as how they are only 4 colours u would have maybe thought that some atari artist would have done something as good in the last 30 fcking years wouldnt you really?
-
unfortunately the 320 mode only allows only 1 colour in 2 lums so placing a black pmg underlay across the screen would only make the graphics white (or whatever you set the lum to). You can use pmg's in other ways for additional colour such as masking zones of the screen but it has to be said that the mode is very restrictive. Amongst many things on the A8 wish list, I wish they would have provided a map mode as many of the other platforms had available.I was going to ask the same question because I wanted to know if it was possible to put a screen full of quad size black PMGs under the Head over Heels screen so you could have a black background instead of a sickly "off colour" one. Maybe some people don't mind but it ruins the foreground for me.
Pete
Jesus christ Tezz be quiet for gods sake.
there are certain people who post on this forum who will burn crosses on your front lawn for speaking such heresy. then have u publicly flogged thru the streets.
-
was there a reason why you used only 4 colours for the last 2 pics? for artistic reasons?
3 reasons really
1 there were at the time several artists rendering "photographic" style stuff in greyscale on the 64 (namely Bob Stevenson (BOB), Paul Docherty (Dokk) and Steve Thompson (SIT)) these were my contribution to the genre.
2 any attempt to add white to one of these as highlight would probaby cause massive attribute clash or just scream WHITE! at u because its luminosity would be so overpowering as to ruin the effect.
3. the 64 has only 3 shades of grey and black
which tbh is enough to render b&w images well at 160x200 in multicolour mode thru the use of dithering to get a few more shades.if u want to see more go to http://www.c64.com/ click "pictures" in the top left blue menu and my stuff is on the short list that appears along with that of Dokk and a few others. sorry i can't give a direct link but the site is done in frames so direct links to areas of it arent available.
Steve
-
I wasn't pointing that out to you btw Tezz, should've replied to Rockford really instead of you, just in case you thought I was having a poke at you
Pete
no it's ok, I know you didn't mean anything directed. It was just a general reply back from me about the convertions. There's been a lot of good artists on the c64 so it's kinda nice to bring some of the work over. I also like to patch the loading pics on to the A8 games for the sake of a reason to use them. Most of the uk releases were cassette so they didn't even get the usual lazy reduced colour pic at all.
u might want to convert these then:
i think these are available on the a8
and these 2 should load right in
Steve
-
yeah what u want are some really good title screens like these:
Steve
-
good god 30 dollars for a mod 1 atari with 2 buttons?
my microswitched old cruiser with torque control on the stick must be worth about £50 then
Steve
-
C-64 version has better sound/music, graphics, sprites and more colours. Another easy win by C-64
Aren't you dead yet?
It is already established that in the UK the Spectrum and C64 were the top two 8-bit computers. Spectrum was the number one, trailing way behind was the C64 at number two. All other computers were thought of as 'not commercial interesting enough', CPC maybe a bit more so. Atarians in the UK were lucky to even get a A8 converion of any UK-made C64 game, or any other UK-made game actually. Most UK programmers could NOT program the A8 properly, only because they couldn't be bothered (Matthew Smith: no money was to be made with the A8, although it is the best of the 8-bit computers).
On the other hand the best C64 games also came from USA, on fdd, not UK. I mean ever played any good games from CRL besides Tau Ceti? Or Elite, Grandslam, Beyond Software, Domark, Ocean, Martech, here's a C64 Martech classic, Nemesis the Warlock, most awful looking sprites, terrible game play:
Even the people who knew how to program the C64 got it wrong very often, here's the UK arm of Activision:
Galactic Games (1987), basically a piece of shit, just like Rampage on A8:
but they did more stinkers on C64: Enduro Racer, Afterburner, Dragon Breed, Galaxy Force II, Knightmare, Ghostbusters 2, Ninja Spirit, Quartet, The Real Ghostbusters, and the David Crane classic on C64: Transformers, to name a few.
oh mate u are priceless!
why dont u pop over to lemon and ask the actual 64 players over there if the US software was best on the 64?
i think u will get a resounding NO from anyone who actually played 64 games. the american simulator stuff was good because of all the money thrown at multiple disks and manuals. but by and large american programmers SUCKED. they simply couldnt do anything without multiple disks. and u should know, a hell of alot of their stuff was actually in basic.
please feel to check out any of the Datasoft/Dataeast coinop conversions like Gunsmoke, commando, karate champ etc just to see how far these guys were behind their euro competition.
they started the ball rolling for the 64 but were easily eclipsed in technical ability by the europeans by 1985.
flame away mate, but i was there playing this stuff first time around.
Steve
-
hmm maybe at first but not later.
but most coders that were doing both versions would tend to write the same code as much as possible, with the sprite routines being vectored to the blitter on the amiga and the cpu on the st.
that way development times and deadlines were easier to meet.
because the code for HW sprites would have been amiga specific they tended to be ignored and the blitter substituted instead.
Steve
-
TBH many of us who were involved in producing ST/Amiga sw found the amiga's hardware sprites a serious disappointment after being used to the 64.
they promised much but delivered little. the blitter was the only useful bit.
the hw sprites were generally relegated to the player, bullets and special effects.
i would hazard a guess that most software disregarded them completely in order to make ST conversion more straightforward.
Steve
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Atari v Commodore
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted · Edited by STE'86
i think i disagree with Pete on this one. i wouldnt bother to waste life converting west bank to colour. not because it cant be done but because its utter drivel
let me tell u that the 64 version was never released as a full price game it was a "right to budget" job on a compilation.
its nice to consider how to go about it but then u must consider WHY to go about it
personally, if i were so inclined to be writing a8 stuff, i would be looking at ninja commando and thinking... ghosts & goblins? or something similar?
steve