ceti331

Did ST's have concept of Fast(CPU-only) ram .. i.e. the 68000 could run fullspeed in fastram (or running ROM routines) while bitplane+blitter used ALL cycles in chipram Amigas had more memory intensive video modes (68000+4 bitplanes = full CPU speed, but 5,6bitplanes started to steal cpu cycles i think; intensive copper use i.e. changing background color continously across scanline could also do that) also how did the ST blitter behave, surely it would also have to do cycle stealing Maybe i'm missing a detail here: Why was the amiga at 7.14mhz and the ST at 8mhz, if so rigorously tied to video scanout both clocks would be identical in 320pixels x 4bpp

serious question. I gather the C64 palette involved some compromises r.e. shared/flipped UV values Does anyone think an improved 'universal 16color palette' would have been possible with benefit of hindsight (looking back at CPC464 & ST/Amiga games I guess..) the only glaring change i'd make is to tweak the slightly sickly bright yellow copying the palette from chaos-engine would probably not be universal enough IMO, excellent as it was.

Ok, which has better colors:- Jupiter Ace or ZX81

And the A8 can't do them either, so once more this is a totally moot point and absolutely irrelevant even to your latest tangent away from the actual thread topic. That's what a big pallette can do for 16 on screen colours. And that was my point. Now, imagine a C64 with a palette of 128 or 256 colours to choose from. With the same abilitys as now. I agree a larger palette would have enhanced what the C64 can do. but it was very capable where it was.. it was a good compromise. A large palette would have ment more onchip registers, more going on in its video hardware Might sound a bit silly but as pete pointed out - Dan Malones' chaos-engine palette is very similar to taking the C64 palette and desaturating it. Maybe one could just do that with the TV

hehe yes that has the 3 least representative ingame screenshots, all very empty try this:-

You've gone out of your way to pick the least dithered image, this has dithering all over the place.. even for flat shades (cliff tops) broken image link taken from.. http://free-game-downloads.mosw.com/abandonware/amiga/games_c/chaos_engine.html look at the image of the level exit even more in the next metalic level

Some levels even used dithering for the floor. Agree dithering was a vital technique, IMO. It allowed you to tradeoff detail vs color depth obviously... the eye is more drawn to edges, information is not equally scattered across the screen. Gods' used it well to get a 3rd 'major shading range'.. the blue tinted grey, the orange/brown, and something midway between them. Even many arcade machines with huge numbers of onscreen colors used dithering (e.g. In The Hunt etc)

Yes this is why i liked the BB games. More real detail due to all the shades. Didn't matter that most of the objects were the same colours. BB games did resort to dithering on larger elements.. Xenon's 3rd boss, etc etc. Other more 'colourfull' games had to dither more. i think on many TV's the 320 pixels wide tended to blur ordered dither together very well

Yeah, but those bad boys FLASHED on and off!! yeah I do recall setting the flashing rate as fast as possible I would be curious to hook up a BBC micro to an LCD monitor with a really poor refresh rate to blur them together!

BB games (Dan Malone drawn stuff anyway) used a more C64 palette though, a reasonable shade (say 6-8 greys) with some very different colours and interleaved those using the greys to make other coloured shades. That's how things are done on the C64, You've got 4 greys in total including black and white, you add to those the blues or reds or greens etc and you dither them/interleave them (as the BB games do) to get the perception of more colour. yup that was probably the best.. i'd describe his palette has halfway between C64 and the other BB games.

most bitmap games were 'greys' + 'yellow-orange-brown' (+ fewsome incidental colors). they looked great. the key thing was lots of shades of single colors (as you correctly identify) to get lots of detail in the objects. Some atari ST games even used the C64 palette (or something similar) I'm not saying a bigger palette isn't good... just that on most computers the limitation you most feel is "not enough onscreen". (Rare case was BBC micro which could display more onscreen colors than it had in its palette!)

One way to look at it. for each machine ask what you'd do to improve it. I dont mind samey colorschemes between different games.. machines always tended to have a distinctive best way of using them. The bitmap brothers games had similar palettes... but IMO looked quite a bit better than rivals. Amstrad CPC464 vs commodore 64... the Amstrad has bigger palette, but I think I'd still go for the C64's hardware fast sprites & scrolling over the Amstrad

Having large areas of single color also means 'resolution lost' Generally in computer graphics you'd choose less res for more color depth Dithering was always a highly effective technique on 8,16 bit computers. even the 32bit PSX benefited from dithering

clearly for a certain number onscreen, a bigger palette doesn't help CPC464 xenon looks quite good to me, only 27 color palette but 16 onscreen being very effective. an attempt at A8 xenon (see my mockup earlier) is clearly lacking onscreen colours.

not bad at all

Just wrong. The ST/Amiga have enough colours - but they still use Dithering to overcome limits of mostly 16colors visible at once. (even amiga needs dithering on its 3color sprites or 7color playfields) It is not about the Palette. it is about the bitmap/tiles/sprites Even if the C64 had more colors it would still use dithering due to sprites & tiles being 3 colors.

have we got a consensus here yet, by ALL parties ?

agree 100% that many shades of fewer colours look best ( and yes I am a fan of the 2 ramp style seen in Paradroid or the bitmap brothers games) the diagram earlier from "way of the pixel" shows why the C64 palette is an effective compromise Really these 8bit machines can only display 3 shades of something at the same time in object detail. The C64's palette & sprites/attributes allows for a lot of different ramps this way, allowing player/enemies & different background elements (e.g. walls vs backdrop) to be seperated. Some 'hue rotation' approximating colours is necessary for C64 these ramps, sure.. but thats not a problem. in real life, its very rare to see pure shades of a single colour... brighter areas would be lit by lightsources (e.g. yellow sun); darker areas would be lit by reflected ambient light (e.g. blue sky, earthtones in landscape) So for cartoony game graphics, its fine to just have slightly different hues for the highlight & mid-tones.. & white is usually used for highlights. From what i've seen on the A8 with its 5 color backgrounds, you need to make exactly the same compromise if you want a background with distinctly coloured elements. You can use black, white, and a generic 'dark' color as the main 3 colours.. then have 2 distinct 'mid-tones' .. giving you 2 distinct ramps, only one of which can be shades of a single color. Most likely you'd make the dark shade a different hue halfway between the hue of the two mid-tones you wanted,or you could have 3 pure shades and one different colour ramp thats futher off.

Both look good attempts to create a unique machine specific experience inspired by something on better hardware. As such they're both interesting. personally i was more a fan of the sci-fi type games, hence subdued palettes even mostly greys are just fine. More movement as was possible on the C64 wins for me. =More gameplay possibilities. I agree 100% with what was said above - the fixed palette but more choice in where colors are, and how many different coloured blocks can move - was a highly effective compromise, and the C64 deserved its popularity. Shame about the C64's not-quite bright yellow. That was an odd colour. But on wikipedia they state they needed to re-use YUV values, some colours are just complements or something, forced by what they could fit on the chip.

Quitter! keep going till we reach a consensus its an important issue.

Random diversion- Seeing Dr Who and Rainbows in the same post instantly reminded me of the RAINBOW dalek re-design with their "Clear" colours..grrrr. Maybe I should do a mockup of a 8bit doctor who game with DLI shaded daleks

thats quite impressive, interesting stuff. r.e Quantizator, to really throw the cat amongst the pigeons we should get some side by side pictures of C64 &per-line A8 paletizer Regarding mid-line register changing - how intensive was this.. is it possible to horizontally re-use sprites?

Greetings, interesting app. Q1How involved is the ditering here - Does it do ordered dither aware of the colour aproximations & hence additional error in the scanlines above/below Q2 Has anyone tried a general converter using 4th tile colour. (even just one using 1 palette for the whole screen... i.e. trying to pick the most effective color for the 4th.

Has anyone got any stills of A8 representations of converted photographs/modern bitmaps, at 160x192 resolution maybe generated by seperately palettizing each scanline ..something like that.

no. we'll keep going for another few decades until we've reached a consensus only kidding