ceti331

In both cases those jobs could've been done better but are at least handling the majority of what is required. There are no Atari 8-bit versions of those games so at the moment the Atari 8-bit isn't anywhere near to handling those games. Why make a shoddy version of a great arcade game? Isn't it better to make specific C64 games, that the machine can handle? This is why i like games *like* armalyte or that A8 uridium clone. Something *inspired* by a great game on better hardware, but designed from the ground up within the limitations of the machine its running on arcade conversions are a usefull 'benchmark'

Yhat would need some kind of fallback mode to allow older software to run on the XL and Atari would probably have ended up in the same boat Commodore found themselves in with the C128, more power overall but hobbled because nobody is targeting that mode because they want to sell to all the users - i've always assumed that's why there isn't far more GTIA mode use...? GTIA could have been improved by simply enabling a few things that seem to be intentionally missing: 256-colors in ALL modes (not much help really, but why not?) Two real colors in 320 modes - GTIA can switch LUM's at 320 rate, but they saved some complexity by keeping all color logic at 160. GTIA mode 11 is completely useless (except for the pencil demo). Colors at the same LUM just bleed together horizontally. Making a combination of 9 and 10 (gradient and a palette) would be much more useful. Now, what would have been really cool is if they could have added a line buffer to GTIA and allowed 16 colors at half the vertical resolution (160x100-ish), or perhaps all 256 at 80 across. All these can be done by just changing GTIA and wouldn't cause it to become a split-personality machine. edit: oh yeah, the reason there isn't more GTIA use is it really isn't that easy to do compelling 80-wide games. Especially when they won't port well to other platforms. Did the machine have sufficient memory bandwidth for a 160x192 x 4bpp mode like the BBC micro & amstrad CPC464? the BBC micro, (2Mhz 6502cpu) could display 16 logical colours out of a palette of 8 ...FAIL!

so, Tiled-rendering-into-tile-maps. damn that Vic2 is a great chip.

i suppose you could do some approximations with enemies that have more freedom of movement in one axis - like those ships which fly down the screen. I suspect Zybex was doing this sometimes from some of the movement i saw. different animation frames only existing in different pre-shift positions would the machine be able to switch character sets per horizontal area ? e.g. each quater of screen having its own character set, copying in remapped background tiles & dynamically generating software-sprites on demand ? e.g. 64 active tiles per screen quater + 64 soft-sprite chars..

I was careful in the latter mockups to remove black from the circular enemies, so black/orange is the '3rd character' color. i was losing patience so its not fully gridded. I tried to give the impression of character cells being used for enemies with no software masking going on, just the mid-grey around them. taking inspiration from Spectrum R-Type. very jerky object movement, but at least getting smooth scroll & smooth player/projectiles.

ah, so you might actually have quite distinct perceptual preferences to the rest of us ... your mind is adding color to flatter "symbolic" sprite graphics? or you're much more sensitive to the hues? ... & thats why you strongly prefer the cleaner colors of A8 to C64 screens? or does ordered dither grate for you in the same way garish colors do for me ? if so, fair enough I'm not a C64 fanatic by any stretch of the imagination: I had a BBC micro. There's a big hole in my childhood lasting up until Amiga where SHADES didn't exist at all I'm just interested in retro games. The C64 wins for me for being able to display different bas-relief elements seperated from eachother. But i'm still interested enough to see how far the A8 would get to do the mockups. It reminds me of the 8bit days, and the A8 feature set is a BIG step forward over the BBC micro.

bit more on what i reckon it would look like, i'm thinking use the player missile graphics to do exactly what they say on the tin & characters for the moving objects. You'd have the multiples, smoothly following the ship, with whatever software sprite compromises going on for the enemies. i suspect basic hardware use would facilitate getting a lot going on onscreen (the player is supposed to have 3 multiples i think? plus homing missiles...) I think DimensionX is severely opposed to using Halftones, which is completely insane. the halftone is necassery to properly differentiate the 8 sided look, and to allow brighter highlight than the general raised areas.. the moving enemies will need a brighter highlight than the general raised areas..

thanks for posting this - this is more like the type of game i'm interested in seeing on A8. i might try and download that.. i concur with TMR, unfortunately it doesn't show the ability to match C64 xenon. reason is: C64 can switch colours for each tile, so it can have shades of blue on one, and shades of grey on the other. A8 can only have one set of shades, and a single 'spare' colour substituted on some tiles. the A8 has more *colours* but the C4 can display more overlapping on the same horizontal zone of the screen, which is very important for movement & varied design of enviornments. Sure you could have more palette variety on the A8 though, and yes the ability to select different shades of the same hue does give it a 'cleaner' look. Maybe for Xenon it would be better to re-style it as blue-tinted grey for both the tiles & structures, (each level would be a differnt tint).. & use the spare color for enemies or detail ? It does seem vertical scrolling can make good use of sprite-multiplexing which helps.

Not a chance. Do you know why? Atari has much more clear colours then that. Bye for now. if i've understood A8 hardware, it would be restricted to 5 colours for the majority of the image. the sprites would have to be combined for a detailed player. Otherwise objects would have to be single-color. so I made this with 1 of the colours as a rainbow background. Admitedly Xenon is a bad game for the A8; a Horizontal Scrolling shooter in the style of armalyte would allow the background effect to represent a propper sky, and add more to the image. TMR's technique of using sprites to add a middle colour to software objects (grey+Other+white) might be able to acheive more.

I think A8 Xenon would look something like this...

Sorry IMO this Alternate Reality game is a bonkers comparison Its just still pictures, and they've clearly been badly converted between formats. i wonder which format was the original. the C64 can handle stills much better than these as proven elsewhere on the thread. It would have to dither, but it has roughly 5 shades of grey, red-browns or blues from what i could gather If the A8 shots are "better" than the Amiga, thats clearly down to it being a bad conversion and nothing to do with relative hardware merits of the platforms. The amiga can of course do same 'rainbows', as well as displaying propper shades of detailed graphics 16 vs 8bit isn't a fair comparison (unless its PC-engine ..)

I think salamander was more graphically limited than R-Type, so easier to port. less color & lower res (256wide vs 384 wide) by the looks of it. Still an amazing game. I own both jamma boards How much could C64 r-type be improved... adapting the graphics better the the C64 palette? any unused hardware tricks?

wow, how exactly does that work ? what mode is it, what trickery is going on?

I'd been looking into this myself lately, out of interest. I didn't know the exact c64 spec back in the day. seems Dan Malones' palette is pretty much halfway between Mark Colemans' & the C64's (take the C64's, bias the colors mostly toward grey or brown) I love the look of all the bitmap games. I actually prefer the bitmap-brothers' 16-color games to the Amiga-specific dual-playfield stuff from Psygnosis (8bg+7bg+3color-hardware-sprites+copper) such as Menace, SOTB, etc. .. due to greater actual Object detail from the shading. [32color amiga stuff wins overall for me] Funny how the best use of the amiga was often 16colors with sprites used as LITERALLY Player/Missile. one 32x32 16color player seperate from background, and a few extra uniquely colours projectiles. so similar to the intent of the a800. But I always remember thinking how the Amiga was poorer use of 16bits than the C64 was of 8bits. see 8bit PC-engine vs 16bit amiga...

even 8 colours total, with a few different ramps.. one for background, one for enemies, one for player, = clear visual variety for moving objects, very effective for detailed moving ingame graphics. agree any computer can be mis-used to display messy graphics. C64 Armaltye screenshots look a lot better than C64 R-Type because the former is designed AROUND its colour restrictions.. just one ramp for the background, then all the sprites are dark-grey+white+unique color. Each moving element stands out with its own ramp, & the background is coherent. [ i do generally prefer a home computer Arcade Tribute to home computer Arcade Conversions, but the conversions are a usefull benchmark. ]

I didn't complain about A8 gradients - I just stated per-character unique colours are more usefull. A8/C64 graphics involve 3 tones+transparent for *detail* dark,mid,highlight. Doesn't matter what the full palette is.. set 'highlight' to white, ability pick mid and or dark per block or sprite yields a lot more visual variety & object detail.. this is why the C64 was a superior games machine. I'm saying *detail* is more usefull than *background gradients* DISCLAIMER: i still think i'd have enjoyed the A8 at the time, as I prefered to tinker with graphics rather than play games. Its a great computer, certainly no waste of silicon.

seen one gradient, seen em all. I think my years of amiga ownership have made me automatically filter out background gradients

i see your point in defence of GroovyBee, his description sumarises the salient difference between the atari 7800 and the average programmers picture of an 8bit computer I always think of a Frame Buffer first, especially a special type of dram chip with a second sequential output port designed for video scanout. but thats a very old definition now.

This is clearly a skewed comparison- elsewhere there's a lot of evidence that the C64 CAN handle set peice images much better than those pics in Alternate Reality. looks like the bitmaps dont use any color attributes. I'd much rather have the per-cell color attributes (with approximated dithered gradients) rather than the raster bars. those pictures have a lot of compromises in them such as the sky shading going through that static structure. Multiplatform titles are a bad comparison because they are designed for lowest-common-denominator (and possibly biased to one or the other) the best comparison is either Arcade ports aproximating something superior, or single-platform games like Armalyte designed to show one off.

Yep! Its much easier in hardware terms just increment the MSB of the address. When you use indirect mode the only difference in how the graphics are accessed is that CHARBASE provides the MSB of the address and the data in the buffer provides the LSB. Sirius is a side scrolling shmup. It was never released back in the day but is a fully working prototype. Check out my WIP Apple Snaffle for a 4 way scrolling game using indirect character mode. googled that... very armalyt-esque indeed, and appears to be port of C64 graphics by the looks of the colors? i gather the 7800 would have been able to color each sprite properly

After posting that i wondered if the character defs had a pitch of 256 like the sprite defs.. or is each Indirect CharMap DL-Header only able to reference 256 total bytes of character map definitions any examples of games with complex backgrounds (e.g. what would an r-type or armalyte port look like on the machine..) or examples of homebrew on this.

curious how backgrounds worked on the 7800, <r.e. indirect mode ..> >>"The Character Map is composed by W entries, where W is the specified width and each entry is one byte long. Each entry is a Low address byte of a character, and the High address byte is specified by the Character Base register (see CHARBASE under REGISTERS). This means that each character on a scan line must have the same high address byte (sit on the same 256 byte page)." Does this really mean each zone of background in a 7800 screen can only feature 32 4x8pixel characters & 1 palette? does seem the 7800 screenshots i've seen have very simplistic background graphics what tricks were used? did people run length encode sections of backdrop around sprites as background chunks or what?

arguing on the internet. I think its called the special olympics. Why am I getting into an argument about 2 machines i never owned ..because i was curious to know if A8 could handle something r-type-esque. raster rainbows dont help at all IMO

Lets see A8 r-type or Armalyte before passing judgement. until then, C64 = superior Games machine. More variety & detail in moving, interactable game objects, & game backgrounds. Rather than rasterbars which add no information to the game itself. A8 = 'an interesting machine, an amazing design considering it was years earlier'. I'd have been quite content with an A8 given how I used and enjoyed computers (tinkering with programming/graphics more than gaming) call them a 'tie' as home-computers. but the C64 = clear winner for games. When doing multiplatform ports, the design is around a lowest common denominator. Armalyte & r-type port (for me being side-scrolling nut) shows the superiority of the C64 as a gaming platform also turrican (i had this on the amiga, but was suprised to see how good the c64 version was) my take on the graduated backgrounds - they are used to fill 'empty'/background areas. wheras the C64's colors-per-tile allows richer interactive environments.. variety & detail in the areas you actually move through. I'll conceed the rasterbars do look effective for set peice static screens.

this is a stunning conversion, considering its not designed around c64 restrictions an arcade down-port is the best judgement for one machine vs another, IMO Doesn't matter that its only 16 colors. Its clearly MUCH better than the A8 at getting the right colour in the right place, when asked to do anything other than graduated background sky or shiny text from way of the pixel:- Interesting stuff