ZylonBane

January 12, 2003

I thought the main reason was that he ran out of RAM?

The warp-speed UFO drastically changes the way it interacts with the player. In the arcade and accurate versions, the UFO moves slowly enough that you can almost always stop what you're doing, scoot over and take 2 or 3 shots at it. The Instigators UFO is more of a blink-and-you-miss-it affair.

If you're going to just go and capriciously change elements of a classic arcade port to be "better", that undermines the point of the exercise.

January 11, 2003

it's just a far more accurate take on Space Invaders besides.

Except for the UFO speed. :ponder:

January 11, 2003

how does it play with a one-button joystick?

When you press up you go faster. When you pull back you go slower. Pushing left and right moves you left and right.

January 11, 2003

Hopefully he'll realize what an awful title it is and change it soon. Oh, and keep an eye out for my upcoming maze game, MAN PAC!

Hey, who are you? Get aw--arghh...

"Silence stupid human! Fu Kung be good name! Me like a lot!"

January 11, 2003

I also think that 3D sprites were never used to full potential, I imagine 3D sprites with far more than 4, 8 or 16 views, from more than one angle too.

Umm, if it's 3D, then can't you by definition view it from any angle you want?

Sounds like you're almost talking about voxel sprites, which are pretty cool but blocky. Blood used them for pickup items.

January 9, 2003

So would you then g-shade just the bevels, or the entire thing?

January 9, 2003

Gauntlet doesn't scroll. It's screen-based.

January 9, 2003

the problem with the lcd shutters is that you'll either need to double your refresh or half it. i think ntsc is 60Hz, so your talking 120Hz or 30Hz. and you also reduce vertical resolution by half.

Good grief. It's impossible for a console to change the refresh rate of a TV set. What you can change is your frame rate. With shutter glasses, the left and right images are sent on alternate frames, so with NTSC you'd get a full scene every 30th of a second. This is the same frame rate interlaced NTSC runs at anyway, so it's obviously not an unacceptable drop. And what's this about halving the vertical rez? Each left/right image gets a frame all to itself, so why would you need to do that?

January 8, 2003

Yoink! I'll be taking that picture, thank you very much!

Have fun with it. The colors are too saturated for the 2600 palette, but something close should be possible. And in case you're wondering, the look of the "ATARI" text at the top was the result of trying to match the style of the NAMCO logo font.

Now if anyone can make the Galaxians look like this, I'll be impressed.

January 8, 2003

It's still 99% Adventure, so the title has to have "Adventure" in it. Why not something as simple as "Adventure+"? Or "Adventure HE" (Hacked Edition).

January 8, 2003

I'd also like to improve Galaxian a little more... the colors just aren't right, and now that I have Glenn's color chart I might be able to hunt them down and change them.

Yeah, I was just wondering why they went to the trouble of changing the colors, but not changing them to the right ones! If you could pull off something like what's below, that would be sweet.

January 8, 2003

Caverns of Mars II, Tail of Beta Lyrae, Super Cobra, any of a couple dozen side-scrolling shooting-and-bomb-dropping games.

Your description doesn't really narrow things down much.

January 8, 2003

Now if only someone would add sprite multiplexing.

And why the name change? Calling it "Quest" doesn't change the fact that it's still an Adventure hack.

January 8, 2003

Another interesting pseudo-3D technology is Chromatek. The glasses (which are, I'm guessing, a form of diffraction grating) cause reds to appear closer to you, and blues to appear farther away (with a smooth transition on the intermediate colors). A few years ago they were printed into the backs of boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese as part of some promotion... Rug Rats movie, I think. You can also request free ones from the manufacturer.[/url]

January 7, 2003

I mean if it's just a cube then you can flat shade it, nit it looks so much better if you miter the corners and gouraud shade the thing.

Are you talking about adding more polys to the cube, or just changing the shading from flat to gouraud? Because the latter looks weirder, not better.

January 7, 2003

Erm... seams between flat faces are something you see in Real Life, so I don't see how this would be a bad thing.

January 7, 2003

I thought that BattleMorph used Goraud shading, and not flat shading.

?

It uses a mix of both. Faces which are intended to be curved are gouraud-shaded, faces which represent flat parts are flat-shaded.

Looks a lot better than games that just blindly gouraud-shade EVERYTHING, even when flat-shading would look more correct.

January 7, 2003

Chris, "arbitrary" does not mean "random". It essentially means determined without external consideration, or as dictionary.com puts it, "Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity".

As far as games with arbitrary playfields, one need look no further than Surround, Pengo, Cosmic Swarm, Canyon Bomber, or any other 2600 game that uses the playfield as a freeform frame buffer.

January 6, 2003

Nukey, reread my message. Do I need to put the "arbitrary playfield image" in 72-point bold blinking text? :roll:

Using players to smooth the scroll is only possible with very specific playfield shapes that don't require more players than are available.

January 6, 2003

Just a note for the less technically-inclined folks in this thread--

Smoothly scrolling an arbitrary playfield image horizontally is IMPOSSIBLE on the 2600. The smallest possible 2600 playfield pixel is highly rectangular (8 color clocks wide by 1 scanline tall). Since TIA doesn't possess any playfield fine-scrolling hardware like its CTIA/GTIA big brothers, the only way to scroll is at the pixel level. Since the pixels are thin vertically, vertical scrolling can be very smooth. But since the pixels are thick horizontally, horizontal scrolling will always be coarse.