Fröhn
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Posts posted by Fröhn
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And I don't think the unorthogonal and limited design of the VIC playfield (not sprite!) system is a master piece of engineering. ANTIC, however, is a brilliant chip design probably four or five years ahead of its time.
ANTIC is a good IC but then again it has a lot of "luxury" features which you don't really need to do it's number 1 job: games. I believe the balance of features is better in VIC2, or said with in different words: VIC2 does better (2D) games with less coding involved. Doing a jump'n'run or shoot'em up on VIC2 is much much easier to do than on ANTIC/GTIA.
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Pokey neither has ADSR capabilities. For SID, you fire off the ADSR slope and the chip does it all itself. This is ADSR support. Not the capability of being able to do it on the CPU by writing into the registers. SID does it by itself. Pokey doesn't.
Well POKEY has 4 volume registers for each channel and can do ADSR by software. Less precise than the SID ADSR but still ADSR.
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Well, obviously that'll be you then (a troll that is) as I mentioned that ...dun dun dahhhh....Commodore purchased MOS after it went bust quite some posts ago. I know it's sunday, but wake up man.
CBM made MOS go bust just to buy it.
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*sigh*
this forum needs a more active moderator.
I totally agree. Useless posters like Frohn and Wolfram need to be ....going. Although they are quite funny so to speak.
You are not even funny.
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Like a C64 perhaps? They seem to thrive on 'cheap'.
It's not the A8 I hate, it is you I hate. Ofcourse I know that you are just trolling around but then again so I am.
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You probably are. Gay and unskilled. Gay would be fine...
Well, thank you, and it takes one to know one....unskilled that is, and we established that you are quite some posts back already.
"takes one to know one" is kinda cheap. Especially when you have done NOTHING and I have done a number of things on both platforms.
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You probably are. Gay and unskilled. Gay would be fine...
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Conclusion:
Jetboot Jack 10 Frohn 0
Atari 8-bit line wins (AGAIN).
Conclusion: frenchmen still surrender monkey without ANY kind of skills apart from random trolling. Have you done ANYTHING valueable in your life at all? Your wife must be pretty disappointed.
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Fröhn said "None of that games is "kick ass" in my eyes. You guys are all blinded by 20++ years of anti-commodore propaganda. And you guys are completely unskilled crap people too. please die now."
What an absolute a**hole you are sir!
Aside from the ignorant and childlike insult to the message board. The fact is that those games ARE milestones in games development, the fact you cannot percieve that is quite illuminating. Unlike "another scrolling clone of a Nintendo game" which (although I like those games personally
), did not move the art forward one step - games the C64 catalog is filled with.And what did you do? Apart from "nothing"?
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You're right. But this fact seem to be a handycap on vertical scrolling games. Well, even when using a Super CPU, always h-scroller games show the "power" of the C64' chipset.
Better than no A8 game showing the "power" of the A8 chipset.
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Here too - especially the sound/music in 'Slap Flight' or 'Terracresta' is very anaemic: The remaining two channels
when there is need for a sound effect are a joke and would led me in turning speakers off.
And now please your kick ass A8 games... nothing? oh I'm sorry...
Alternate Reality
Rescue on Fractalus
The Eidolon
Ballblazer
Shall I continue? I can list others...
None of that games is "kick ass" in my eyes. You guys are all blinded by 20++ years of anti-commodore propaganda. And you guys are completely unskilled crap people too. please die now.
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But it cost >additional< DMA cycles.
Better than NO additional cycles because of NO friggen sprites.
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Here too - especially the sound/music in 'Slap Flight' or 'Terracresta' is very anaemic: The remaining two channels
when there is need for a sound effect are a joke and would led me in turning speakers off.
And now please your kick ass A8 games... nothing? oh I'm sorry...
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There must be some handycap in vertical scrolling on the C64.
Even in Turrican, you see less "graphics" where the screen has to scroll up and down.
There is no handycap. It's basically the same (copying screen data every 4, 8 or 16 frames).
Thinking about the fact that a re-using of sprites vertically is not possible, and that horizontal sprites re-using cost CPU power by DMA cycle stealing... this might go the way...On C64 it's very easy to re-use sprites vertically. Just set new screen position... done.
Heck. Thinking about a v-scroller . 240 lines high and 32 bytes wide, with full PM multiplexing... good lord.This would look like a "MAME" Arcade emulated game, at full vbi speed(50/60 fps)
Only thing missing would be the sprites.
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Because there are less cycles to waste on horizontal scroll games.
Finally, I prefer more the vertical scroll shooters.
Concerning "cycles" it doesn't matter if you scroll vertical or horizontal. I think horizontal shooters were more common because of R-Type spawning a lot of similar games.
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Could you please explain, why h-scrollers look mostly superior, but v- scrollers look mostly like crap on the C64 ?
Because there was the Shoot'Em Up Construction Kit for v-scrollers so there are many many v-scrollers done by amateurs. Also don't take that screen shots too serious. A lot of them are very old and done with very very wrong emulator palettes. And concerning SEUCK: All SEUCK games scroll color RAM too, so there's atleast 720 more shoot'em up games scrolling the colors too.
A few other V-scrollers with color RAM:
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I don't see new stuff right now. My point being VIC II, being more specialized has less to exploit, and is largely exploited compared to ANTIC / GTIA. And that is absolutely because the code complexity needs to be higher to really squeeze ANTIC / GTIA and POKEY. But, here we are today, and that code is happening because people build on the work of other people.
The opposite is true. ANTIC/GTIA are pretty much straight forward with only few possibilities to exploit features while the VIC2 is the most exploited gfx chip that I know.
The potential exists on the chip to exploit more than 16 colors. It fetches more data per line, etc... but, it's just 16! That always seemed goofy to me. Say 32 colors were available! 16 for the color mapped screen, and some others for the sprites! That would really shine with all those sprites right? Damn right it would. Major bummer there just isn't the color space to show the damn chip off!Looking through the games library I see a huge number of games with 4 color background. 4 colors looks always like 4 colors, no matter if they are picked from a 128 color palette or 16 color palette.
Frankly, I think that's why there are so many more great C= pixel artists. They like the smaller pixels, and placing those 16 colors very well is the only way to really trancend the 16 color limit. On Atari, it's about using more of the system colors, and a bit less resolution. Sometimes a lot less resolution.The reason is that gfx people normally avoid technical stuff. They just want to set pixels, and if you just want to set pixels without knowing much of the technical background, the A8 is pretty much limited to 4 colors @ 160x200 resolution.
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Also, on scrolling shooters where C64 use a multiplexing sprites engine, there is not enough CPU to get the map color with scrolling. Those games reduce his background graphics to 4 colors. Less than 5 colors on Atari.
There are enough shooters which prove the opposite. In fact, shooters are the most easy genre when it comes to color RAM scrolling + sprite multiplexers.
Examples:
etc etc etc
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- C64 waste a lot of more CPU when do scrolling on this game
Better than wasting far more for software sprites.
- C64 reduce his colors to 9 when mixing hi-res and med-res in this game9? If you are refering to character mode you get 11 colors. Ofcourse easily extended by sprites and raster colors.
- Have more cpu for triple parallax scrolling effect -
That's exactly what I was writing before....
This eye cancer pic looks better ...
It should be mentioned that this is all crappy emulation palettes which have nothing to do with how things look on the real thing. Same for A8 emulators btw.
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None of the two computers can display their full palette in any resolution without restrictions.
That's not 100% true because the C64 can display all of it's 16 colors at 80x200 resolution without restrictions.
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It's not matter if 30% 20% 15% or 10% better, the point is there are 7000 extra cycles to do more programming. Considering a 160x200 graphic screen on Atari, because still can be optimized to save more cycles.
Assuming a 40x25 character screen comparision it's ~5200 cycles difference on PAL systems and ~2550 on NTSC. On a bitmap screen the A8 gains 800 cycles in comparision.
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this is just a list of disk drives not that not made it into production:
Some of those drives have been in production. I own two 1551s and one 1570 for example.
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So if you have sprites moving around, you have to self-modify the code in the kernel to maintain same total cycle time.
That's what IRQs are for.
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Atari v Commodore
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted
Less of a problem than the lack of sprites on A8. Software sprites need far more CPU time than software scrolling every 4th frame.
Since you use a "rasterline address" lookup table anyway it ends up being the same on both computers. Just the tables look different, the code is the same.
Lacking the color RAM ofcourse.
63 cycles on a PAL machine. And 64 on early NTSC machines. Anyway, VIC2 is full of shift registers. 8x 24 bits and then 40x 12bits for screen/colors... and ofcourse the current bitmap byte shifter. Ofcourse the 8x24 and 40x12 eat up most of the space but they are well worth it. Two prime features of the VIC2 where the ANTIC (as good as it is) cannot compete. ANTIC has other strengths.