R0ger

As for hardware, they have similar upgrades. But as for software, they are miles ahead. C64 community is IMHO way bigger. It has several programmers doing C64 software for living. IMHO that's not possible on Atari.

IMHO the main problem is you can't see where you are going, so you can't really plan. But hey, somebody is actually trying to make original content. And I appreciate that greatly. It's basically casual game. It's about sitting and enjoying graphics and music without having to think too much. And the music and graphics are superb.

Actually my version is 1MB exactly and it needs MaxFlash cartridge (or compatible solution). Yeah, I know I promised XEX version. I simply didn't manage to make it just yet. Shame I know.

The first part with xc and yc just adjust the coordinates. PMG has 48 invisible pixels on the left, and 16 on top (both depends on dlist and screen width). So if you want to convert PMG coordinates to playfield coordinates you have to adjust for that. I usually just use good old trial and error method for correct amount As for the rest, it seems you are confused by & sign. That's for bitwise AND. It's used for getting bits of a number .. X and 3 for example extract bottom two bits, as 3 is 00000011. Here it is used for modulo. XC & 3 is the same as XC mod 4. Note this only applies for numbers 2^x (2,4,8,16,32 etc). I'm not sure what AndTab does either.

Indeed, you simply can't use HW detection for this. Everything has to be done in software, and there are many way how you can do it. Typically you use the same structures you use for drawing the map.

I think the C64 outrun is fully hand-animated. IMHO it's valid approach. It goes well with character mode and allows simpler combination with sprites. Also it doesn't mean the game is bad. You can have bad game with great fluid road rendering, and good game with simple road rendering. Fully rendered road with hills and cars at high framerate is simply impossible. Sega uses special hardware for that. You have to cut corners somewhere.

It's magically old-school !

It totally doesn't have to be 3rd person. My algorithm even supports rotation of the view (to some extent), which is thing most games like this don't do. Like Elektra, you only have X-position on the road, not actual heading of the camera. It's just simple extension. The hills are imho must have, especially in first person game. I didn't do them here only because I wanted 60 fps on NTSC, and I just couldn't make it.

You are right ! It is Japanese car. But not Supra It's Nissan GTR, snapped from Forza Horizon 4. And yes, it is all in assembler, you need all the cycles Atari can spare.

I have the opposite question .. why PMG ? Road like this could be done completely in graphics. It would take similar amount of changes per line I think. Btw. in my demo PMG is used for the road, not grass. 3 players and 3 missiles for the road itself, 4th player for the strip in the middle. 4th missile is used for the car license plate. Just use CTRL+F8 in Altirra, it will be clear.

As I said before, imho we should not fear software rendering. Just do it. It wont be 50/60 fps. So what.

Nice ! But the road was never the problem. Road and 1 car were never the problem. Road and 2 ugly cars were never the problem. Road and 2 pretty cars .. that's the problem

That's great news !

Well let's say I didn't give up on driving game. Not using this approach, not any time soon. But I'm still thinking about it.

Can only speak for me, and the answer is no. Certainly not based on this. As for PG, I don't know about anything, but you know him ..

Orgs allowed. Yes, Poison should have been wiser, because it harmed him the most. But orgs allowed. Let that be lesson for the future. As for the old demos, the biggest problem was nobody knew they are actually demos from 90s. Btw. about the pictures in the Prodigy demo. It's just 6 colors, using PMG and inversion, on char basis. I was surprised how good some of them looks. 6 colors is clearly lot more than 4.

I'm not revisiting the problem for at least a year, so feel free :-)

Oh, I see .. well then I think road like this is just too simple. You want side stripes, more stripes, or even forks. Road as PMG does not allow that. Also at the bottom, I have to set 4 player and 3 missile positions. That can't be done on one line, so even like this I change left side of the road on odd lines and right side on even lines. So it wouldn't go well with character mode. It could be done if the road was even narrower .. but I would actually want to have it way wider.

Problem is, if you scroll the characters for the road, how would you draw the objects ? I think non-character mode would be better. you could have road prescrolled, and not use hscroll at all. Then you would select proper lines, and draw graphics over it. And then you can indeed use just character precision (like Chase HQ), or if you have enough memory, have everything prescrolled.

Indeed, it's nothing special. The problem is how to make the road and at least two cars, at high FPS (ie. using mostly hardware). One car never was problem. I wanted to try making road using PMG, and I accepted this problem. I didn't try to solve it. For demo it's fine, and I tested what I wanted.

Answered in depth in the other thread.

Sadly you don't have control over that on compos. This time all the ugly trash on the right was shown, and you can also see left side. I even put several COLBK changes over the grass part, which wouldn't be necessary with normal overscan. That part uses GTIA 16 shades mode, and usually you just use darkest possible COLBK of the desired hue, and set the shade with fields. But that left huge dark gap on the left side. And good thing i did it ! Testing the demo we found out some TVs just do it. Some even do it just sometimes. It's like they detect if there is some widecreen signal or not, and then decide what mode they will use.

Hm .. sources wouldn't do you much good without explanation, it's deep in 'black magic' realm. There are comments, but not comments explaining the underlying principles, you mostly need pictures for that. I plan to do a talk about this kind of road algorithms on the Atariada party. It's usually recorded and posted on YT. Might be good idea to do it in English. Or at least I could do some article about it afterwards.

Don't think so. I mean, not like this. There is too many limitations. This uses PMG for the road, that was the idea behind experiments. Outcome is like this: Pros: - independent colors for the road and the car - hardware merging of foreground and background - independent positioning, no scrolling required - allows for 1 frame rendering times Cons: - limited road width - extensive kernel code, inflexible (very hard to add slopes for example) - impossible to do forks or more complex stripes on the road - allows only one car with HW only. You want more cars, you are back to software rendering - doesn't solve objects on the sides of the road at all, you would have to use software rendering - even if you accept all limitation, the speed is just about right for 1 frame rendering, no reserve for more complex rendering - not enough time to set both sides of the road on the same line, leads to artifacts. Can be somewhat controlled by camera angles, but it's not suitable for player control I think the hardware approach is good for first person view games, like Elektra glide. It has the road in GFX, no other cars, and objects in PMG. High refresh rate, great sense of speed. For third person view games I think it's better to go full software. Using PMG just for getting more colors. It would be way slower, but that's what I would do after playing with this.

Thanks ! Atariklub.cz is organization organizing the Atariada party, R0ger+PG+Hardcore are members responsible for the demo. The music is not available AFAIK, I will ask the author.