Crazyace

Gateway to Apshai was around for the 8 bit - I guess if there had been a need it could have appeared on the 5200 easily.

Rescue is pushing the 7800 quite hard - mainly because of the special ram - but not much else is...

Tell that to CV Gus. Why? He didn't bring them up in this thread?.. Actually I need to change that - I'm not sure Rescue made it to MSX, google was a bit ambiguous... I found a MSX cas image of BBlazer - need to work out how to run it. The only version of Rescue close to MSX would be the spectrum version.. It doesn't look to bad - I expect that a CV version might be more colourful

You should ask the IK+ guy to convert the 8 bit version to 5200 Are there any big sprite fighting games on CV?

If it were apples and apples there would be no comparision arguments P/M graphics are sprites - just programmed differently - per line it's 50 pixels/160 for 5200 vs 64 pixels/256 for CV - The actual biggest difference is that the CV sprites are easier to use. My feeling is that the lack of h/w scrolling on the CV ( and, as a programmer, the seperation of ram and vram ) make it a weaker machine than the 5200. The increased resolution is it's strongest point. I've not seen any evidence for this - but, again as a programmer, using PASCAL wouldn't stop you tap the full power of the CV. I was looking at the Namco MSX version of Pacman - which is similar to Opcode's version. I think his version is visually more impressive - but it's interesting the way Namco approached it, with Pacman and Ghosts slightly bigger compared to the maze - and no whites around the eyes and no flickering. ( The NES version looks like exactly the same graphic dimensions )

It doesn't matter how good opcodes coding is - in the end there is flicker on the CV version - this shows a weakness in the system (Opcodes version is stunningly good ) My 8 bit demo shows that the Pacman sprites can be reproduced without any flickering, using the original graphics and scrolling on the 5200.

I think that it's obvious what the 5200 could do - it was an 8 bit machine - look at the games for the XEGS, or even the 130XE - pretty much all of this could be done on the 5200 - eventually RAM as well as ROM could appear on cartridges if needed. The 7800 was the new machine with more potential, and more importantly it could be cheaper to produce, and the security would ensure no unlicensed games - so if things had gone differently it would have taken the market. Either way Atari had a competitor for the CV

It's way more fun if you write for the base system... ( although the use of ram for some 2600 projects like BDash is really cool )

Egad, man! I could live a long, happy life without seeing those Simpsons sex pictures on the Atari 5200. Yikes! Also, I'm not entirely convinced that the Atari 5200 could handle graphics of that caliber. Those pictures were created on an XE computer, correct? That system has a lot more memory than the 5200, and that makes a big difference. Normal highres is less than 8k - even with all the extra data in a g2f picture I'm sure it would be less than 16k - and the 5200 has 32k rom ( without banking ) as well

I find these stupid Colecovision vs. threads, which are now appearing in both the 5200 and 7800 forums to be silly. I didn't see a good technical comparision, and although I favour the 5200 ( due to using an 8 bit for a long long time ) there are some merits to the CV. A lot of the other discussions involve comparisions of one or two games - but I'm sure some of the CV coders have some interesting tricks nowadays.

In terms of CPU I've always found the z80 and 6502 pretty much the same... ie: For a soft sprite I'd have this code on 6502 (4) lda charbase,x (4) and mask,y (4) ora data,y (5) sta charbase,x (2) inx (2) iny so 21 cycles @ 1.79MHz... on z80 (7) ld a,(de) (7) and (hl) (4) inc l (7) or (hl) (4) inc l (7) ld (de),a (4) inc e 36 cycles @ 4MHz They compare pretty well ( if I unrolled the 6502 loop I'd lose the inx/iny giving 17 cycles )

Ballblazer and Rescue seem to have appeared on MSX according to google - I've never seen them though. The other titles are 7800 titles - wrong platform comparision

True - I've only seen one good example for a CV picture ( the Roxette one ) before, although the article referenced has quite a nice title screen for the CV. I'm not so sure that Rescue on Fractulus couldn't be implemented in some way on the CV - it would be an interesting challenge - I'm going to have to look at it again

As CV gus has been raising CV vs 7800 topics, and various CV vs 5200 individual game comparisions I thought it would be nice to have a good technical comparision thread. ( Some of the older threads have been historical rather than purely technical - although I liked the references to http://www.siggraph.org/publications/newsl.../molyneaux.html ) Both machines tech specs are pretty well known: 5200: 16K ram - shared video/cpu 32K rom - shared video/cpu 128(256) colour pallette ( 9 pallette registers ) 320x192(224) 2 colour 160x192(224) 5 colour ( 4 per character cell ) 80x192(224) 9 colour 80x192(224) 16 shade/single colour 80x192(224) 16 colour/single shade 5 8x224y sprites or 4 8x224y sprites +4 2x224y missiles or 2 8x224y 3 colour sprites + 1 8x224y or 4 2x224y Double width and quad width selectable per sprite Hardware scrolling and per line programmable video 4 voice channels - each square wave or noise Colecovision 16K Video ram - cpu access via port 1K ram - cpu only 32K rom - cpu only 15 colour pallette ( directly selected ) 256x192y 15 colour ( 2 per 1x8 cell ) 64x48 15 colour 32 16x16y sprites (Limit of 4 on single line ) Global double size (x and y) for all sprites ---------- In my opinion the CV has the advantage in the resolution and the number of sprites, but seriously lacks in the scrolling. The 8x1 colour cell is excellent for backgrounds , but there are situations where the 4 colours per pixel is a win. I like some of the images here - they show off what the 5200 could show in terms of BG graphics http://g2f.atari8.info/gallery.html

The 7800 is weird, as it 'came from outside' atari - GCC designed ( and it sound's like it wouldn't have been possible if the chip company they used hadn't already designed the CV 2600 adaptor ) I'd love to know what the 'internal' 3600 design was - I guess someone must know? ( The rumours say 10 bit - the GI chip is the only 10 bit chip I know - and that ended up in the intellivision )

The most brilliant thing about the NES was the PPU bus on the cartridge - That allowed so many cool h/w tricks to be implemented in the mapper chips Although the SMS had better graphics it was bottlenecked in some ways by the fixed VRAM. If the 7800 had been released in 1983 with a 'big launch' it would have dominated - the software launch was a lot better than the 5200 - and the H/W was cheap to make - and more powerful than the competition ( It would have been interesting to see a 'computer' version to compete against the C64 )

Hi, A couple of differences. 1: You set the blank DLL's to point to a DL at address 0. They should be pointing to an empty DL ( ie: 2 bytes of 0,0 ) 2: All of your display DLL's point to the same DL - they should be pointing to 13 different DL's If you have 32 sprites active in all zones you'll need nearly 2k for all the DL's and the DLL. For sprites that aren't present just set their high address to the holey area and they wont display. For the Y address of the sprite - /16 gives the starting DL to modify.. you take the &15 and add to the high address - but this only gives you the starting part of the sprite - you then set the next DL's equiv entry to the (&15)-16 value. ( I could have mucked that up.. typing from memory here )

A lot more people program on the computers ( compared to any console ) I guess... Even the 2600 had the supercharger to allow easy programming - On early consoles making eproms is a bit more of a hassle.

Maybe it's a character based system.. a 'colour' version of the original trs80 graphics - on the pictures, the block resolution seems quite coarse - but the lines in baseball and the pacman are pretty high res in comparision

Yes, the nice thing with demos is to show what could have been...

Any new 8 bit demos? I guess the C64 scene is way bigger ( having a c64 party in 2008 is pretty impressive )

That's pretty nice - shows off the plus points of the c64 really well ( better sprites, and colour attributes )

It would be nice to look at it on an emulator - the youtube video makes it look really flickery. Are you using 2 coleco sprites for each monster in sequence, or all monster bodies, and all monster eyes

There's a text window x/y - you can switch graphics/text on left/right and up/down. The interesting thing with PP2 is that there's no 'road' - just the side and centre markings made with sprites.. It looks better than the 8 bit version though - but that's not hard, it should be possible to make the 8 bit version look more like the 7800 one.

I guess it makes more sense to have more sprites for a game/arcade console - after all the TI chip was designed for a home computer - not just a games machine. The text seemed strange - skipping odd lines In the emulator the font is 128 chars only , with the bottom 8 lines of the 8x16 blank - I wonder what happens on the real machine if bit 7 of a char is set? It would be cool if it changed the char from top to bottom 8 lines