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Crazyace

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Posts posted by Crazyace

  3. Posted

    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 :)

     

    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

    post-4839-1226049327_thumb.jpg

  5. Posted

    It's apples and oranges, man. The 5200 uses player-missile graphics, while the ColecoVision uses more traditional sprites. Personally, I prefer the player-missile graphics, as they've got more color, but there are some serious limitations with that style of visual presentation. The 5200 can only display 16 characters at once, while the ColecoVision has access to 32. The 5200's player-missile graphics can only be eight pixels wide, while the ColecoVision's sprites can be double that width. It makes a difference.

     

    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.

     

     

    I'm no programming expert but I do know enough to tell you that the two machines are so completely different that they defy comparison. The ColecoVision offers a sharper resolution and more onscreen characters, while 5200 games offer more colors in both its characters and backgrounds. Neither system is clearly superior... your preference between the two will be entirely subjective.

    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.

     

    Also, remember that some of the games for the ColecoVision were created by less talented developers in PASCAL, a high-level programming language that didn't let developers tap the full power of the console. Donkey Kong on the ColecoVision looks pretty sad next to its Atari XL/XL/5200 counterpart, but Opcode's invested some serious effort in a more accurate ColecoVision port that could blow them BOTH away.

    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 )

  6. Posted

    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.

  7. Posted

    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 :)

  9. Posted

    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

     

    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

  10. Posted

    The other titles are 7800 titles - wrong platform comparision :)

     

    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.

  11. Posted

    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 )

  13. Posted

    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

  14. Posted

    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

    post-4839-1225897281_thumb.jpg

  15. Posted

    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 )

  16. Posted

    Oh, I don't know `bout that- the NES did pound the superior SMS in sales, didn't it? Don't forget how much effort into expanding the 2600's abilities there was, but the other systems from that time? Not much. :P

     

    But the X-Box 360 under the control of the Tramiels likely couldn't have beaten the RCA Studio 2. So what chance did the 7800 have, even if (this occurred to me years later) the whole 1983 7800 idea wasn't doomed from day one?

     

    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 )

  17. Posted

    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 )

  19. Posted

    Well, I did some more research after I read that there also was a predecessor of the "Super Cassette Vision", the "Cassette Vision". Of course that one has even inferior graphics and sound, but nonetheless seems to be an interesting platform (just as the Atari 2600 is). I've found the most complete game description and the highest quality screenshots of that system here:

     

    http://www.ne.jp/asahi/cvs/odyssey/hyperli...cv_yosaku1.html

     

    (from there on click on "Nextsoft" to advance to the next game)

     

    Interestingly, this system seems to have a pretty low resolution, but still seems to be bitmapped. And I haven't seen any restrictions in which colors are allowed to appear where (though there probably are only 8 colors in total). What's also interesting about that system is that each pixel seems to be able to contain a diagonal. But there seems to be something strange going on about those diagonals... on those objects that are made out of diagonals, like the pigs, snakes and birds in "Kikori no Yosaku", you can see black triangles on the left side, but not on the right side. I really would like to know how that system works and what kind of games could have been made on it if it would have become more popular.

     

    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

  24. Posted

    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.

  25. Posted

    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 :)

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