frogstar_robot
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Posts posted by frogstar_robot
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I should turn in my Harry Potter Nerd Card. It is a hippogryph....
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I've been fiddling with rjespino's jpeg and pgm viewers:
http://rjespino.tripod.com/8bit/a8jdpeg/a8jdpeg.html
And it is capable of good results:
http://rjespino.tripod.com/8bit/a8jdpeg/gallery.html
Though I'll have to download his sample images to find out what makes for good fodder to feed it. I did have fun feeding the 21st Century Eagle to it. I got my best results of the evening by turning it into a greyscale and brightening it up a bit and using HIP mode to display. I don't think this proves much either way as a graphics artist tuning the picture will get better results. This is a screen capture of HIP which is a flicker mode. I'll also note that the screen cap seems to be a bit kind to it in a browser. It looked a bit weedier in the emulator though not bad from TV viewing distance. Just for laughs and giggles I'm going to turn on NTSC emulation next.
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Just to show how far from the original even the C64 pic is.
Other than the inevitable green and purple tinging, the C64 is producing quite a nice likeness of it.
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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.Buh-Bye. Fröhn
..Al
A couple of us find it very possible that account may have been hijacked. Up until a very suspect and out of character series of posts, Fröhn has at times been heated but respectful. Of course, an account compromised by a troll needs to be dealt with but I'm reserving judgment on Fröhn himself.
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I fully respect all here, even Fröhn as (since for years imho very 50:50 compared to the both machines) but his last posts let me thought of someone else got his account??? never have seen him go personal nor even be assaulting people or sexual orientation??????I'm going to agree with that until shenanigans with his account are ruled out. Much of what he has posted has been heated but respectful. The personal pottymouthing is very out of character.
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If you figure that the 64 sits right in the middle of the timeline between the A8 and the Amiga, you would expect something either very cheap and about as capable as an 800 or something as expensive as an 800 and much more capable. I think the 64 mostly emphasized price point, but also picked up some nice features.And here is the explanation for why the C64 does some things better but doesn't utterly monkeystomp the A8 in all respects. A machine cheaper than an A8 that is better in just every way would have been possible by 82 but it would have missed that pricing sweet spot. In that time frame, capability wasn't the primary Atari weakness it was price. The 600/800XL rectified that by consolidating a lot of parts into a single board that wasn't overpopulated but that came later than it should have.
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Looks like the thread has been reset and we're back to the old arguments again. I still say a direct comparison of hardware features misses the point:Moore's law can work for you two ways. You can buy the same amount of power in the future for less money or you can get more power for the same money. Well actually it doesn't say that. It says that transistor counts for a given amount of $ double every two years.
For the most part, I believe the C-64 went more in the direction of equivalent power for less money than stupendous power for the same amount of money. The 400/800 were very expensive in 1979 dollars when they came out. What Tramiel was trying to accomplish was to put a reasonable amount of performance within reach of even lower middle class families and by 1982 that was possible.
Look at netbooks right now. They are more or less equivalent to machines from 4 or 5 years ago but are priced to sell.
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No. Take for instances a platform game. If the main character gets even just one pixel to collide with another sprite, and you base your hit detection on that, that will make for some really poor gameplay and great frustration.That should only be the case if the collision detection is used in the simplest most naive fashion possible. You don't HAVE to do things like:
if $colreg_barely_touches then die_immediately();
You can watch what the registers do over a number of frames or combine the register test with a test of XY within the objects to see how far within the object the collision is happening or other tests. The idea here is that a good set of collision registers can tell you whether you need to branch off into collision handling or not. So one still has to burn some CPU on collision handling but it can be less than continually computing bounding boxes.
I believe the biggest reason for leaving collision registers out of later generation hardware is that they had more CPU for software methods like bounding boxes.
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I think it's an interested point of discussion-- hardware acceleration to help GUIs. I'm sure if Windows had collision detection or other means of accelerating GUIs as standard, they would have incorporated it into their OS. As far as I know, sprites are not even used what to speak of doing collision detection in hardware.I recall in the early nineties that some of the first PC video chipsets that had drawing primitives implemented in hardware were marketed as "Windows Accelerators". As this was still in the Windows 3.1 days, they were probably replacing or least patching at runtime the standard DLLs. These cards for sure implemented some form of blitter, line drawing, and probably a means for caching some textures and drawing rectangles fast. It isn't clear to me whether these cards had anything in the way of colliision detection or not. It was a big deal at the time to drag a window around like a piece of paper rather than a skeleton outline that the window would be redrawn into.
Of course these days hardware assisted 2D drawing is the norm although that is increasingly treated as a special 3D case.
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5 pounds says this thread gets locked within 100 posts of my one (unless some peeps behave)I personally want this thread to keep going. Am I wrong, or is this the longest thread on this forum now?
When it hits 200 pages, all participants get a free set of steak knives!
Do you think it's a good idea to give these guys knives?
Maybe the Super Chamois would be wiser.
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If implemented as a library, this could show up in other emulators and join the other scalers and filters emulators offer. If it were an SDL driver then these effects could be applied to any SDL software. There's a lot of things that could happen.
The thing I've always thought needed more thought is vector monitor behavior. I know there is no way an LCD or even a plasma can draw the super bright lines of a vector monitor but there is much that can be done. I don't play vector games in MAME much. Take Asteroids for instance. On the original displays, a shot looked like a Great Ball Of Glowing Plasma Death. In MAME, shots are dim little points. Even playing around with settings like Beam Width and Brightness don't really help much as the best I can create are shots that are fuzzy squares. And some of that glowing effect wasn't just the vector monitor alone. The monitor was under glass that reflected some of the light back and created a penumbra effect around objects. Take the shots in Asteroids again. Thanks to the glass, a shot was a bright round point surrounded by a round aura at perhaps 5% of the brightness of the central point. All of this contributed to the look of the original game. Emulators turn the great vector games into dim uninspired lines.
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True, one mouse button is just the kind of crazy idea Apple would come up with I have an Apple mouse from an Intel Mac and it is some stupid design where you press the whole body of the mouse to do a click as there is no mouse button at all, absolutely useless and perfect example of style over function.
Not quite true. I have seen those work very well for very young children and special needs kids. Of course, that is an opening for a snarky comment along the lines that is all they are good for........
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I Loved those old Sharps too, especially the MZ-80s, the A was my first computer and the B really was a lovely machine.Apparently the X1 was by a different part of the company and not sold outside Japan really.
Could all 8 colors be used in the 640x200 mode or was that only 320x200? With 640H pixels you could do some nice dithering.
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Glenn was the man!! Wonder where he is today:?For all we know he could be one of the regulars here. I just have a feeling he'll never tell.
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[the qualities of Freddie and Jason. With all these comparisons in mind: zombie dwarves and flying silver spheres that will...well, I'll save it for a surprise.And you must especially save the Special Golden Sphere for a surprise. That is pretty much my favorite bit of gruesomeness from those movies.
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I'm down with wanting *ANY* of the older computers that you can emulate peripherals (flopply disc in particular). If they'd get an SIO2PC-type thing on the others, I'd likely get an Amiga (!!!) for the first time, as well as the ST. I've already downloaded gigs of software torrents for these systems, but I like the real thing. Since PCs "went widescreen" (try and find one that isn't nowdays) it kind of threw the emulation thing for a loop, because you can't go fullscreen without a stretched/distorted image, and that pretty much ruins it for me, hence I want real hardware now but no peripherals.There are ways to use Amigas with IDE hard drives which kills much of the motivation for an SIO2PC style interface. Additionally there are Ethernet options. I'll also note that Linux with the correct options compiled into the kernel can mount Amiga drive partitions. I once created disk images of a friend's Amiga hard drive in that way.
Amigas are closer to modern machines in their interface choices than they are to old 8-bit home computers. So moving data back and forth will involve drives or ethernet rather some sort of bespoke interface.
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Regarding joystick ports, it's not a minor difference if you are transferring data through it.Perhaps so but then if the joystick port don't suffice most of the vintage micros have other options. The use case most of the time for a joystick port is that someone is going to plug a controller into it and proceed to play a game. If the correct thing happens quickly enough then the port is Good Enough. And the C-64 ports qualify as Good Enough under the original premise of this thread.
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Here's their equivalent of this thread, titled "Atari 8-bit or C64--which is better?"Wow, I was surprised by the balanced tone of that thread whereas this thread has trended toward the ridiculous. I think page after page of how the joysticks are read really misses the point.
The thread here is unfortunate in that it has Tireless Rebutters from both camps.
http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorsh...essrebutter.htm
I'll thank Wood for pointing those threads out. Oswald and Wolfram did kinda have me thinking there are a disproportionate number of Commodore fanjerks. I think part of what has happened here is that the C64 was so successful that its community just plain has more of every sort of people including The Chosen Prophets Of Commodore who must preach to the A8 heathens. It was so successful that apparently there are enough of these prophets for all of the communities around vintage micros.
On the other hand, I find the discussion of how various bits of vintage hardware generate video fascinating and would probably be even better if not done in this Mother Of All Threads. There's a good bit of such lore amongst all the bickering. But I can't get all that worked up about joystick ports or minor I/O chip differences.......
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The worst version? No, not the 2600. It's the Super Nintendo. They also made a Game Boy Color with the same "look and feel" (not my cliche but works) as each other, and **NOT** the arcade look at all. They totally lick balls, and I'm sad to say I own both of them because I didn't know; I assumed the SNES version would be comparable to (if not better than) than Genesis...WRONG!!! GB Color version was equally disappointing and very similar. I'd rather play Parker Bros. 2600 version than either, because it was at least *trying* to be the arcade game.JW
Ah Nintendization. Take a perfectly good and beloved title and louse it up with overbright colors, anime characters, and gameplay that is only loosely inspired by the original at best. Apart from the the flicker and pastel pallete of the NES, Nintendization did more than anything else to turn me off Nintendo products for a long time. Though I do have a softmodded Wii these days that I'm pretty happy with. I don't mind the cutesy in small does as long as it isn't applied to something it shouldn't be applied to.
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AFAIK a8 has no AV (composite) out built in. I might be as wrong as you were with TV sets tho.Most models do. The A8 has a DIN5 connector similar to the one on the C64. I didn'
t mean that the A8 doesn't have a composite output but it is true that the video output circuitry, that is the video amp and so-forth, on many models can use some improvement.
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I would go with Atari here, on a personal/technical basis. You can't, AFIK, hook up a C64 to a TV set; certainly not with AV cables. And that's where I'd want to play it. Also, there are tons of cartridge-based games for Atari computers; I don't think there are as many with the C64.Yes you can. There is a DIN connector on the back that supplies composite and separate luma/chroma. With the appropriate cable it can be connected to either composite inputs or "s-vhs" connectors.
Actually this is one area where a C64 will often give a better out of the box experience. Atari made some boneheaded decisions on the analog video circuitry on many models up to and including leaving separate luma/chroma disconnected. It is common to modify A8s for better video output.
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This thread is wrong starting from topic's title.The original interesting question was: Does anybody have any views on where any titles were launched on both Atari and Commodore - and the Atari version is the better of the two?
Most of that is way back in November-December of the thread. Many stills and some links to movies were posted.
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But i won't be suprised that a 1982 6510 will be sligthly faster than a 1978 6502 at the equal frequency.I can find absolutely no evidence for that. Everything I have found says that the motivation for the design was to consolidate some memory and IO logic. Atari did a similar thing with the 6502C in the XL and XE series to eliminate additional circuitry that was necessary in the 400/800.
The 6502 isn't like modern Pentium and PowerPC chips where variations of the chip can accomplish more or less instructions per clock cycle. Everything I've found emphasizes opcode compatibility and the phrase "slightly modified" turns up over and over. There is no reason to believe either a stock 6502, 6502C, or 6510 running at the same clock have any significant differences from an assembly language point of view or in performance.
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actling like there's no difference between built in and cpu driven modes wont help. I can define the matter easily so that you cant escape: c64 can display a better picture without it's cpu touching any gfx chip regs without using "sprites" at all, than the a8 doing as hard as it can the opposite.Largely a matter of opinion. I'll agree that C64 can display restricted 320H pictures with a higher color density than the A8 can do. But those restrictions often result in pictures I don't find very pleasing at all. Incidentally most of the C64 pix I do find pleasing employ some form of the dreaded hardware diddling or *gasp* aren't 320H. You C64 modes aren't the slamdunk you think they are. *Sometimes* they *are* better but not often enough to make want to throw my Atari gear out and replace it with Commodore gear.
indeed, now compare this graphics hardware to one which doesnt expects cpu help, and does still better ? no more comment needed.The A8 has more CPU to do it with and one practical adjustable tradeoff is that lower-res/lower-color modes can be used to make more cycles available for animation or other logic. Ballblazer is a practical example as it is very colorful, fast, and buttery smooth and perhaps someone can name the exact demo but I once saw an animation of a low-res correctly colored rotating Rubik's Cube that solved itself.
The engineers of both systems had to make tradeoffs and balance factors to come up with practical and affordable designs. The two teams made very different decisions and *overall* I prefer the mix in the A8 but don't hold it a sin to prefer the C-64.
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Anyone heard of this? Popeye Pac-man arcade
in Arcade and Pinball
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This doesn't work?
http://sdlmame.parodius.com/