Foebane

I looked at pics.zip. Some very nice renders there, but I'm not so sure about the stippling on some shades/iteration bands.

Ouch! And I thought my remarks were "below the belt".

Oh, OK.

The A8 was capable of any number of electronic projects. Atari User Magazine for a long time published an interesting electronic project every month to build for the computer (including simple robotics) for low costs. They once published such an article on producing a speech synthesiser for the A8, and that interested me so much I went for it. Unfortunately, I wasn't that handy with a soldering iron, unlike others who had more success and enjoyed having their A8s talking back to them.

Amaurote for the C64 wasn't even isometric, unlike the A8 and Speccy versions!? Interesting. I played Amaurote myself, and even though it seemed slow, it was still interesting to look at, although totally monochrome.

I haven't compared Mercenary on Speccy and A8 yet, but I have compared Boulder Dash on the platforms, and whereas the A8 has lovely smooth full-screen animations and lovely smooth scrolling in 8 directions, the Speccy is absolutely juddery, jerky and generally slow and inferior. Also, concerning the C64, it would seem it and the A8 seem to share certain similarities, like user-defined character graphics which can be "animated" by addressing different character sets in memory with a single POKE (which I've used in games myself) and thus achieving smooth animation that fills the entire screen with (I imagine) very few CPU cycles. As a result, both those versions of Boulder Dash are almost graphically identical, except for colours and the positioning of the score bar. But the poor Spectrum has none of that and so has to rely on other types of games for its success.

Oh MAN it wasn't. I felt like preaching that at the time in the 80s in the UK, but I feared for my life as a result.

I've seen this under emulation, done with a game which I think was called Black Angel, but ONLY on the title screen, and even then, only every couple of scan lines. Think of it as the rainbow effect you see often on A8's. But no, as was mentioned above, only two colours were ever allowed every 8x8 pixel boundary, AND of the same brightness. Imagine my disappointment when I wrote a program in Spectrum BASIC to fill the screen with different coloured pixels next to each other and I get a whole bunch of pixels which are the same two colours, every 8x8 blocks apart. I really grew to dislike Speccy graphics then.

The thing is, I never got to the point in my zooms where the limitations of Atari BASIC's (or even Turbo BASIC XL's) floating-point accuracy was ever exceeded. I would've known when that happened - the images would've started to pixellate, rather than showing maximum detail for the resolution of that screen. Ironically, on far more sophisticated systems, like the PC's ChaosPro program, I HAVE reached that limit very quickly, and it has pixellated far more quickly. I think to see the proper complexity of the Mandelbrot Set, you'd need a renderer with an accuracy of 1000 units after the decimal point, AT LEAST.

Oh, MAN, did it! Wish I'd known machine code back then, but I had to settle for a faster BASIC.

Funny, but even though I too started with a ZX81, my dad got me the more expensive Atari 600XL (then 800XL) because he didn't want me playing games all day! I made a lot of programs myself on the Atari, in fact I started a whole lot more projects than I finished, but even then I also played games when I found a fellow Atari user, and we started swapping them. Much to my dad's irritation.

The camera allowed me to capture individual frames. If you look under "Foebane72" on YouTube search, you'll find a whole bunch of other animations I made as a result. I can't quite remember how I captured those shots, maybe I loaded them manually one-by-one and captured them that way, or it was some other method. I honestly don't remember. This was back in 1990 or so, you know!

I acknowledged that above with the game designers who made their names with the machine, but I wonder how many of them, and the home users they catered to, moved to better and more sophisticated platforms later on?

No, not when it comes to a machine which was designed by the man who would later go on to develop such crud as the Sinclair C5. Granted, it may have launched the careers of many of Britain's top games designers, but I bet (even though they never admitted it) that they couldn't wait to move onto a better platform for development as soon as they could, like the Commodore 64 or even still, the Atari 8-Bits.

Back in the late 1980s, I developed an interest in the fractal object known as the Mandelbrot Set, and thanks to my father was able to develop a program to generate it on my Atari 800XL. In the meantime I was also able to recreate it on BBC Micro, Atari ST, Amiga and even old XT IBM PCs. Later, when I got Turbo Basic XL courtesy of Atari User Magazine, I went one step further and created a program where you could zoom in and travel around the set, and save images from it. At the time, I also had an old-fashioned cine camera and filmed the program in action at the time I had it, to demonstrate how easy it was and how reasonably good the Mandelbrot Set could look on an Atari 8-bit micro. Sadly, the program itself no longer exists, but the footage does, and I posted it up on YouTube a couple of weeks ago. So enjoy!

Spectrums suck. The graphics can actually succeed in making me physically sick, but nothing else. Also, the creator, "Sir" Clive Sinclair is an old fraud. He used to buy electronic items, use a soldering iron to take them apart and then sell them on as his own. Fraud.

No, I think there are complete character sets for each frame of animation. Only the walls, spaces, soil and boulders are not animated (why should they be?). But everything else - slime, warps, butterflies, diamonds and even Rockford himself are animated. On the other hand, considering only half the graphics are animated, you are probably right. But I think Peter Liepa would've used the easier method of full-screen animation as I did in my own game.

Heaven, I'm not sure about the scrolling between versions. But I am adamant that Rockford is NOT a player sprite on the A8. In fact, I think Boulderdash is one of those rare A8 games that uses no sprites at all.

OK, thanks. I'll accept that, probably as it's so obvious! Did the Commodore 64 have the same ability? I've played Boulderdash on that as well, and apart from less choice in colours, seems identical to the A8. Mind you, I've also played the ZX Spectrum version, which was unbelievably static and sluggish.

There's a classic 80s cartoon based on the same theme as this: "Mysterious Cities of Gold". It was my favourite of all of them as a kid, and it's available as a DivX or DVD set. Just Google the name above. In fact, my avatar is my favourite character from that show: Tao, his name is.

I always loved how dynamic the graphics in that game looked, and I figured out later it was due to repeated cycling through eight pre-defined character sets that defined the "frames" of the animation, probably by changing a POKE location to point to different parts of memory, ie. the start of each character set. I once made a game that used the same technique and relied on collision with sprites for the action, wherein you have to collect treasure and avoid being hit by traps, and it worked brilliantly. But that was years ago, and I forgot how I did it in BASIC... I was just wondering what the technique was called.

Possibly, but it was a LOONG time ago and I was panicked at the time, so I don't remember!

I've had close shaves in the PC world as well: One thing I've learned, is to always keep the PC earthed during the installation of cards, etc, but not to keep it connected to the power (ie, turn the power off but keep it plugged in). I didn't obey this, and was once in the middle of installing an Ethernet card when the PC decided to turn on!! Cue frantic scrabbling to unplug it before any damage was done! Luckily, I was fortunate.

I know the CTIA was part of the original A8 blueprint, and that Jay designed that, but did he also design the more advanced GTIA? I hope so, but I've not been able to find any conclusive evidence of that.

Hmm, on second thoughts, I've decided A8 Demos aren't good enough to be put on Video CD; and anyway, the results I've had with Numen as a test have been poor: there was masses of artifacting, one image broke up entirely, and for some reason my DVD player ignored the MPG file I created from it. I've recently created a DVD of Video CD files from PC Windows demos, since they're the only types of demos that are worth putting on disc, but the trouble I've had creating the A8 Demo MPGs outweighs the advantages. Thanks for the advice, but I'm abandoning the project. Same goes for the Amiga demos, too.