APAC/Trucolour - a whole new approach

[Heaven/TQA]

I guess not the best pic to demo...

[atariksi]

I am sure you can also do the same for sprites and re-use a sprite 7 times and get up to 11 sprites/scan line.

 

Depends on if you want to use other shapes as well. When not, it could be possible. But remember that for new sprites also a new shape and sometimes even a new colour could be wanted: this is already 3 regs. When PM DMA is activated, the PM data is only read once a scanline.

 

I have not had much use for that many sprites that require different shapes, but I guess if you are doing games that require different colors and/or shapes, you would have to resort to tricks rather than standard DLIs. Perhaps, putting blank lines every other line in the display list to get more CPU time to modify more registers and interlacing it with odd/even lines every other frame and using undocumented opcodes of the 6502 that are stable to gain some more cycles.

[DamageX]

my demo picture as .XEX didn't work on the real Atari, should be fixed now...

 

http://www.hyakushiki.net/cslice.zip

 

instructions for converting your own image:

make an 80x200, 24-bit BMP file

run BMP2GTIA WHATEVER.BMP (converts to Atari color palette, etc.)

run CSLICE.EXE (does color reduction and generates DLI color change table)

run S.BAT (assembles the file)

[Kernal]

why does this not run on 64bit windows.. is there a 64bit ver?

[slampam]

Slight bug in the cslice program. In the final xex file the data at $2000-$20F1 (topmost line in the image) is rewritten to $3000-$30F1 giving your image a bad line halfway down in the image. You can recopy the lines $3000-$30F1 to $2000-$20F1 and fix that bad line if you don't mind the first line being messed up. That's what I did here in a hex editor with Johnny Lighting Bug Bomb.

Bug Bomb.zip

[DamageX]

That was a 16-bit QuickBASIC program so it won`t run natively under 64-bit. Nowadays I am usually using FreeBASIC instead which compiles to 32-bit. I will have to convert it over sometime.

 

BTW, ANTIC`s inability to increment the address past a 4KB boundary is annoying. Would it have killed them to put the whole 16 bits, or at least 13, into their adder? (I`m guessing the bad line bug is related to this)