CPC Colours, Games, ans some more

[José Pereira]

Hello, here I am again.

 

With CPC screen colours I always thought it uses more colours that sometimes it needs. Why? Because on 160 Horiz, resol. they can put any colour (16 maxim.) from 27, but sometimes it's more that what needed! The game turn to be a lit like Lots of pixels with lots of colours. And this turned worse because they were only with monitors and no T.V.s So, you see all, lots of pixels across all the screen, a little bit like C64 Colour Map game/screens but with not real colours. The CPC colours are very brighter, not very real. One thing C64, and I have to admit, that someone says here some days ago, have only 16colours but it's a very well choosen Pallete.

 

The CPC games in 160Resol. always are more colourful than C64 ones, but C64 always (almost) wins in realistic colours. I only remember right now a game that they say, and I totally agree that CPC have the best version. And this one is "RAINBOW ISLAND". and I see why. CPC colours are very good to do Cartoon/lego alike games.

 

I've been taken some screens and try to find some Maps of CPC Games, possible some interest ones for that Competition...

Maybe later I can show some of them to you.

 

 

José Pereira.

[José Pereira]

Maybee I'll start and new war between C64 and CPC users and we will be happy to see Rokford turn to other place.

 

José Pereira.

[STE'86]

all i can remember from my albeit limited cpc experience ( 2 or 3 games as i recall) was that its colours very very vibrant but not a great selection. in particular its grey palette was very limited IIRC.

 

its plus points from a designers POV (apart from the vibrancy) were that

 

A) it acted like a 16 bit when u were drawing for it (no multicolour/colour ram/attribute problems)

 

and B) u could therefore create a palette for it on the ST and develop on there with a mouse rather than "go native"

 

Steve

[José Pereira]

I see one game right now on You Tube and without intentiion to...

And is one that no A8 &/or C64 versions.

I think it could be a winner and almost all of you can approve.

The Graphics can be very well trranslated to this two...

 

 

<and the name is: ____________________________________

[José Pereira]

O.K.

 

I'll say:

 

PRINCE OF PERSIA.

 

Must go now.

 

Bye,

José Pereira.

[oky2000]

Maybee I'll start and new war between C64 and CPC users and we will be happy to see Rokford turn to other place.

 

José Pereira.

 

I think there is a marked difference between the onscreen colours of the CPC and the C64, the C64 has quite unsaturated subtle colouring (some will say too subtle of course) and the CPC has very strong very highly saturated colour output. The spectrum is somewhere inbetween the two in terms of colour saturation of output image 9although the RF modulators on all sinclair machines are really horrible in my opinion)

 

I think this over saturation of the CPCs colour palette is what gives the screenshots and games their garish overly colourful look sometimes. Also most were used with those low quality Amstrad colour monitors too which doesn't help but perhaps the saturation levels are linked with luminance values given the machine has no native internal RF modulator to connect to a TV and quite a few machines were sold with the green screen mono monitor instead of the colour one.

 

(without hacking home made cables and using the monitor to power the CPC anyway there was no simple way to connect it to a real quality monitor from Sony or Thomson etc and the MP-1 RF modulator brick was a difficult piece of hardware to locate before anyone asks why use Amstrad 12" monitors...and even more stupidly even with the official Amstrad modulator the size of an encyclopaedia the sound still came out of the internal 5 cent speaker inside the CPC...FAIL! )

[TMR]

With CPC screen colours I always thought it uses more colours that sometimes it needs. Why? Because on 160 Horiz, resol. they can put any colour (16 maxim.) from 27, but sometimes it's more that what needed! The game turn to be a lit like Lots of pixels with lots of colours.

 

Well, the short version is "because they can"; since it's essentially always 16 colours when using mode 0 (160x192x16 unless the dimensions of the display are altered) and writing in or removing a sixteen colour software sprite takes about the same time as an eight colour one, the designers tend to go for broke with the colour use. There are some exceptions of course, four colour software sprites over four colour backgrounds can be drawn and removed more rapidly and that's why Mission Genocide, one of the smoothest CPC games going at a constant 50FPS, is one of the least colourful games on the machine.

[Tezz]

Beyond the ice palace was quite nicely done on cpc, it was not that far from the 16-bit versions at the time.

[Allas]

Clearly CPC have different colors, but those are not bad.

Despite all (no sprites, no HW scroll, no advanced musical chip), I think CPC is superior to C64, it's a powerful machine.

 

 

100 Amstrad games

Edited October 22, 2009 by Allas

[Lazarus]

CPC has RGB colors with only 3 colors per color channel. That's why many CPC colors have 100% saturation.

[TMR]

Clearly CPC have different colors, but those are not bad.

Despite all (no sprites, no HW scroll, no advanced musical chip)

 

Actually, it does have coarse hardware scrolling which is generated by hammering the CTRC; a surprisingly small selection of games use it, for vertical scrolling it's pixel accurate (as used by Mission Genocide which originates on the CPC and Warhawk) but for horizontal there's limits as to what the value can be set to and that meanes the CTRC steps the screen RAM at the equivalent of four colour clock chunks (Zarkon uses this at 25FPS to get a reasonable speed, Killer Cobra howls along at four colour clocks a frame essentially and a few more examples are the first level of Savage, Out Of This World, Fres Attack moves like the clappers and works in mode 2 at 640x192 and the excellent Star Sabre relies on 25FPS shifts and offset double buffering to give two colour clock moves every second frame). Using these two different CTRC tricks it's possible to handle multi-directional scrolling (FlySpy and Bio Spheres for example, although the horizontal shifting on the latter is a bit rough).

 

I think CPC is superior to C64, it's a powerful machine.

 

No, just play the games and you'll see that whilst some are good and most look pretty decent, the majority have nowhere near the refresh rate of their C64 equivalents. The main problem is the vast 16K of screen RAM and the CPU looks impressive on paper but a 4MHz Z80 isn't four times faster than a 1MHz 6510 because the Z80 commands require a lot more cycles each.

[Lazarus]

Despite all (no sprites, no HW scroll, no advanced musical chip), I think CPC is superior to C64, it's a powerful machine.

The CPC is just a framebuffer + Z80. The poor Z80 has to update 16k of screen RAM and that's why almost every game has a horrible frame rate. Nowhere near the 50 fps we are used from Atari or C64.

[Poison]

Amstrad CPC is 8bit? Impresive games!! it looks such as atari ST games. C64, ZX, SHARP and others sucks.

[Atarigmr]

Amstrad CPC is 8bit? Impresive games!! it looks such as atari ST games. C64, ZX, SHARP and others sucks.

 

It looks good, but it doesn't play that good

[TMR]

Amstrad CPC is 8bit? Impresive games!! it looks such as atari ST games. C64, ZX, SHARP and others sucks.

 

Nah, the YouTube videos are hiding the lower refresh speeds of the CPC... both the C64 and A8 have far better frame rates for most of the games and the Spectrum is usually faster as well (3.5MHz Z80a but with half the screen RAM to deal with) - that's why R-Type on Spectrum and CPC is essentially the same code but just about nobody likes the CPC version including most CPC gamers.

 

One thing to watch out for... a lot of CPC graphics (and indeed the game code) are directly ported from two of the machines you said "suck".

[Lazarus]

Amstrad CPC is 8bit? Impresive games!! it looks such as atari ST games. C64, ZX, SHARP and others sucks.

It looks good, but it doesn't play that good

Yeah, CPC games look good on screenshots but once you see them move you see the extremely low framerates.

[Poison]

ok, cpc has lower framerate, but I tried some games under emulator and for example golden axe is much better on cpc (more playable)than ZX (poor colours), many games on sharp has lower framerate too, for example saboteur, after the war (players are drawing when I move:( ) slow? bad code? I dont know Iam only player:) and C64 has colours such as little child paint colouring book:) CPC has better colour and games I have tried are fully playable. for example I like r-type and double dragon (better than ZX version).

Edited October 22, 2009 by Poison

[TMR]

and C64 has colours such as little child paint colouring book:) CPC has better colour

 

Most people would point at the far heavier-handed saturation of colours on CPC for being what a child would paint with, Jose already described it as looking like Lego in t'other thread if memory serves. What really doesn't help is that the real hardware doesn't allow much adjustment of the display.

 

Before i forget, there are some games in that mode 0 games video that aren't really Amstrad CPC games because they require a CPC Plus.

 

and games I have tried are fully playable. for example I like r-type and double dragon (better than ZX version).

 

Double Dragon i couldn't comment on personally since i didn't enjoy any version enough to play it for an extended time but no, R-Type isn't more playable than the Spectrum version and most Amstrad CPC users will disagree with you there. The game code is close to identical so the only deciding factor as regards playability are refresh speed (which is better on the Spectrum), control response (again better on the Spectrum) and colours (strike three).

[STE'86]

if u are looking for something to play on the cpc, i remember liking a "Battlezone" type game called "Taking Tiger Mountain" many many years ago.

 

Steve

[oky2000]

Despite all (no sprites, no HW scroll, no advanced musical chip), I think CPC is superior to C64, it's a powerful machine.

The CPC is just a framebuffer + Z80. The poor Z80 has to update 16k of screen RAM and that's why almost every game has a horrible frame rate. Nowhere near the 50 fps we are used from Atari or C64.

 

That Z80 was a curse, meaning a lot of games were spectrum/timex ports for it and not very well done either. Example..

 

Commercial release of Shadow of the Beast on...

 

spectrum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV1hSyN9gBo

 

amstrad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDvOhoiuU0E

 

and what is possible with some coding talent on the amstrad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_RbO0Vm-AA

 

The original CPC design was to be 6502 based and there was a prototype with a 6502 sold on ebay last year in fact. Had this been the case with the launched machine then I suspect the games would not rely on spectrum/timex source code so much.

[+GroovyBee]

@José:

How about joining up over at FormatWar if you haven't already? There is some discussion going over there about the first contest's game.

 

http://www.formatwar.net/forums/

[José Pereira]

Despite all (no sprites, no HW scroll, no advanced musical chip), I think CPC is superior to C64, it's a powerful machine.

The CPC is just a framebuffer + Z80. The poor Z80 has to update 16k of screen RAM and that's why almost every game has a horrible frame rate. Nowhere near the 50 fps we are used from Atari or C64.

 

That Z80 was a curse, meaning a lot of games were spectrum/timex ports for it and not very well done either. Example..

 

Commercial release of Shadow of the Beast on...

 

spectrum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV1hSyN9gBo

 

amstrad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDvOhoiuU0E

 

and what is possible with some coding talent on the amstrad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_RbO0Vm-AA

 

The original CPC design was to be 6502 based and there was a prototype with a 6502 sold on ebay last year in fact. Had this been the case with the launched machine then I suspect the games would not rely on spectrum/timex source code so much.

 

With that colourfull screenshot of Beast reminds me of our prototype version. I said here it is one of the most colourfull games I've seen on A8. This 1st stage as an Horizontal scroller could almost be like this and/or even more/better colours on our A8. With good programming Sprites could be achieved.

 

I remembet Steve (JetBootJack) said how the author was doind the sprites and the dificulties. I don't remember in wich Thread, but he reveals some of the author ideas.

 

This is one of the games that I always known it could be very, very good on A8 and one that I will ever wanted to see on A8. So many incomplete Project/Games!!!!......

Oh God!!!!.....

 

 

José Pereira.

[Lazarus]

The Beast demo is not a game project, it's just a demo and afaik uses all memory so there wouldn't be any space for more graphics or a game.

[José Pereira]

I was refering to A8 version by Harlequin.

 

José Pereira.

[oky2000]

 

With that colourfull screenshot of Beast reminds me of our prototype version. I said here it is one of the most colourfull games I've seen on A8. This 1st stage as an Horizontal scroller could almost be like this and/or even more/better colours on our A8. With good programming Sprites could be achieved.

 

I remembet Steve (JetBootJack) said how the author was doind the sprites and the dificulties. I don't remember in wich Thread, but he reveals some of the author ideas.

 

This is one of the games that I always known it could be very, very good on A8 and one that I will ever wanted to see on A8. So many incomplete Project/Games!!!!......

Oh God!!!!.....

 

 

José Pereira.

 

The larger colour palette of the A8 with DLIs would make a very nice sky in the background compared to all other 8 bit machines yes. The rest I don't know because I'm not experienced in the A8 screen modes and PM graphics.