Technically speaking, which games really pushed the A8, hardware wise

[Gunstar]

With out a doubt, the Lucasfilm games and Alternate Reality really show off the hardware for commercial life-span games. Those are the first that get shown to newbies that want to know why I think the A8 is better than say an Apple or Commodore. With absolutely no aprehensions in showing side-by-side comparisons of the same games on the Apple or Commodore, if possible.

Edited October 29, 2011 by Gunstar

[AtariGuru]

what about some of those prototypes that never got released but were programmed back then.

midi-maze

sinistar

commando

[Tickled_Pink]

Really pushing the Atari?

 

Clearly Drop Zone. No other game reached that quality on the A8.

Of Course Rescue on Fractalus, but even more Koronis Rift.

Wayout, far Ahead , compared to other machines of that time.

 

As the man says. Dropzone was one of the first bundle of four games that I got for the A8 in '85. Still ranks as the most impressive achievement on that machine to my mind.

 

My second favourite game? Rescue on Fractalus.

 

Guess I know what I'm talking about.

 

Not quite so sure about AR. It had impressive presentation - but pushing the limits of the machine? Most RPGs in those days were just number crunchers behind the scenes. AR was no different in my view. It was my third favourite game, though.

Edited October 29, 2011 by Tickled_Pink

[Gunstar]

Really pushing the Atari?

 

Clearly Drop Zone. No other game reached that quality on the A8.

Of Course Rescue on Fractalus, but even more Koronis Rift.

Wayout, far Ahead , compared to other machines of that time.

 

As the man says. Dropzone was one of the first bundle of four games that I got for the A8 in '85. Still ranks as the most impressive achievement on that machine to my mind.

 

My second favourite game? Rescue on Fractalus.

 

Guess I know what I'm talking about.

 

Not quite so sure about AR. It had impressive presentation - but pushing the limits of the machine? Most RPGs in those days were just number crunchers behind the scenes. AR was no different in my view. It was my third favourite game, though.

 

AR uses a real-time raytrace engine (like Wolfenstien 3D/DOOM). originally design for more than four direction too, but that changed for some reason, (to do with presentation, not ability) but it's still the same graphic engine, just restricted to four directions. Of course it wasn't stamped "raytracing" when Philip Price invented it. Not to mention truely simulated weather patterns and sound effects of the City. And depth of character atributes (and character interaction) no other RPG of the day could touch. Mostly "behind the scenes" that effect gameplay and who your character became. Then of course there are the 128 color DLI driven artwork. How about the best music of the day the Pokey had to offer? Or being the first game with the movie-like intro? Nuf said.

Edited October 29, 2011 by Gunstar

[emkay]

AR uses a real-time raytrace engine (like Wolfenstien 3D/DOOM).

 

 

Where did you get that information?

 

 

[Gunstar]

AR uses a real-time raytrace engine (like Wolfenstien 3D/DOOM).

 

 

Where did you get that information?

 

Sorry, can't remember any names but the place was AA, but from a guy(s) working with the AR source code. Maybe I should restate to similiarites and attributes similiar to ray-tracing engines, and it might have been been the Jaguar AvP engine spoken of instead of W3D and/or Doom, one or more where compared, since it's been a while and I'm not the guy with the answer, just a parrot. However, the truth of it lies buried in an Alternate Reality thread on this forum, I got the information in the 8-bit forum we are now in.

Edited October 29, 2011 by Gunstar

[solidcorp]

Tail of Beta Lyre ! - Full mode 7 (or 7+) bitmapped level graphics that were created algorithmically, totally new each time, totally fun until it made a tunnel the ship couldn't fit through but it was awesome. It was also the only game I can remember that ever combined the four 8 bit audio channels into two 16 bit audio channels for those smooooooth frequency sweeps with chorus in the final victory songs.

 

I guess it didn't use every trick in the book, but it was up to 4 players and did some stuff unusually well.

 

I also need to throw Synapse back in there with LucasArts and the rest again, they really used the hardware very well very early in the product's life cycle.

[Rybags]

Software tricks for efficient complex level generation don't really count. River Raid does the same, and it's not exactly pushing the hardware.

 

But by the same token we could say the same for Fractalus - it's software magic, the hardware isn't really being pushed.

[Gunstar]

Maybe we should say "getting the most out of the hardware" rather than "pushing the hardware."

[emkay]

Software tricks for efficient complex level generation don't really count. River Raid does the same, and it's not exactly pushing the hardware.

 

But by the same token we could say the same for Fractalus - it's software magic, the hardware isn't really being pushed.

 

Pushing the hardware, well only doable with software magic.

Ofcourse the game could be faster or do more per frame, but at least it is a clever usage of the hardware, scaling stuff from real "graphical hi end computers of the 80s" down into the A8.

I only wonder, what they did exactly with the C64 version, as it seems CPU optimized, not VB depending. All we can see there is that the C64 version draws parts of frames "in another frame" , making it looking faster though.

[emkay]

AR uses a real-time raytrace engine (like Wolfenstien 3D/DOOM).

 

 

Where did you get that information?

 

Sorry, can't remember any names but the place was AA, but from a guy(s) working with the AR source code. Maybe I should restate to similiarites and attributes similiar to ray-tracing engines, and it might have been been the Jaguar AvP engine spoken of instead of W3D and/or Doom, one or more where compared, since it's been a while and I'm not the guy with the answer, just a parrot. However, the truth of it lies buried in an Alternate Reality thread on this forum, I got the information in the 8-bit forum we are now in.

 

Is it possible, you mean "Raycasting"?

 

You know Raytracing is that stuff, an Amiga calculated hours for one picture , and most modern PCs render up to several minutes for one picture.

[Gunstar]

AR uses a real-time raytrace engine (like Wolfenstien 3D/DOOM).

 

 

Where did you get that information?

 

Sorry, can't remember any names but the place was AA, but from a guy(s) working with the AR source code. Maybe I should restate to similiarites and attributes similiar to ray-tracing engines, and it might have been been the Jaguar AvP engine spoken of instead of W3D and/or Doom, one or more where compared, since it's been a while and I'm not the guy with the answer, just a parrot. However, the truth of it lies buried in an Alternate Reality thread on this forum, I got the information in the 8-bit forum we are now in.

 

Is it possible, you mean "Raycasting"?

 

You know Raytracing is that stuff, an Amiga calculated hours for one picture , and most modern PCs render up to several minutes for one picture.

Yes, it could be Raycasting, if that's the technique used in some of the early 3D stuff like I mentioned above, there were references. Since I am not a programmer it is quite possible that I am confused with RayCasting and RayTracing. The point I was making is that it used an advanced graphics engine technique, pionerring code, that was way ahead of it's time and nothing like it seen again until years later. I am also speaking of the original Atari 8-bit version of the City, the Atari 8-bit Dungeon and any other versions of the City or Dungeon have nothing to do with this. Maybe they used similiar techniques, maybe not, but only A8 City is involved here. Edited October 30, 2011 by Gunstar

[solidcorp]

Yea, I was going to say that Whomper Stomper was the first game I played that used digitized sound but Rybags is right, the question is what pushed the A8 the hardest, and the real answer is I don't know. The later stuff out of Europe and modern demos really blow anything I used to play out of the water.

 

It is interesting though that even though the 2600 and the A8 had the same CPU running at the same clockspeed (1/2 the color clock) and some very similar graphics hardware (players, balls, playfield, colors) that the 2600 tricks for duplicating players on a scan line weren't used to enhance A8 games. It's like once the display list was introduced everyone forgot they could write a tight 76 CPU cycle display line kernel.

[oky2000]

Software tricks for efficient complex level generation don't really count. River Raid does the same, and it's not exactly pushing the hardware.

 

But by the same token we could say the same for Fractalus - it's software magic, the hardware isn't really being pushed.

 

Loren Carpenter made the impossible possible, it makes best use of the CPU but also the lower resolutions offered. It's no different to Mr Micro using the Amiga blitter to make polygons in Elite draw faster on 7mhz Amiga than 8mhz ST.

[Thorsten Günther]

It is interesting though that even though the 2600 and the A8 had the same CPU running at the same clockspeed (1/2 the color clock) and some very similar graphics hardware (players, balls, playfield, colors) that the 2600 tricks for duplicating players on a scan line weren't used to enhance A8 games. It's like once the display list was introduced everyone forgot they could write a tight 76 CPU cycle display line kernel.

 

Methinks the first thing A8 programmers did was "getting rid of that nasty VCS flickering" by using P2, P3, M2, M3 instead of multiplexing PMs 0 and 1 (cf. Pac-Man or Astrowarriors as good examples). Sadly, the VCS style of multiplexing PMs seemed to be "forgotten" (IOW, contemporary programmers didn't even consider them) when the 4 players were no longer sufficient for arcade conversions (see Rampage, e.g. - a seriously ugly conversion).

 

Cleverly used PM multiplexing and XORing obviously gives much better results (see Crownland) with minor flickering.

 

Now would someone rewrite Rampage?

 

Thorsten

[solidcorp]

I wasn't referring to flickering, you can re-strobe the position registers to reposition players mid scan line to get one player in two places horizontally on one line... but now that I think about it maybe the A8 couldn't do that because it had no equivalent of HMOVE or a position strobe.

[Rybags]

It can... the problem is that the CPU use tradeoff means there's not much advantage over rendering softsprites, plus there has to be a reasonable distance from one copy to the next if the graphics or colour is to change too.

[Heaven/TQA]

GTIA is missing the TIA 2600 HMOVE and mirrowing sprite data.

[Rybags]

The repeat function would have been real nice. Throw in a mirror bit and it'd be even better.

[ZylonBane]

It is interesting though that even though the 2600 and the A8 had the same CPU running at the same clockspeed...

No, they don't. The 2600's 6507 runs at 1.19MHz. The 8-bit's 6502B/C runs at 1.78MHz.

 

Sadly, the VCS style of multiplexing PMs seemed to be "forgotten" (IOW, contemporary programmers didn't even consider them) when the 4 players were no longer sufficient for arcade conversions

Plenty of A8/5200 games use sprite multiplexing. Ms Pac-Man, Qix, Millipede, Joust, Dig Dug, just to name a few. Of course, A8 games were usually designed to avoid multiplexing because it's incredibly ugly. Some of the most graphically impressive A8 games, like Gremlins or Zone Ranger, mostly use software sprites.

 

On topic, I'd consider any game that does disk I/O without pausing gameplay to be pushing the hardware. Seven Cities of Gold for sure. Possibly Alternate Reality.

[oky2000]

+1 for crownland.

[emkay]

AR uses a real-time raytrace engine (like Wolfenstien 3D/DOOM).

 

 

Where did you get that information?

 

Sorry, can't remember any names but the place was AA, but from a guy(s) working with the AR source code. Maybe I should restate to similiarites and attributes similiar to ray-tracing engines, and it might have been been the Jaguar AvP engine spoken of instead of W3D and/or Doom, one or more where compared, since it's been a while and I'm not the guy with the answer, just a parrot. However, the truth of it lies buried in an Alternate Reality thread on this forum, I got the information in the 8-bit forum we are now in.

 

Is it possible, you mean "Raycasting"?

 

You know Raytracing is that stuff, an Amiga calculated hours for one picture , and most modern PCs render up to several minutes for one picture.

Yes, it could be Raycasting, if that's the technique used in some of the early 3D stuff like I mentioned above, there were references. Since I am not a programmer it is quite possible that I am confused with RayCasting and RayTracing. The point I was making is that it used an advanced graphics engine technique, pionerring code, that was way ahead of it's time and nothing like it seen again until years later. I am also speaking of the original Atari 8-bit version of the City, the Atari 8-bit Dungeon and any other versions of the City or Dungeon have nothing to do with this. Maybe they used similiar techniques, maybe not, but only A8 City is involved here.

 

 

This one uses raycasting aswell ...

 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3-J2-VeoH8

 

 

or this:

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N42PuqrOg0

 

 

OK. It's just "demos" , but they show the big gap between "what is done" and "what is possible in a game" .... a huge gap...

 

[solidcorp]

It is interesting though that even though the 2600 and the A8 had the same CPU running at the same clockspeed...

No, they don't. The 2600's 6507 runs at 1.19MHz. The 8-bit's 6502B/C runs at 1.78MHz.

 

HAHAHAH, I knew both those things and I totally forgot, it's been a long time, thanks for the clarification.

[high voltage]

No games really pushed the A8 hardware, they were still to be expected, if the hardware wouldn't have died so early.

[ZylonBane]

No games really pushed the A8 hardware, they were still to be expected, if the hardware wouldn't have died so early.

This statment is dumb. The A8 hardware has been out for over THIRTY YEARS, and software is still being developed for it. Look at recent projects like Yie Ar Kung Fu, Project M, Bomb Jake, Yoomp, Crownland, etc.