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[Aquarius] Could R-Type be done in Aquarius?


nanochess

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Sure, the Aquarius can do that. You'd have to be creative with the character graphics, and not all of them would be a 100% match, but it would be very close. In a way, it would actually look better on the Aquarius, because the Aquarius can have more colors on the screen at once than the C64.

 

I put together a very quick character set editor for the Aquarius years ago. The screenshot below shows all the characters in the Aquarius character set:

 

aquarius_chars.png

 

(Someday, I'll integrate this tool with a full-screen editor, something along the lines of TheDraw for DOS, but optimized for the Aquarius. I started working on one, and I used it for the Aquaricart, but it's not nearly good enough to be released yet.)

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Seems pretty much anything is possible today with today's talented retro-oriented programmers! :love:

... anything except finding enough free time to turn our ambitious ideas into realities, it seems. I've had to put everything except my day job on the back burner so far this year, but here's hoping that changes soon!

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Hm, I can't recall if the Aquarius character set has been contributed to the Playscii editor. Many other sets are there, I think I even pirated the Intellivision character set to that editor. While there are plenty of PETSCII editors, this one can use any character set and has a mode where it tries to automatically map an high resolution image to available characters, for those not so talented in drawing themselves.

 

By "more colours", do you mean every character can have its unique background on the Aquarius, similar to e.g. the ZX Spectrum or for that matter FG/BG mode on the Intellivision? As most know, the C64 by default has one background colour but each character can have its own foreground colour. By restricting the font to 64 characters you can have four background colours without getting into raster tricks. It might sound primitive but not many other systems were as capable, e.g. the VDP ones define sets of foreground and background for 8 characters at a time which can be very limiting if you want the same text or graphics in multiple text colours and background colours on the same screen. The Atari 8-bit have all sorts of combined modes but it takes a course in engineering to figure it out, or you're stuck with very primitive text graphics capacities. Same goes on for many systems, actually I think the ZX Spectrum is one of the most capable here, possibly next to the Aquarius if I understand you correctly. Imagine that, the Aquarius being one of the most advanced systems of its day when you want text based graphics?

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By "more colours", do you mean every character can have its unique background on the Aquarius, similar to e.g. the ZX Spectrum or for that matter FG/BG mode on the Intellivision?

Yes. The Aquarius has a 16-color palette, but any of these colors can be foreground and background, in any combination, without any limit to how many different colors are on the screen (or even on a single line) at a time. The only exception is the character/color cell in the upper-left corner of the screen: any character/color combination that is copied into this cell is also displayed in the overscan area.

Imagine that, the Aquarius being one of the most advanced systems of its day when you want text based graphics?

The Aquarius has a pretty versatile character set, and of course, you can "stretch" it by creatively using inverted colors to make the characters look different. It would have been nice to be able to program new character bitmaps, but there are ideas for upgrades which will hopefully add this capability.
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Taking some screenshots from R-type on the Gameboy http://www.honestgamers.com/assets/4740/view/0.html ( I looked at this from the perspective of lowest resolution system that had a commercial R-Type release)

 

I cropped the images to 320x192 then fed them thru cjmartin's bmp2aq . Scores could be added on the top line .

 

It would be nice to say take the output of bmp2aq and convert to a rexpaint compatible format.

 

A couple of the tests were done with full character set, the other with 80x72 bloxels

 

Certainly with some decent editing and emphasizing the chunky look a decent translation could be achieved

 

Barnie

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Edited by barnieg
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1) Z80 source for ZX Spectrum was released to the public. Improved Amstrad CPC version is based on it, probably its source will be available on request, too.

2) Spectrum version is less or more character-based (due to attributes). Only the "background" scrolls by one pixel, but its colour attributes jump by 8 pixels.

Character-based graphic will require less space (for 8x8 pixels two bytes instead of 9, with the mask - say 3 bytes instead of 17, although Spectrum graphic was RLE compressed) and one level will probably fit into 4+32 KiO with ExpandeRAM.

 

So it seems to be possible (for one level), but where are the people to do it?

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