Atari 8-Bit Graphics Capabilities

[Gunstar]

4 hours ago, zzip said:

Player missile graphics (sprites) that can add colors, but they are only 8-bits wide, but run the length of the screen (8x240 basically)  Up to 5 players, with 5 unique colors

Display List: Each line of your display can easily be reprogrammed to be a different mode than the previous line, this allows interesting mixed modes

Can't the 4 missiles have 4 unique colors if you kept them separated and not combined as a fifth player? Would that basically allow 4 players of 8x240 with 4 unique colors and 4 missiles of 2x240 with another 4 unique colors so you could have a total of 8 unique colors instead of just 5 by combining the missiles into one player? I don't see the sense in combining the missiles into 1 player when it comes to static graphic screens. I'd think it would be much more flexible to use them all as 8 separate player/missile "sprites" under static art circumstances.

[flashjazzcat]

The missiles either share the colour of the corresponding player (0-3), or - if combined as a fifth player - they share a fifth colour. Remember there are only nine colour registers in total; four missile/player colours, four playfield colours, and the background colour. The fifth player takes the colour of playfield three.

 

[emkay]

 

9 color registers plus GRPIOR logics. Allowing 17 colors per Scanline for small pictures without DLI usage. For loaders and else.

[José Pereira]

2 minutes ago, emkay said:

 

9 color registers plus GRPIOR logics. Allowing 17 colors per Scanline for small pictures without DLI usage. For loaders and else.

Antic4/GR.12 is that way 23colours, isn't it?

[emkay]

16 minutes ago, José Pereira said:

Antic4/GR.12 is that way 23colours, isn't it?

Up to.... but if you want to have some nice image...

[+Adam+]

On 7/14/2019 at 8:39 PM, R0ger said:

Right, that might be. We will know when there is XEX released.

Well, it was already released when you were writing this comment. XEX file and G2F file in the official stuff pack.

[+Stephen]

14 minutes ago, +Adam+ said:

Well, it was already released when you were writing this comment. XEX file and G2F file in the official stuff pack.

Link please for the dumbasses like me that can't find it?

Edited July 16, 2019 by Stephen

[+Adam+]

4 minutes ago, Stephen said:

Link please for the dumbasses like me that can't find it?

It's quite easy to find it at the end of Atarionline article or on the official party page: https://www.lostparty.pl/2019/

 

The link:

https://www.lostparty.pl/2019/stuff/LostParty2019stuff.zip

[José Pereira]

20 hours ago, emkay said:

Up to.... but if you want to have some nice image...

Humm... will you say that this isn't a nice image?

23colours and no DLIs and is a single charset (=<128chars) so it can be used while loading.

?

 

21 hours ago, José Pereira said:

21 hours ago, emkay said:

 

9 color registers plus GRPIOR logics. Allowing 17 colors per Scanline for small pictures without DLI usage. For loaders and else.

Antic4/GR.12 is that way 23colours, isn't it?

 

Edited July 17, 2019 by José Pereira

[emkay]

19 minutes ago, José Pereira said:

Humm... will you say that this isn't a nice image?

23colours and no DLIs and is a single charset (=<128chars) so it can be used while loading.

?

 

Funny , you show me particulary this picture

 

But to do a little nit picking: The small image has exactly 5 colors.

The "Loading" part has no details

 

Could be interesting to have an editor for that directly. But G2F is fair enough. 17 colors in a small screen....

Wait... There is an additional idea. As people like huge borders. How about a small screen about 11x11 chars, using the PMg with GPRIOR 0 , allowing any game with "up to 23 colors" per scanline and fluently playable  .

 

[José Pereira]

Ok. it hasn't there 23 because I didn't do some Orings between some PFs and PMGs but I could do it, just didn't like the colourings result.

You may call it simple but took many hours to get ? and had the idea is more than enough ?.

Here's it with just PFs before the PMGs added:

Edited July 17, 2019 by José Pereira

[emkay]

Yeah, back then I suggested to use a picture that breaks the common "vertical" break even in a loading screen.

 

 

The colored loading above a 5 color  display. Up to 11 colors per scanline while the limits were 4 colors in game loading screens .

Sadly, the game never made it.

 

Edited July 17, 2019 by emkay

[emkay]

Also very underestimated is the use of GTIA modes with multiplexed PMg.

 

10 colors with no color DLI. Only a split for PMg has been set.

 

 

Edited July 17, 2019 by emkay

[danwinslow]

Lots of cool stuff! But there's a difference between how many colors are possible in things like static pictures and splash screens and how many colors you can use for game programming purposes and still have system resources left over to run the game.

[R0ger]

Well .. 4 colors is too few. But 6 ? Enough for many cases. I'm using 6 color mode in my PuyoPuyo remake:

 

 

Full thread here: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/284327-puyo-puyo-wip

 

It's character mode with something like c64 color map. I have black and white in every character. Then red and blue, which can be swapped for every character. Blue can be swapped for yellow with inversion, and red can be swapped for green with PMG. It also uses DLI to load the PMG data, instead of DMA. It takes some extra time, but the data manipulation is way faster that way, as I only use 1 byte height-wise per character row (DMA would need 4). And you can achieve more colors with patterns and PAL mixing. Especially the purple comes out very nice.

 

Edited July 17, 2019 by R0ger

[Gunstar]

@R0ger Yes, that works very well! I thought it was DLI's at first, and only thought the second to last row at the bottom, between the red and yellow/orange(?) was a mixed color. It's the only one that looks like checker-board pattern unless you look really closely.

Edited July 17, 2019 by Gunstar

[R0ger]

53 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

@R0ger Yes, that works very well! I thought it was DLI's at first, and only thought the second to last row at the bottom, between the red and yellow/orange(?) was a mixed color. It's the only one that looks like checker-board pattern unless you look really closely.

They all merge better if they are same brightness. Problem is you want yellow brighter, and red darker to get more saturation. So it's most visible with this pair. But you can fine tune it for your application ?

[emkay]

11 hours ago, danwinslow said:

Lots of cool stuff! But there's a difference between how many colors are possible in things like static pictures and splash screens and how many colors you can use for game programming purposes and still have system resources left over to run the game.

If you follow my writings, you might have recognized that I always propose graphics that can be used for something. 

GTIA Mode 10 allows a lot tricks for free, as masking is given by the used color register. Also some kind of parallax scrolling is possible while almost all CPU is free to do a full screen PMg multiplexer.

 

GPRIOR 0 allows to have a small range on the screen for 17 colors. Imagine a graphics window as in Alternate Reality (when walking through the city or dungeon) using 17 colors. At least the "enemies" could look very detailed .

Also "highres" text is possible with no cost, if you interleave ANTIC Mode E and F .

 

and so on...

 

 

 

 

 

 

[José Pereira]

15 hours ago, emkay said:

Yeah, back then I suggested to use a picture that breaks the common "vertical" break even in a loading screen.

 

 

The colored loading above a 5 color  display. Up to 11 colors per scanline while the limits were 4 colors in game loading screens .

Sadly, the game never made it.

 

But no way I like that one now.

Strange is why you come with it and it vs my actual one colourful... How can this one be better?

Does anyone here like this one and think it looks any better than the one I did?

 

P.s.- @Emkay: the game is indeed beeing done and more advanced than your thinking. Not from the first coder, nor a second that no-one ever know who was but by a third one. Maybe you'll see it more soon than you think ?...

And no, it's not like the video you see at the end of my posts but you'll all will be amazed from what we get and what A8 version will have (just can't see how and already contacted Albert here because I don't get how to edit these bottom information on this new AtariAge forums but sadly and from a long long time I don't have his answer).

?

Edited July 18, 2019 by José Pereira

[Gunstar]

3 hours ago, José Pereira said:

But no way I like that one now.

Strange is why you come with it and it vs my actual one colourful... How can this one be better?

Does anyone here like this one and think it looks any better than the one I did?

 

 

I think yours looks much better. And I could care less if the image and loading graphics are over-lapping or not.

 

But also, honestly, I could care less also if it were @emkay 's or your loading screen in the game. It's just a loading screen, I wouldn't care if there wasn't a loading screen, it's the game that is important to me.

 

Even on modern games and systems I watch/look at the opening screens exactly once, the first time I load the game. After than I skip past it all if I can.

Edited July 18, 2019 by Gunstar

[zzip]

5 hours ago, emkay said:

If you follow my writings, you might have recognized that I always propose graphics that can be used for something. 

GTIA Mode 10 allows a lot tricks for free, as masking is given by the used color register. Also some kind of parallax scrolling is possible while almost all CPU is free to do a full screen PMg multiplexer.

 

I was never a fan of the elongated pixes of the GTIA modes.     Although Mode 9 could do some amazing gradient effects that no other computer of the era could touch, like the Rescue on Fractalus loading screen showing the space station exterior, or the Walking Robot demo.

[emkay]

2 hours ago, Gunstar said:

I think yours looks much better. And I could care less if the image and loading graphics are over-lapping or not.

 

But also, honestly, I could care less also if it were @emkay 's or your loading screen in the game. It's just a loading screen, I wouldn't care if there wasn't a loading screen, it's the game that is important to me.

 

Even on modern games and systems I watch/look at the opening screens exactly once, the first time I load the game. After than I skip past it all if I can.

I posted my image just for the records. Back then it was part of a tutorial. To show to some special guy that colorful images can be used for a loading screen. 7 years passed since then.

Sometimes things turn weird.

[emkay]

4 hours ago, zzip said:

I was never a fan of the elongated pixes of the GTIA modes.     Although Mode 9 could do some amazing gradient effects that no other computer of the era could touch, like the Rescue on Fractalus loading screen showing the space station exterior, or the Walking Robot demo.

It really depends on the Image. And it depends on how it is all used. The PMg (and the multiplexing) over a mode that doesn't need any special handling, can give a lot of details. Particular if a coder uses the "masking" wich is free in that mode. You won't need to open the horizontal borders to get a feeling for depth and to solve glitches that could happen , using standard PMg over a graphicsmode. The "landscape" in my posted picture doesn't really miss a higher resolution.

Also, you're not restricted to that resolution over the whole screen.

 

 

[VladR]

On 7/4/2019 at 3:10 PM, R0ger said:

You can also mix 4 hues and 4 brightness levels in 4 color mode. If you add character mode and PMG, you get 6 brightness levels. And using 2 frame flickering you can get 8 hues and 11 brightness levels. That can make images like this:

 

How exactly is this one done ? At first I thought that since this is interlace, then we're talking PAL blending, and alternating two different framebuffers. It's also not using PMGs, as you say that would give you 6 levels.

 

But then you mentioned the 2-frame flickering would give you more, so it implies that the image above isn't using flickering.

 

I would understand additional colors would be produced/artifacted if it wasn't interlaced with blank lines (as at that point, any color below the current scanline will "bleed" some color into the color above it). But the interlace makes it confusing for me to guess what exactly is going on here. Is this a carefully timed kernel ? But then you wouldn't talk about hues, it would be straight new colors. So, why hues exactly ? Is the every odd empty scanline a GTIA mode ? It's still empty, so it shouldn't matter to color blending, no ?

[José Pereira]

17 minutes ago, VladR said:

How exactly is this one done ? At first I thought that since this is interlace, then we're talking PAL blending, and alternating two different framebuffers. It's also not using PMGs, as you say that would give you 6 levels.

 

But then you mentioned the 2-frame flickering would give you more, so it implies that the image above isn't using flickering.

 

I would understand additional colors would be produced/artifacted if it wasn't interlaced with blank lines (as at that point, any color below the current scanline will "bleed" some color into the color above it). But the interlace makes it confusing for me to guess what exactly is going on here. Is this a carefully timed kernel ? But then you wouldn't talk about hues, it would be straight new colors. So, why hues exactly ? Is the every odd empty scanline a GTIA mode ? It's still empty, so it shouldn't matter to color blending, no ?

It seems that usual PAL Blending technic (that wouldn't look good on NTSC machines) where on intercalated scanlines you have:

-> red, green, yellow;

-> black, gray, white;

(And blue is BAK register so is possible on all scanlines but it can also blend with all those above)