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That's how an A8 racing game should look like... ;)


Heaven/TQA

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9 minutes ago, R0ger said:

You simply can't make cars and 50fps.

This is generally not true.

Well, in most cases thing slow down, but it is only depending on the software.

 

9 minutes ago, R0ger said:

You can use hardware to have nice road .. and the use PMG for cars. Problem is, Atari's PMG is too limited, and you end up with simple cars.

Good grief ...

Have you ever realized that no game uses a road in that height as in your demo?

Also: The PMg is really "wide" enough , to produce any "Road" .

 

 

9 minutes ago, R0ger said:

 

Or you can do it like Electra Glide - first person view. That would be possible even with more complex road and hills, but having tried myself, I must say even that would be an achievement.

 

Elektraglide uses Mode D already. It shows in a bad way that hw scrolling isn't really useful for road creation.

 

 

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4 hours ago, rensoup said:

I don' t recall any good looking racer at 50/60 on the A8, (except for elektraglide? and there aren't any cars...) so there's still that gap to fill?

 

The problem is the road which probably requires a kernel (it seems to be the only fast solution for drawing it with PMGs). A kernel at 25fps is a more annoying if you want to do something useful in it (on top of repositioning PMGs)

Yeah, I was thinking Elektra Glide, but now that you mention it, it doesn't actually have any cars in it, so it's not a fair comparison from me to make.

I was also thinking the GreatAmericanRace(Country / cross/ etc.), though that has simplistic visuals due to number of cars there (but is a great game) and it feels like 50-60 fps.

3 hours ago, emkay said:

 

Elektraglide uses Mode D already. It shows in a bad way that hw scrolling isn't really useful for road creation.

Wait, what ? Just how does EG show that "in a bad way" ?!? Please elaborate. I would never think it's possible to come up with a sentence where "EG" and "bad" could be together when talking about visuals (gameplay and audio restart is a whole another matter)

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4 hours ago, R0ger said:

You simply can't make cars and 50fps.

You can use hardware to have nice road .. and the use PMG for cars. Problem is, Atari's PMG is too limited, and you end up with simple cars.

I tried using the opposite approach ..  PMG for the road, field for car, which simplifies things greatly, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iT2_PdJa3g
But there is too many limitations, mainly width of the road, I don't think it's the right way.

 

I'll admit I haven't fully thought about it but I agree that PMGs for the road is the only fast way but I'm not sure why there are so many restrictions with it (why is your road so narrow?)

Then software sprites for the cars, precompiled of course.

The screenshot I posted seems doable with 2 cars but that's just my gut feeling.

 

c64 outrun isn't great to be honest.

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42 minutes ago, rensoup said:

I'll admit I haven't fully thought about it but I agree that PMGs for the road is the only fast way but I'm not sure why there are so many restrictions with it (why is your road so narrow?)

Then software sprites for the cars, precompiled of course.

The screenshot I posted seems doable with 2 cars but that's just my gut feeling.

 

c64 outrun isn't great to be honest.

Well if you want some center line on the road, and you want to use PMG for that too, you have only 3 PMG left for the road. And that won't fill the full screen width.

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5 hours ago, R0ger said:

Well if you want some center line on the road, and you want to use PMG for that too, you have only 3 PMG left for the road. And that won't fill the full screen width.

 4 Players for the Road

4 Missiles for the lines 

?

and if that doesn't work, you could revert things:

make the Playfield black and set the players colored to fill the "fields" .

The Road never needs more than 88 lines height in such games.  It's more like 70 lines, sometimes 80 .  

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7 hours ago, VladR said:

 

Wait, what ? Just how does EG show that "in a bad way" ?!? Please elaborate. I would never think it's possible to come up with a sentence where "EG" and "bad" could be together when talking about visuals (gameplay and audio restart is a whole another matter)

 

The game looks just unfinished. 

There is a lot colors on the screen, and some light FX were great. 

But then the depth projection is already "not correct" . You simply don't see the depth of an object, and you only can play through, if you know what the game does. 

The Board is apart from the Gamescreen. There is even no attempt to create a cockpit view. 

Not to tell that there is simply no detail in the graphics. But the game control seem to suffer by missing CPU speed already. 

 

 

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8 hours ago, R0ger said:

Well if you want some center line on the road, and you want to use PMG for that too, you have only 3 PMG left for the road. And that won't fill the full screen width.

yup, missiles must be the same colors as players so only 3 players left to have other color of stripe. How CPU heavy do you think would be to have center line done by software gfx (maybe it could be XOR)?

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34 minutes ago, ilmenit said:

yup, missiles must be the same colors as players so only 3 players left to have other color of stripe. How CPU heavy do you think would be to have center line done by software gfx (maybe it could be XOR)?

That wouldn't be too hard. XOR wouldn't work though, as you have to combine it with the cars in front, and if you do 3rd person view, with player's car.

But the whole road in PMG is really nasty dense kernel code. You don't even have enough time to move all the PMG objects per line, I do left side on even frames and right side on odd frame. Adding hills would mean the kernel code has to be active for even taller portion of the screen. That eats into available CPU power. Also PMG have one great feature - they can all have different color. This cannot be used here.

If I ever go back to this topic, I would like to experiment with full software rendering and character modes.

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24 minutes ago, R0ger said:

That wouldn't be too hard. XOR wouldn't work though, as you have to combine it with the cars in front, and if you do 3rd person view, with player's car.

But the whole road in PMG is really nasty dense kernel code. You don't even have enough time to move all the PMG objects per line, I do left side on even frames and right side on odd frame. Adding hills would mean the kernel code has to be active for even taller portion of the screen. That eats into available CPU power. Also PMG have one great feature - they can all have different color. This cannot be used here.

If I ever go back to this topic, I would like to experiment with full software rendering and character modes.

True, with just a XOR the cars would look semi-transparent. Repositioning of PMG would be really hard within DLI indeed. As in racing games everything move fast, probably the char mode is really the one feasible if we want to have many moving objects on the side of the road and colors.

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Phaeron (I think it was him?) once described a new found bug where you can stretch a single player over the width of the screen. Proof of concept was a big rotating square. Can't find it atm, but it must be here on AA. Guess it was the programming forum. Perhaps this could be used for a road?

 

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18 minutes ago, ivop said:

Phaeron (I think it was him?) once described a new found bug where you can stretch a single player over the width of the screen. Proof of concept was a big rotating square. Can't find it atm, but it must be here on AA. Guess it was the programming forum. Perhaps this could be used for a road?

 

I haven't read it yet but a quick google search brought up this:

 

 

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53 minutes ago, ivop said:

Phaeron (I think it was him?) once described a new found bug where you can stretch a single player over the width of the screen. Proof of concept was a big rotating square. Can't find it atm, but it must be here on AA. Guess it was the programming forum. Perhaps this could be used for a road?

 

I tried just that. That was actually my original idea about PMG road. And the answer is .. no. There is limit how much to the left you can do it. You can't stretch the road to the left border of the screen.

 

image.thumb.png.6f66f11417bd0373646fe028dd7055b3.png

 

This is analytic view (ctrl+F8) in Altirra. You see that vertical yellow line ? That's basically the limit. Maybe the left side could be covered with another PMG object .. good luck with that though, this trick needs to be done on specific cycle, and the kernel for drawing road via PMG is complex even without it.

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In Outrun Europa on the C64 the road is about 60 lines high. Depending on the "hills" , it seems to go up to 70 lines, sometimes down to 50 lines.

 

If the PRIOR Handling for the missiles is to time consuming, there still is the possibility to use 3 of the players for the upper part of the road , in the lower range flip them to build the border of the road.

3 Players overlap 96 pixel. this is 16 pixel more than needed. So there is several vertical lines space to do the needed code.

The main DMA lines of the character mode should be avoided. 9 Registers could be changed in a scanline.

Swapping the colors would need to have 4 registers changed additionally. But only 2 loads and 4 writes.

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Hey, that's pretty impressive graphics out of the TED chip in the Plus/4. I'm surprised the Plus/4 community hasn't just come up with a hardware mod to shoehorn a VICII and the SID into their machines. They'd have one hell of a system then compared to a stock C64 since they'd have the better BASIC and a 6551 too...

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32 minutes ago, Lynxpro said:

Hey, that's pretty impressive graphics out of the TED chip in the Plus/4. I'm surprised the Plus/4 community hasn't just come up with a hardware mod to shoehorn a VICII and the SID into their machines. They'd have one hell of a system then compared to a stock C64 since they'd have the better BASIC and a 6551 too...

As far as I know, there are SID mods for the +4. Incorporating VIC-II, though, would be not be a trivial task.

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SID is fairly easy, probably the main issues being requirement for the second higher voltage power supply, external hardware for filters and the unique clock speed.  And shortage of real SID chips.

 

Vic-II, really why would you bother?  If you put Vic and Sid into a Plus4 it would still be hugely incompatible requiring most software to be reworked.  May as well just use the original machine.

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3 hours ago, Rybags said:

SID is fairly easy, probably the main issues being requirement for the second higher voltage power supply, external hardware for filters and the unique clock speed.  And shortage of real SID chips.

 

Vic-II, really why would you bother?  If you put Vic and Sid into a Plus4 it would still be hugely incompatible requiring most software to be reworked.  May as well just use the original machine.

There are now SID fpga boards? To overcome shortage same with our POKEY or was it just pokey.... ;)

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12 hours ago, Rybags said:

SID is fairly easy, probably the main issues being requirement for the second higher voltage power supply, external hardware for filters and the unique clock speed.  And shortage of real SID chips.

 

Vic-II, really why would you bother?  If you put Vic and Sid into a Plus4 it would still be hugely incompatible requiring most software to be reworked.  May as well just use the original machine.

 

The same can be said for why port A8 games to the 5200? The answer is "because".  :)

 

There are +4 owners who like their unique +4 hardware but would like to run C64 software "natively" on their computer of choice.

 

On the other hand, maybe one should ask why C64 enthusiasts, with their plethora of upgrades, haven't done ROM hacks to boot the later versions of Commodore BASIC on their machines or widely supported an internal 6551 upgrade.

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