Bird is the Word with Intellivision Pixel Art

[First Spear]

While looking for something else, I found this. A 2020 entry at a demoscene competition/party:

 

https://events.retroscene.org/dhl2020/lowend_gfx/2244

 

 

 

[carlsson]

That handle seems somewhat familiar. Here are some more past productions, including Intellivision: https://demozoo.org/sceners/66378/

 

At first I thought it was someone part of Realm of Illusion but probably not related.

[Kiwi]

Looks really cool but there's too many colors in one 8x8 square, UFO, the beam below the UFO, the bird's crown, and etc.  Even the Colecovision would have trouble with some of the tiles. 

[carlsson]

There is a binary to download. The author has used MOB overlay to create the additional colours.

[First Spear]

6 hours ago, Kiwi said:

Looks really cool but there's too many colors in one 8x8 square, UFO, the beam below the UFO, the bird's crown, and etc.  Even the Colecovision would have trouble with some of the tiles. 

I tried some of his ROMs and he’s “animating” to get the effects, so they are it static images. 

[Kiwi]

Got it, he's flickering the tiles to get the additional colors.  Seems like he's plotting the cards on the backtab that only need to be changed every frame.  The Intellivision system RAM doesn't seem to have enough memory for a 2nd screen, I think the system RAM is 384 decle I believe and the backtab takes 240 decle?  So it makes sense to change out the cards instead of update the entire screen for 60hz flicker.

[carlsson]

Yeah. The 16-bit System RAM is 352 decles per the memory map included with the jzintv documentation. I don't think it would be possible to even point STIC to read the BACKTAB from another location (i.e. double buffering) even if there was room for it?

 

For some reason the binary is padded with 492 null bytes (or 246 decles if you want) which normally IntyBASIC binaries aren't but perhaps it was in order to put it on some device that expects binary files to be an even multiple of 1024 bytes?

[vectorcat]

Hello. I'll leave these here

https://demozoo.org/graphics/299581/

[carlsson]

It looks good, and quite an unorthodox way to generate Intellivision graphics by plotting different screens on every second frame, in particular like this one where you use two different graphics modes. Perhaps on a slow CRT with delays in the phosphor it looks better than in the emulator or a fast modern display.

[TrekMD]

Those look quite nice!