polyex Posted June 12, 2020 Share Posted June 12, 2020 This is kind of a technical question, so perhaps a programmer can shed some light. Why is the scrolling on the Colecovision so jerky? Zaxxon jumps to mind, but there are other examples too. It's like the background is moving too many pixels at a time. It's pretty far from the smooth look of the arcade and even other platforms. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Serguei2 Posted June 12, 2020 Share Posted June 12, 2020 Colecovision does not have scrolling hardware. The only way to scroll is to move tiles. Tile has 8x8 pixels. That's why scrolling games need to move 8 pixels at the time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CrazyBoss Posted June 12, 2020 Share Posted June 12, 2020 Its possible to have "bit scrolling" smooth scrolling, but mentioned no hardware support for that at the ColecoVision VDP. A few games/demos from the Colecovision/MSX world. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted June 12, 2020 Share Posted June 12, 2020 As noted above, there's no hardware in the Coleco VDP for smooth scrolling - and all the graphics modes are based on 8x8 tiles. Smooth scrolling is usually accomplished by pre-defining all the shifted tiles and having them ready to go. This takes a lot of memory - it means you need to define two tiles for each onscreen one - and then do it 8 times for single pixel scrolling - so that's 16 characters for one 8x8 pattern. Then, since it needs to straddle two characters, you also need the characters that can be placed beside it. Other options are scrolling more than one pixel at a time, or uploading changed patterns to the VDP every frame. But the VDP is too slow to update EVERY pattern in one frame, so there's still usually some compromise. The Magellan tool (for making game maps) has the ability to analyze the map and output the characters you need for smooth scroll. Thread is getting pretty long, towards the end it got a new home, so the latest version is not in the first post there. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+nanochess Posted June 13, 2020 Share Posted June 13, 2020 Princess Quest Mecha-8 Mecha-9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
youki Posted June 13, 2020 Share Posted June 13, 2020 In other style : Battle of Hoth BTW: Malaika is impressive for the MSX 1 Lotus F3 , makes me think to the excellent Burning Rubber on Colecovision: 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pixelboy Posted June 13, 2020 Share Posted June 13, 2020 (edited) 2 hours ago, youki said: Lotus F3 , makes me think to the excellent Burning Rubber on Colecovision: Actually, Burn Rubber is a sort of "reskin" of Lotus F3. Both games are from the same guys. Edited June 13, 2020 by Pixelboy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 (edited) Uridium ported to colecovision Uridium on YouTube Edited June 20, 2020 by artrag Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
insertclevernamehere Posted June 20, 2020 Share Posted June 20, 2020 As far as original run games go, Nova Blast by Imagic seems to scroll smoothly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted June 21, 2020 Share Posted June 21, 2020 Uridium uses a specific VDP configuration that doubles the number of tiles usable for the scrolling. The whole level, under any offset, uses 1024 tiles and they are all loaded in VRAM, so only name table is updated 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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