Uridium demo.

[emkay]

3 minutes ago, popmilo said:

 

 

At least calculation like this shows that chances of something like this working on A8 is much higher with double scanline mode

Somebody will code it, and we'll see what can be done

 

 

 

 

 

Such games surely will be possible, using a double scanline mode. 

But for some special graphical fx, and for something really new, a PMg scroller plus any ANTIC mode could endup with a lot "wow" effects on the observer. 

Particular, because it offers "free" parallax, and there is no restoration of the background needed. 

The need for additional character set so fill the screen could be simply not needed. Some charset rotation to simulate the scrolling ...

 

 

 

[ivop]

12 minutes ago, popmilo said:

At least calculation like this shows that chances of something like this working on A8 is much higher with double scanline mode

Yeah, a game similar to this could be done in mode D with PMG underlays. I say similar, because why would one want to copy a C64 game in the first place? That said, it's nice to see so many people working together on this.

Edited November 16, 2020 by ivop

[+Stephen]

13 minutes ago, ivop said:

Yeah, a game similar to this could be done in mode D with PMG underlays. I say similar, because why would one want to copy a C64 game in the first place? That said, it's nice to see so many people working together on this.

That would be super impressive - take a hi-res 320*200 game and drop it to 25% of the resolution.  Definitely a way to showcase the power of the machine!  Agree on the idea of "why port" when it will definitely come out sub-par.

[ivop]

5 minutes ago, Stephen said:

That would be super impressive - take a hi-res 320*200 game and drop it to 25% of the resolution.  Definitely a way to showcase the power of the machine!  Agree on the idea of "why port" when it will definitely come out sub-par.

No, my point was not to take a game and drop it to 25% of the original, but write a new game that might borrow elements from Uridium. Write a game that is more suited to the Atari hardware. And showcase the power of the machine? One could play 7.6kHz samples on the odd lines that are mostly free now

 

But that's not what this thread is about. They want to recreate/reimage Uridium on the Atari 8-bit. I wrote emulators to replay sid files, so who am I to judge. One could also say, why bother? Compose your own darn music!

[emkay]

 

28 minutes ago, ivop said:

No, my point was not to take a game and drop it to 25% of the original, but write a new game that might borrow elements from Uridium. Write a game that is more suited to the Atari hardware. And showcase the power of the machine?

 

Power of the Atari? Still a comparision of what people talk about

 

You see the "usable screen size pixel exact" . The big screen in what the Atari offers.  The small screen is the range of game related screen in Uridium.

Wouldn't hurt that much, using a double scanline mode

 

 

 

[popmilo]

28 minutes ago, ivop said:

No, my point was not to take a game and drop it to 25% of the original, but write a new game that might borrow elements from Uridium. Write a game that is more suited to the Atari hardware. And showcase the power of the machine? One could play 7.6kHz samples on the odd lines that are mostly free now

 

But that's not what this thread is about. They want to recreate/reimage Uridium on the Atari 8-bit. I wrote emulators to replay sid files, so who am I to judge. One could also say, why bother? Compose your own darn music!

Tried that with sound playing once, in the end that "every other line" took so much precious cycles I abandoned the idea. Guess it depends on a game complexity, in some cases it would work.

 

For me Uridium is just an example of 50fps shooter. I have no fixed goal in mind regarding it's gfx or gameplay. Finding the best way to show that same speed and look on a8 is the challenge.

 

 

[shoestring]

6 hours ago, José Pereira said:

Idea is to put all in monograys together then extract all 3 interleaved charsets

I sent you an email yesterday with all the ctms for each level, in monograys and 21 rows tall.

 

Check your spam folder if you haven't seen it already.

[rensoup]

6 hours ago, popmilo said:

Why is your math like that ?
Shouldn't restoring background be faster than drawing masked sprite ?

 

lda #$

sta (),y

 

With precompiled sprites, you only mask when required (slower than above) and plot when required (faster than above), so I'm taking an average but like I said, this is an optimistic cycle count...

 

...And it can indeed be faster than restoring!

 

6 hours ago, popmilo said:

"24 pixels width" - you mean hires pixels ? So 3 bytes like c64 sprites ?

 

oh yeah,  8 * 4 * 21 = 672 cycles per sprite

 

piece of cake then ?

 

 

[rensoup]

6 hours ago, Stephen said:

That would be super impressive - take a hi-res 320*200 game and drop it to 25% of the resolution.

hmm... I don't think it's hires is it ? and it's 4 colors, not 5 right ?

 

according to its author: https://uridiumauthor.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-trouble-with-graphics-today.html

 

[emkay]

2 hours ago, rensoup said:

hmm... I don't think it's hires is it ? and it's 4 colors, not 5 right ?

 

according to its author: https://uridiumauthor.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-trouble-with-graphics-today.html

 

The scrolling seems to use hires, as it aimes to look like accereleraten and deceleration.

The Atari's scolling resolution is about 160 pixel.

 

Btw: Using Antic D for the ship leaves more cycles for some PMg multiplexer. 

At least 3360 cycles per frame.  The details aren't really breathtaking in the game. The enemies also could be shaped with double wide Players.  Allow some flicker... done.

[TIX]

3 hours ago, emkay said:

. The enemies also could be shaped with double wide Players.

As a matter of fact I have done this experiment for a friend some time ago..

it's perfectly doable with little loss  !

 

[popmilo]

3 hours ago, emkay said:

Btw: Using Antic D for the ship leaves more cycles for some PMg multiplexer. 

At least 3360 cycles per frame.  The details aren't really breathtaking in the game. The enemies also could be shaped with double wide Players.  Allow some flicker... done.

You're right with that. And it wouldn't look bad at all. Here is uridium gfx scaled twice vertically:

 

It should be redrawn for smaller vertical space, but honestly I would rather fly over such a big ship with screen scrolling vertically too. Reduce gfx details to fit in 128 chars.

Use two player pairs for two enemies in a scanline, make bunch of them in mostly vertically spread formations. Making player ship with soft sprite is then easy and can be very optimized.
Now that would be a proper a8 shooter.
 

[Rybags]

It wouldn't look that good if done as Mode 5 characters but scaled to the same aspect ratio - plenty of detail would be lost.

 

I don't think the game would work well with V-scrolling as well... maybe if done using 240 scanlines and only a single Mode 2 line for the score which would mean most of the world vertically would be present.

 

But... with Mode 5 vs 4.  The bad news is you're only saving DMA from 50% of the badlines which equates to 12-15 lines in total.  Since Antic doesn't buffer character set data, it gets fetched every scanline.

So really, the only reason to use Mode 5 would be if the graphics retained their AR which would mean less softsprite detail to render.

[emkay]

5 hours ago, Rybags said:

It wouldn't look that good if done as Mode 5 characters but scaled to the same aspect ratio - plenty of detail would be lost.

 

I don't think the game would work well with V-scrolling as well... maybe if done using 240 scanlines and only a single Mode 2 line for the score which would mean most of the world vertically would be present.

 

But... with Mode 5 vs 4.  The bad news is you're only saving DMA from 50% of the badlines which equates to 12-15 lines in total.  Since Antic doesn't buffer character set data, it gets fetched every scanline.

So really, the only reason to use Mode 5 would be if the graphics retained their AR which would mean less softsprite detail to render.

And the amount of needed memory is 50%

[Rybags]

I don't see memory as being the biggest hurdle for this game.  If it needs 128K then it needs 128K.

Most of the enemy flight congurations are pre orchestrated - some optimisations might be had there, like keep some on vertical character boundaries.

[TIX]

Since it's a fun experiment, I worked some more on the double wide enemy crafts,

there are some exceptions, but they turn up amazingly close in just 6 chunky pixels !

 

I leave this here in case it's of some use  ?

 

 

 

Edited November 18, 2020 by TIX

[Rybags]

I'd be interested in seeing ship detail in Mode 5 with original aspect - I do suspect it'd not fare as well as the enemy sprites.

[TIX]

18 minutes ago, Rybags said:

I'd be interested in seeing ship detail in Mode 5 with original aspect - I do suspect it'd not fare as well as the enemy sprites.

I don't speak Atari ?,

but if you give me some specs I'll give it a shot !

 

[Rybags]

The battleship pic Popmilo posted yesterday - Mode 5 but stretched vertically 2x.

 

So, original aspect ratio would mean the same bigger pixels but the graphics with half the vertical detail.

 

A quick and dirty job using Paint - problem is the filtering tends to generate more colours so it's not a good representation of what you'd actually get, plus the original I used had lots of JPEG noise.

 

 

 

Edited November 18, 2020 by Rybags

[José Pereira]

4 hours ago, Rybags said:

I'd be interested in seeing ship detail in Mode 5 with original aspect - I do suspect it'd not fare as well as the enemy sprites.

@TIX example of 3 enemy ships C64 2:1 ratio (on the left) converted to Antic5 2:2 ratio (at the middle) and GTIA mode 4:1 ratio (on the right):

[José Pereira]

Now the maps (here's all, thanks for @shoestring that did and sent me them) in 2:2 Antic5 ratio:

C64 has 2charlines 2:1 on top and same on the bottom just for the stars so that makes 1 on ecah for Antic5 that ok.

But large ships has 17charlines in 2:1 ratio Antic4 so would be 8,5charlines in Antic5.

Need to convert them to 18charlines so best is half top and half down adding:

[emkay]

If you use Antic D instead, it will look same. It may need more RAM, but it allows to do 2 things. 

 

There is simply more CPU time for creating the attack waves. 

And, between the attack waves, the graphics data can be handled (depacking ... whatever) ...

So you'd get all available CPU speed for the dedicated moment. 

 

Just a reminder, if people think "Last Squadron was possible, so any shooter like Uridium is possible too" :

Horizontal scrolling needs a lot of more memory and DMA . The handling is not linear.

Vertical scrolling cost just nothing, and the most time during gameplay, it is just like "add 40 bytes, set LMS (one or two times) . 

 

So , when using vertical scrolling, you could use all tricks not running into CPU limits. It's partly more powerful than the C64.

When using horizontal scrolling, the CPU limits were restricted. It's far below the possibilites of the C64. 

 

If you want to have a "50 fps" shooter , forget any character mode. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[TIX]

Since the big ships look more or less identical in 2:2 Antic5 ratio  (with little touch-up),

lets concentrate on the sprites.. things are looking pretty good either way in my opinion !

 

 

 

[Heaven/TQA]

sprites look nice...reduced to antic5

[José Pereira]

Here's level_1 in 4x1 that I think doesn't look all that bad (with an enemy at the left side):

So black, white & grays more 2 on the enemy ship =6

Still 2 as PMG0&1 multicolour on our ship and one more left in GR.9...