The hamburger experiment

[+atari2600land]

The patties in the burgers in Burgertime were green. There. I've said it. This is because the Intellivision can't display brown. There is no brown in the palette. So if I, say, wanted to make a game about, say, chocolate, I couldn't (unless it was white chocolate.) But I wanted to make a game about flying hamburgers, even though there is no brown in the INTV's palette. I have made this game before (for the Game Gear and Virtual Boy), but I wanted to see what a hamburger looked like on the Intellivision. So I made this experiment. While doing this, I had to reinstall Photoshop because it was being a moron and wouldn't let me use it. But once I installed it, I found the grids. This will help a lot when making Intellivision graphics. Anyway, I think adding the bun hides the fact that the patties are really green, albeit a little bit. What say you?

[+Steve Jones]

they might look less green if the background was not that red.

[+atari2600land]

What color should I change the background to?

[+JasonlikesINTV]

12 minutes ago, atari2600land said:

What color should I change the background to?

Try a blue or purple.  This pic isn't quite the same situation, but might be helpful.  Prob just need trial and error.

[+stupus]

Doesnt it have this brown?

 

If thats the brown your using maybe another green as a background would make it look more brown.

[+atari2600land]

Here it is with a blue background. What do you think?

[TIX]

turn the buns orange

[+atari2600land]

I tried. It wouldn't let me.

[Rev]

Soylent Green Burgers!

[+atari2600land]

Soylent green burgers, now with ketchup.

[wolfy62]

Did you try gray burgers on the blue background?

[+atari2600land]

I tried 127/127/127 in IntyColor. It came out bright green instead of gray.

[IMBerzerk]

Intellivision brown is actually Olive Drab.  You might want to try a green or grey background as it will cause your eye/brain to see brown as it will compare it to green.

 

If you don't believe me... Load AD&D.  Keep the map screen on for a little while, let your eyes adjust to the green background of the map.  Now hit reset and you'll see the title screen as brown.  Armor Battle and Auto Racing gives you that illusion as well. 

 

That's about the best you can do with Intellivision "brown" because it's not brown at all.

Edited January 11, 2021 by IMBerzerk

[+JasonlikesINTV]

1 hour ago, atari2600land said:

Soylent green burgers, now with ketchup.

These actually look more hamburgery

[+JasonlikesINTV]

2 hours ago, atari2600land said:

Here it is with a blue background. What do you think?

[TIX]

7 hours ago, atari2600land said:

Soylent green burgers, now with ketchup.

better !

now try dithering the burger

[Bamse]

Is the brown more 'brown' on PAL?

I don't remember the burgers being green.

[carlsson]

Yes, per this rather lengthy discussion about accurate Intellivision palettes and how the perceived image changes between RF and composite video (might depend on the mod).

 

[Bamse]

I seem to remember reading that thread. Think it was mentioned that colours were corrected (or at least partially) in PAL. Also an RGB mod helps. My intellivision is both which would explain what I'm seeing. Don't know how much the rgb mod helps though as I remember the burgers being brown back in the day and that was of course not using an rgb modded machine

[+atari2600land]

Against a green background:

[+atari2600land]

More work on Hamburgers. I made the burger sprite. It took a few hours for me to understand the scrolling code, but even though I wasn't able to put in a lovely MODE 1 picture and make it scroll, I was able to do this:

The burger sprite has the same colors as the burger picture on the title screen minus the ketchup (curse the inability to make mulitcolored sprites on the INTV. The burger takes up 2 sprites.)

Just now realized I need to make music for the game! It's already at 5kb!

[+stupus]

Thats some serious brown there now!

[+atari2600land]

Is there a way to display the score but have it NOT scroll?

[carlsson]

You could waste a few sprites for that purpose, but then you probably want to define some custom display with four pixel wide digits to not use too many of the sprites, even though of course those could be 8x16 pixels and you display the score over two rows in some way. I've seen that some of the other games scroll the score with the screen and as soon as the scrolling stops, redraws the score line.

 

Depending on how much of the background and how many objects you need to move, you could also consider soft scrolling those through redefined GRAMs, simply treating everything on screen as software sprites which would be more work but would leave the score display intact all the time. I saw that the Moon Patrol game does that.

[+atari2600land]

Here's the setup of the sprites

sprite 0 - burger (bun)

sprite 1 - burger (patty)

sprites 2 - fry

sprites 3-5 - score

sprite 6 - (eventually) enemy

sprite 7 - (eventually) life counter

 

It took a horribly long time to figure out how to make the sprites numbers. I was going to have sprite 7 be the enemy's missile, but I decided that showing the amount of lives is more important than having enemy missiles.