Cosmic Ark

[phaeron]

On 1/15/2022 at 8:24 AM, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Why are the beasties upside down?

 

Also some colors (meteors, frame around score, ship) are different to the 2600.

The upside-down beasties was an oversight -- some graphics are flipped and others aren't. This version has a fix. (Glurk's version mostly handles this, but the terrain scroll/clip is the tricky part.)

 

As for the colors, they aren't changed from the 2600 version -- the same color register values are used. This matches up reasonably on an NTSC system with the similarities between TIA and GTIA color generation. You may see different color values in PAL due to its different palette, or on an older emulator that improperly uses a PAL palette in NTSC mode (this will manifest as a purple ark and a green sky on the first planet). The meteor and score frame colors can also appear less saturated due to the colors being clipped, as on a PC there is a tradeoff between the overall brightness of the image and saturation at the high end. I have opted not to try to adjust the meteor colors as they do appear blue and red on a TV/monitor setup (e.g. NTSC 800XL and C1702), and it would conflict with some of the algorithmic color generation like the starfield.

 

cosmic-1.1.zip