Did you care about flicker?

[supercat]

i loved the 'invulvernability while shooting' in defender (i didnt call it flicker.) :-)

 

I wonder how it would have looked if the player's ship and shot were multiplexed at 30Hz when shooting? Collision detection would be tricky if other things were also flickering at 30Hz, but visually I think it might have been an improvement.

[+FujiSkunk]

What causes the flicker in frogger when you jump onto a log? The same with Mr Do!, when you are on a line of cherries, they all start flickering, yet the other cherries remain the same. Without getting too technical, what makes it happen?

 

Just a basic display limitation of the 2600. It can only display at most two 'player' sprites, two 'missile' objects, and a 'ball' object on any horizontal scanline...

 

I think Spector was asking why Frogger flickers even when it seems there are only two moving objects (not counting multiples) on a given line. I think this is just the way Frogger was programmed. Up to two enemies and up to two good guys can appear on any given line. That means all the enemies can take up all the available sprites on a given line (swimming turtles and diving turtles, for example), and so can all the good guys (player frog and lady frog, for example).

Each of the two enemies (such as turtles and diving turtles) can claim its own sprite, and so can each of the good guys (such as player frog and lady frog). So, whenever good guys and enemies occupied the same line, the game flickers that line, regardless of how many of each type there actually are. It was probably easier and/or smaller to code the game this way.

 

 

The places I noticed flicker the most was where it didn't have an explanation. Objects flickering in Adventure? Very annoying.

 

Adventure was one of the first (maybe the first?) game to use the flicker trick. Atari's programmers had probably just discovered this trick that allowed them to display more sprites than the hardware was capable of, and they hadn't yet up to writing display code that could employ the flicker trick more intelligently.

[dark-aleph]

i loved the 'invulvernability while shooting' in defender (i didnt call it flicker.) :-)

I didn't call it flicker in that game either. I just figured that the VCS couldn't show both the shot and the ship at the same time...

 

My rationalisation was that the ship didn't 'fire', but instead could transform into an invincible white-hot spear for a moment before reconstituting. A little imagination is a wonderful thing.

 

Flicker never bothered me then, and it still doesn't. It's part of the aesthetic experience for me. Flicker bothers me on later systems because of their greater image density (background tiling etc.) but on the 2600 it just adds to the ethereality of the image.

[+Random Terrain]

Flicker bothered me back then and it still does. A lack of flicker is one of the things I looked for in a game, especially after I played certain Atari 2600 games that seemed to have no flicker.

[accousticguitar]

It didn't bother me in Adventure; I thought it was supposed to be like that. It did bother me in Pac-man; probably because I had an arcade game to compare it to.

[supercat]

Adventure was one of the first (maybe the first?) game to use the flicker trick. Atari's programmers had probably just discovered this trick that allowed them to display more sprites than the hardware was capable of, and they hadn't yet up to writing display code that could employ the flicker trick more intelligently.

 

Flicker was first used in 1977. Adventure didn't appear until years later, by which time flicker had been used in a number of other games.

[JacobZu7zu7]

Atari 2600 flickers, hmm never payed attention. Didn't bother me.

My concentration always was on the task at hand.

Except with my NES's object overdose,

when too much was happening...

the game would get stuck in slow motion.

That was bad ... I hated that.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

There's something about the flicker in that game that seems "different" than most other games; it's faster or something.

The speed is the same as in many other games (at 30Hz), but the flicker is 100% constant. Probably that's the reason why we didn't notice.

[Room 34]

Flicker was first used in 1977. Adventure didn't appear until years later, by which time flicker had been used in a number of other games.

Which game(s) used flicker in 1977? From memory I can't think of any cases of it in any of the launch titles. The earliest game that immediately comes to my mind with flicker in it was Superman. (Was that in '78 or '79?)

[supercat]

Which game(s) used flicker in 1977?

 

Star Ship used flicker to multiplex the stars onto the Ball.

[Room 34]

Which game(s) used flicker in 1977?

 

Star Ship used flicker to multiplex the stars onto the Ball.

Ah, right. The game I try to forget.

[pocketmego]

I did sometimes. Frogger didn't bother me because it was such a great conversion. Defender didn't bother me flicker-wise, but the ship disappearing always bugged me. Then there's PacMan. Sheesh. It's like they *wanted* the ghosts to flicker.

 

When I was a kid, I always assumed the Ghosts in Pac-Man flickered on purpose, because they were GHOSTS. It never occured to me that Atari wasn't just taking Artistic License. I mean look at that game, the whole thing is Artistic License.

 

Flicker didn't bother me as a kid, and it doesn't bother me now. Gyruss would NOT bepossible without flicker and the VCS was hardly the only machine that had flicker issues. Both the Commdore 64 and NES had flciker issues when certain parts of their games were using more than average memory. So, flicker is just something games did for YEARS until the issue was resolved in later memory heavy machines, such as the 16 bit consoles.

 

-Ray

[supercat]

Ah, right. The game I try to forget.

 

I think Homerun is the first game that uses flicker on players. When reading Chronogamer's blog, I used to think it was the first one to use flicker, period, until I remembered the stars in Star Ship (also by Bob Whitehead).

[supercat]

Ah, right. The game I try to forget.

 

I think Homerun is the first game that uses flicker on players. When reading Chronogamer's blog, I used to think it was the first one to use flicker, period, until I remembered the stars in Star Ship (also by Bob Whitehead).

 

Incidentally, the AA database lists a different programmer for Tank Plus than for Combat. Aren't they the same game?

[dwh]

[quote name='Feralstorm' date='Fri Aug 18, 2006 3:47 AM' post='1122806'

 

back on track, flicker never really bothered me unless it's unusually bad, like lots of things on-screen at once in Adventure or Wizard of Wor - bad.

 

The flicker on Wizard of Wor just made the game end sooner for me.By the time you get to level 8 or so, everything is moving so fast...and due to flicker you can't see them,that's just cheating!

I forgot about the whole moon flickering on lunar lander/star ship,"Oh the humanity!"

[Thomas Jentzsch]

until the issue was resolved in later memory heavy machines, such as the 16 bit consoles.

And instead we got slowdowns.

[pocketmego]

until the issue was resolved in later memory heavy machines, such as the 16 bit consoles.

And instead we got slowdowns.

 

Well fair's fair...

 

As one poster pointed out with the NES you got the fun of flicker AND slowdowns.

 

-Ray

[Lord Thag]

Never even realized that flicker was an issue until i started hanging around here. I was always (and still am) more concerned with gamplay.

[The_Laird]

until the issue was resolved in later memory heavy machines, such as the 16 bit consoles.

And instead we got slowdowns.

 

Well fair's fair...

 

As one poster pointed out with the NES you got the fun of flicker AND slowdowns.

 

-Ray

 

Yup, I always thought it was FAR worse on the NES. It could be pretty bad on the Master System too - Double Dragon for example.

[supercat]

Never even realized that flicker was an issue until i started hanging around here. I was always (and still am) more concerned with gamplay.

 

Sometimes flicker can affect gameplay. And sometimes even flicker which doesn't directly affect gameplay can be sufficiently headache-inducing that a game isn't much fun.

 

Still, I think programmers have sometimes gone too far in their efforts to avoid flicker. Using missiles as alternatives to players is fine, though it helps if they're well-disguised (compare Lock & Chase and Dark Cavern with Burgertime). Using vertical separation of enemies that are "naturally" unable to cross each other's path vertically is fine. Likewise using moderate forced vertical separation to limit the number of enemies crossing paths. Unfortunately, many games don't allow objects to cross each other vertically at all; better to have 30Hz flicker than that sort of restriction (even if the game simply had two sets of sprites, and the sprites in each set couldn't cross each other, that'd be far better than just having one).

[pocketmego]

until the issue was resolved in later memory heavy machines, such as the 16 bit consoles.

And instead we got slowdowns.

 

Well fair's fair...

 

As one poster pointed out with the NES you got the fun of flicker AND slowdowns.

 

-Ray

 

Yup, I always thought it was FAR worse on the NES. It could be pretty bad on the Master System too - Double Dragon for example.

 

 

Got that right. Flicker is so bad on SMS Double Dragon as to make the two player mode...UNPLAYABLE.

 

I am convinced this is why the 2 player co-op moder was left out of the NES version.

 

-Ray

[Zonie]

Flicker didn't bother me on the 2600. It did bother me on the Colecovision. Seemed that such an "advanced" console shouldn't have the problem. Never noticed it on my C64 though.

[pocketmego]

Flicker didn't bother me on the 2600. It did bother me on the Colecovision. Seemed that such an "advanced" console shouldn't have the problem. Never noticed it on my C64 though.

 

Run through a game of C64 Gyruss and it is pretty evident. It also appears from time to time on Jeff Minter's more psychadelic games, but there is so much going on in those things it isn't always evident that its flicker.

 

-Ray

[Student Driver]

I noticed flicker on 2600 games (and considered "using" flicker as part of the strategy to play games like Adventure and Defender), but didn't really become bothered by it until I picked up Tax Avoiders. I actually kinda liked the game when I got it, and found it frustrating to have to stand in the position of an "investment" until the system bothered to flicker the sprite so I could pick it up.

 

By that time, I was used to the use of sprites (and/or player/missile graphics, and/or MOBs, depending on the favored nomenclature of a system and its programmers), and understood what was going on and why, but such bad flickering struck me as sloppy.

[ZylonBane]

Both the Commdore 64 and NES had flciker issues when certain parts of their games were using more than average memory.

Flicker has absolutely nothing to do with available memory.