If a C64 can do it...
Forgive me if this isn't the right section.
We've seen coders surprising us over and over again with excellent demos and things that a few years ago would've been said to be 'impossible' on a Spectrum. And I'm not talking about stuff done with the advantages of the new interfaces, mlt techiques, etc. I'm talking about things that can be done on a real Spectrum without any extra hardware. We've been surprised before and it will happen again (gasman comes to my mind).
Now, just out of curiosity, do you guys think that everything that has been done on a C64 could be done on a Spectrum?
No, I won't start that debate again.
But just for the sake of analysis and comparison, I would like to know if all of the effects that we see on C64 demos could be recreated on a Speccy.
If a C64 can do it, why shouldn't the Speccy do it too?
Some C64 demos:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=UyvLSuChvNc
http://youtube.com/watch?v=va108nOAn6g
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7-evtzhLDYM
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zM8R60m6ISc
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MmQQwkKVSik
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5_d0ojvDwLQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZHWlzOBSmh0
And if all of these effects and sprite animations have been made on a spectrum already, and I missed it, I'm sorry.
But my main question's still valid.
We've seen coders surprising us over and over again with excellent demos and things that a few years ago would've been said to be 'impossible' on a Spectrum. And I'm not talking about stuff done with the advantages of the new interfaces, mlt techiques, etc. I'm talking about things that can be done on a real Spectrum without any extra hardware. We've been surprised before and it will happen again (gasman comes to my mind).
Now, just out of curiosity, do you guys think that everything that has been done on a C64 could be done on a Spectrum?
No, I won't start that debate again.
But just for the sake of analysis and comparison, I would like to know if all of the effects that we see on C64 demos could be recreated on a Speccy.
If a C64 can do it, why shouldn't the Speccy do it too?
Some C64 demos:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=UyvLSuChvNc
http://youtube.com/watch?v=va108nOAn6g
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7-evtzhLDYM
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zM8R60m6ISc
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MmQQwkKVSik
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5_d0ojvDwLQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZHWlzOBSmh0
And if all of these effects and sprite animations have been made on a spectrum already, and I missed it, I'm sorry.
But my main question's still valid.
Post edited by zxbruno on
Comments
In a Speccy, everything is cooked by the Z80. C64s play with advantage on this.
Haiku
Koopaville
7th reality
kcolor
etc....
Probably the best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDk3S8oCWZA
edit:
@DonkeyPong: I'm zxspectrum128 on youtube ;)
You could animate the background and the sprites would still appear over the top.
The C64 also lets you use a definable character set that is drawn by hardware. The Speccy has to draw with software.
If you want to know how powerful printable character sets can be look at the XeO3 project on the Plus/4.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-DtKhk6qFw
The Atari achieved a lot of it's animation the same way.
Does the C64 have planar graphics like the old OCS/ECS/AGA graphics of the Amiga?
The c64's video hardware is probably the best of the 8-bits. There are many undocumented "bugs" that can be exploited to do weird stuff. So although the c64 is a slow machine its hardware makes up for it.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
Ahhh then can I say that I love what you've done with the place. :smile:
Sprites are limited in width but by using multiple sprites side by side you can animate very large objects.
I'm not a C64 expert so I don't know about number of colors but after looking at some games I would say they are multi color. However, reusing sprites and combining them may fool a person.
Atari player missile graphics were early single colored sprites and are the height of the screen. Left and right movement was fast but up and down required moving the sprite data up and down in the player missile memory.
It's still faster than all software because it masks the object in hardware.
I thought they had a mode that was more speccy like but just different enough to avoid the patent. I didn't think they had planar graphics.
MSX2 had pretty decent hardware. A shame they didn't use the faster 64180/Z180.
The Tandy Color Computer 3 had really good bit mapped graphics, 80 column text and thanks to the 6809 were even able to do a DOOMish type FPS.
The Apple IIgs had some of the best bit mapped graphics, 4096 colors, a 3Mhz 65816 (commonly upgraded to much faster), lots of RAM and the best audio hardware of any 8 bit. It also had a GUI built into ROM.
The C64 had a lot for the money and was cheap. A great sound chip, decent graphics and sprites (a major buzz word at the time).
I think there was a trade off between colors and resolution that you see in a lot of games that other machines didn't suffer. It also had a relatively slow CPU for a game oriented system.
The basic rules are:
8 Sprites in total.
Sprites are 24x21 pixels in size.
1 Colour per hi-res sprite (24 pixels wide.)
3 Colours (2 shared between all sprites) per lo-res sprite (12 "blocky" pixels wide.)
Sprites can be overlaid to get over the colour limitations, but this leaves less to play with so isn't used that much. Also, you can reuse sprites elsewhere on the screen once they've been drawn which can be done quite cheaply; the limit of eight is effectively per scanline.
My only hope is that we'll continue to see new effects and new tricks on the speccy.
If you haven`t seen it then it should blow you away, and IMHO would equal any of those C64 demo`s for looking `how T-F did they do that` :)
have a gander at :-
http://www.zxdemo.org/ if you haven`t already :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM6ZviAQ9_8
http://zxdemo.org/item.php?id=6851
Pretty sure your spot on. well done :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM6ZviAQ9_8
I`d forgot it was Tube`d !
This ones pretty nice too, especially halfway through when the big colour stuff starts :-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLEm4uuiljs
Funny how you get different styles on diff machines...
edit... this ones rather nice too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-pUklXe8aU
Well... to be honest, I'm not Mr. Demo so I really don't have much to compare it with. The fixed nature pics look awesome... amazing what a little black can do to eliminate color clash / blockyness.
As for the animation... I couldn't make up my mind as to how they were doing the 3D. Either they precalculate a lot of 3D points and just draw lines or they have some really snappy math routines. The frame rate makes me think the latter.
The frame rate / graphics are no Wolfenstein 3D but without color addressable at the pixel level that's about the best you could expect.
Pretty cool really.
This one looks like a combo of 3D lines and some fixed sprites. The last part was pretty cool btw. There was some color clash but the animation is so fast you don't notice unless you look real close.
I think a wolf3D for the Speccy would be but possible but it would need a little more CPU power to really do it.
Since Wolf 3D was available for the Super Nintendo and Apple IIgs (~3Mhz 65816) I'm guessing a Z180 would be *close* to fast enough since it's about 20%-25% faster than the Z80 running the same code once in native mode. It also adds some faster instructions and DMA than may make some things even faster.
The 65816 Wolf3D code actually used a 1 byte floating point number if I remember right. Weird but that's how they made it fast enough.
BTW, the IIgs and CoCo3 bitmapped graphics are about the same, the palette is just larger on the IIgs.
It's funny, the 6800 came first, the 6502 copied and slightly improved on it, the 6809 seemed to borrow from the 6502 (even though they claim it was from the 6800) and finally the 65816 borrows from the 6809... they just needed to borrow a little more. :D
Check the IIgs demos on the emulator here (click emulator):
http://www.freetoolsassociation.com/
I wasn't sneering, I was pointing out that some of those demo effects wouldn't have been helped by hardware sprites thats all.
In practise a lot of C64 games looked terrible, and and SID chip music is way overrated.
At least Spectrum music and sound could never be overrated :razz:
Personally I prefered the high res monochrome that was utilised in many of the isometric games. You could see what was going on for one thing and everything was detailed instead of the C64 version that looked like you were pissed at the fun fair.
One reason cited somewhere - might have been on here - was that it was actually a lot harder to write decent fast running games on the Speccy than it was with the C64 with its hardware assisted sprites and scrolling. That raised the entry level bar which precluded a lot of the lesser talented folk from actually getting anywhere on the speccy. What was left was of a generally higher quality just because doing "simple" things was actually harder.
I agree. Doing your own masking routines is a fiddle, it is a bit easier on the Sam as you can call rom routines ( which I don't know if they are just machine code or call something in the ASIC ) to scroll the display or any part of it but of course it came on the market too late to capture either the quantity of lesser talented folk needed to produce games in quantity that used it.
Mind you this is quite a good example of the walking through treacle effect you get on the Sam when using Basic and the Rom routines for sprites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUf6ely7OEo
Compared with this in machine code ( I think )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI0LeP_MPuw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYZbHdLrhGw
Not as bad as you might think.
On the other hand when you look at these demos the 3d work on the spectrum is impressive. I'm not totally sure if some of the demos haven't been speeded up in an emulator though, I'm suspicous of one C64 demo either not being real 3d ( pre-rendered frames? ) or being speeded up as it makes the same effect under an A500/A1200 look sluggish. When I see something 3d impressive on youtube credited to the C64 I always say to myself "Carrier Command" and start to think how it could be done in a different way.
It's all just code in the ROM.
The problem with ROM routines are that they are slow - they do a fair bit of memory paging and have to be versatile to handle any sized sprites, or scroll any size area of screen. Although, they are useful for beginners to get things up and running!
Writing your own routines in machine code to do exactly what you need is always the best route for speed!
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The first one there - Tomato Antics - is still BASIC!
The second - T'n'T - is GamesMaster, a very straightforward games maker package by the same chap who wrote the Sam's ROM, and uses a simplified scripting style language. Still not true machine machine as it does interpret modules of instructions, and although i've never checked will probably still use ROM routines for graphic displays. (incidentally, T'n'T is going to be one of the games on the coverdisk with the next issue of Sam Revival!)
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Website: www.samcoupe.com
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Hey, hey, hey, oy.... that`s mine ! lol It might seem slow but what you can`t see is that the whole area your seeing from just below the clouds to bottom of screen is being placed with the B.A.S.I.C `Put` command, and it`s slower because there are three such commands to fill the screen, and that`s nearly a 20K area each and every time before the characters/software sprites are placed. so it`s not really that slow, plus it`s early code :D Oh, and hey, hey hey, Oy :) Treacle, tut, lol
Na, as Colin said, still uncompiled SAM Basic, and it looks soo much smoother in SimCoupe than on this video, getting VERY nearly close to getting this to run at 40 - 50 fps. spent a LOT of time on this simple game last summer taking tips from Dunny`s Basic Tips thread.... has a little profiler at end of code, plus did what MC coder`s here always talk about, and unrolled all the time intensive code, and using scripting for bea, weather etc etc, it does seem that SAM Basic is pretty fast if you choose what type of game to write and employ some tricks...
anyway.... :)
P.S. those spectrum demo effects have not been speeded up, that`s what a speccy can do ! given talented machine code programmers.
Well back in the day everything I wrote with Sam Basic was slower than what you have done, so it wasn't meant as a criticism. I read the comment on the video that said it was just a demo test of the animation and layout so I thought I was safe to call it "treacle" without offending. :smile:
Sorry if you got annoyed. It is a promising demo, and I'd like to see it make a game.
I was really referring to one of the C64 demos which is suspiciously fast.
Ahh, the C64 ones, I`ll have to rewatch them, but I doubt they`ve been speeded up. I know what you mean though about some of the framerates looking dodgy compared to some old Amiga stuff... so probably is a lot of prerendered stuff, or precalculated routines going on...
bout the game, I never get annoyed, I was just messing around :D it is actually a good example of treacle, as 3 - 4 fps is laughable in any other context than 8-bit Basic :) and yeah, I used to do a lot of games in SAM Basic `back in the day` and they were also a lot slower than what I can do now ;) good luck with the MC learning by the way, you got bigger balls than me !
I'm doing the MC as a series of macros, so in theory it should be reusable by anyone who understands high level languages.... ....and I'm going to provide call hooks from Sam C just for completeness sake so if you know C....
The include files system confused the hell out of me too when I started out. It's a bit messy all right but after the first couple of hours of swearing and ranting at it, you'll get the hang of it to *never* forget it! A bit like cycling I suppose.
You really should try C#. I've been playing around with it and I'm beginning to like the simplistic and compact language structure. It does spoil you a bit though. :)
Oh, btw, there is a free MS Visual studio Express C# available for download from the MS website. It's an awesome IDE with great tools. Check it out!
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