Been at Brighton Modelworld all weekend trying to stop little LEGO people being maimed and decapitated by an errant roller-coaster.
In other news I will let slip that my 48K Speccy is currently doing 24-wide multi-colour with 8x2 attributes. I can redraw the screen in 2 frames (for scrolling it) but thinking of taking the slower step of 3 frames for a game to get some sprites in. It also uses a looped colour routine rather than unrolled, to save memory for level data, though it takes up an extra 16 scan-lines of time out of the top border to prepare for looping. That means it's occupying 66% of the run-time rather than the 56% on Buzzsaw+.
Working title of 'The Indescribable Adventures of Bertrand Bubblethwaite'. The trick now is to design multicolour sprites I can move in less than whole characters. Thing is, I see a lot of games with 1-pixel movement at 50fps or 2-pixel movement at 25fps, which seems about right for a platform game. Manic Miner is slower at around 12.5 fps with 2-pixel movement, so mine would be somewhere in-between. Unless I went for 4-pixel movement, in which case it would be quicker than most. I think I'll go for 2-pixel movement at 16.66fps for the moment, since the playing area is only 24 characters wide.
You could perhaps do a few bytes more in an unrolled routine. You are chasing the raster around and getting hit by contention over the two lines you're making the change on, so they all seem to change at the same time. You can't simply use the uncontended time of two border segments. It does leave you a big chunk of idle time with nothing much to do but wait between pairs of lines.
Happy belated birthday..! Glad you had a good 'un..
(lol, this is the first birthday thread that I've seen turn into a speccy graphics discussion - surprised it hasn't happened before! :-P)
Indeed! First birthday thread to discuss contention and raster timings too I'll wager!
I'm interested to see what kind of sprites result from this (for pixel rather than char movement). I had a brief play with them in ZXOdus, I found it hard to balance making them look multicolour enough with not being to stripey.
Comments
Looking forward for more of your production...
Patrik
My games for the Spectrum: Dingo, The Speccies, The Speccies 2, Vallation, SQIJ.
Twitter: Sokurah
Drink Beer!
Have a Gudden!
Been at Brighton Modelworld all weekend trying to stop little LEGO people being maimed and decapitated by an errant roller-coaster.
In other news I will let slip that my 48K Speccy is currently doing 24-wide multi-colour with 8x2 attributes. I can redraw the screen in 2 frames (for scrolling it) but thinking of taking the slower step of 3 frames for a game to get some sprites in. It also uses a looped colour routine rather than unrolled, to save memory for level data, though it takes up an extra 16 scan-lines of time out of the top border to prepare for looping. That means it's occupying 66% of the run-time rather than the 56% on Buzzsaw+.
Working title of 'The Indescribable Adventures of Bertrand Bubblethwaite'. The trick now is to design multicolour sprites I can move in less than whole characters. Thing is, I see a lot of games with 1-pixel movement at 50fps or 2-pixel movement at 25fps, which seems about right for a platform game. Manic Miner is slower at around 12.5 fps with 2-pixel movement, so mine would be somewhere in-between. Unless I went for 4-pixel movement, in which case it would be quicker than most. I think I'll go for 2-pixel movement at 16.66fps for the moment, since the playing area is only 24 characters wide.
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
anyway... im really curious where your multicolor obsession will end ;)
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
(lol, this is the first birthday thread that I've seen turn into a speccy graphics discussion - surprised it hasn't happened before! :-P)
Indeed! First birthday thread to discuss contention and raster timings too I'll wager!
I'm interested to see what kind of sprites result from this (for pixel rather than char movement). I had a brief play with them in ZXOdus, I found it hard to balance making them look multicolour enough with not being to stripey.