Re: [stella] Supercharger RAM - why the reluctance??

Subject: Re: [stella] Supercharger RAM - why the reluctance??
From: Glenn Saunders <krishna@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 08:32:25 -0700 (PDT)

On Wed, 18 Jun 1997 crackers@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> Eh!? How does "Life" cry out for a dynamic bitmap? This was a game
> that was done with reversed spaces for graphics. It seems to me that

If you want to purposefully opt for a lower resolution, be my guest.
Whatever floats your boat.

I'm sure it's been DONE in low res, but I'm sure it would be BETTER when
you can see different patterns develop on a higher res display. 

I just couldn't let the thread go by without reminding everyone that there
are two viable alternatives to standard playfield graphics WAITING to be
exploited by clever programmers.

If you aren't going to use the sprites, you may as well press them into
playfield duty.

Games like Stargate, for instance, did the wise thing and just wrote off
the playfield graphics and drew just about everything with sprites. 

> Using the playfield graphics at 4 scanlines each block will give you a nice
> 40x40 display which will be 1600 bits to keep track of. Sounds like a job
> for the supercharger to me.

200 bytes is hardly taking full advantage of SC RAM, although it's small
enough if you wanted to go with a RAM-PLUS cart configuration.
 
Someone may want to disassemble Surround and figure out how it was done
first.

> As for releasing games on Supercharger CD... man, those burners are really
> starting to come down in price! Might soon be able to home spin them
> as easily as cassettes.

It's such a waste, though, to burn a single game on a CD-R.
Media is $7 a disc.



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