On Tue, 17 Mar 1998, Greg Troutman wrote:
> In counting up the stuff it seems possible. No more than six distinct
> objects (allowing for sprite doubling) seem to appear on any scanline.
Not just objects but the width of the objects. Sprites have limited width
in spanning the screen unless you play with the width registers in which
case you lose resolution. The laser display is very wide in its widest
scanline.
And even then there are only what, 4 seprate colors you can generate per
scanline? P0, P1, PF, and background. I believe ball is set to the same
color register as the playfield. You may be able to get away with one
playfield color register change in the middle of the screen if you are
lucky but I doubt this is possible in as busy a kernel as this.
The problem I had with the DOOM image had to do with the pseudoplayfield
graphics which appeared to be generating at least 3 colors per scanline
which is not likely...
The offending scanline in this image is smack dab in the middle. I count
six sprites necessary to pull it off. Five if you count the two dots in
the middle (enemy photons I suppose) as being doubled missiles.
Plus, the meters require two sprites because they use two color registers.
The meters themselves would tie up all but the ball sprite to generate.
Then how does it generate the laser beam and the two enemy photons in the
center of the display? Flicker would be the only solution in which case
this image would have to be a composite of at least two frames, which it
doesn't appear to be.
> Though I can't pin down anything that couldn't be produced as a static
> image on the 2600,
Would anyone like to attempt to clone this static display to show that
it's possible? It would be a good challenge...
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