At 11:12 AM 5/15/00 -0400, you wrote:
> Draft 1 (everyone please amend together!!)
Who's collecting and assembling (heheh) these? You, Glenn?
For now, I guess it's me. But I think a more technically minded person
would be better suited.
Don't give it a vertical resolution, because that makes people start
thinking its like the bitmaps of PC graphics displays. And minor peeve of
mine - never ever use "pixel" to mean anything other than a single
indivisible rectangle on screen.
These are the sorts of things that could be (and have been) better
demonstrated in diagrams.
each scanline as the frame is being drawn. The playfield is one color,
___________________
Should't we mention that the playfield as a discrete unit refers to both
the playfield and the background color registers? That's why I refer to it
as being a display with 1 bit of color, 1 bit meaning two independent color
registers. You in effect draw with the background color by revealing it by
not drawing over it with the playfield color.
but you can write new data to the playfield color register between or
during scanlines to generate more colors. The ark in Cosmic Ark is drawn
using playfield graphics and color changes like this.
An important thing to note.
Depends on the game. In my INV (which maybe I'll finish one day :) ), the
challenge was to get all that stuff happening during the display kernel,
when the invaders are being drawn - that's a lot of complex playfield
manipulation. The game actually uses well under 3k. Just because Piero
struggled to cram Oystron into 4k doesn't mean every game does.
Given that INV isn't done yet, there's no way of knowing how much more
memory the game might require to finish it off ;) I remember us talking
about 2-player combative modes and other stuff that would probably easily
take over 1K extra program space.
The NES, Coleco and Vectrex are also viable and have active developer
activity. Although assembling NES carts is quite a bit harder; I don't
think anybody's trying to program for anything but an emulator.
It's amazing that Carl can develop for the Lynx and Jaguar considering the
higher cart manufacturing costs.
Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment
Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698
Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc
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