In article <Pine.BSI.3.96.970911221040.19739B-100000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, you wrote:
>The 2600 would require far more the 256
>bytes to be able to control the entire display with is as much detail as
>it can without it.
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
I've been toying with the idea of using the ram in the supercharger as
video memory.
Basically the screen will be entirely set up between frames and then
the screen drawing routine will just read from memory what it's supposed
to draw. No calculations, no nothing. Whats in memory is what gets drawn
It would give everyone a no nonsense video kernal that would control
the sprites, missels, ball, and playfield.
The advantage is it would make it easier for people who are not used
to programming a video display on the fly scanline by scanline. The
disadvantage is you'd be stuck using the supercharger only for your games.
But I bet it would give us a huge boost in new games and would encourage more
people to buy supercharger.
Let's see... 192 scan lines. x2 sprites, x2 missels, x 1 ball, x 3 playfield
registers (x6 if we've got the cycles to do independed left and right
plafields). x2 for sprite colour, x 1 for playfield colour, x 1 for
background colour. What have we got?
That's what? 2304 bytes for video? Actually... there would be other things
too. Like sprite size, and then we'd have to work out some sort of horizontal
positioning thing with ram too. Hmmmm.... looks like it wouldn't really
work... bummer.
Well I'll see if I can't refine this idea some. It would be nice to
work out a way to keep the video memory to 2K or less, so that the
game logic can be 4K. Maybe setting up the playfield in 4 or 8
scanline blocks like I did in my playfield demo would do the trick.
Going with double scanline video would cut things in half too, but then
we lose out on vertical resolution. Oh well, just one of the pet projects
I churn over in my head whenever I get a spare second.
CRACKERS
(Trying to make things easier from hell!!!)
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