Re: [stella] Real or not? Why?

Subject: Re: [stella] Real or not? Why?
From: Glenn Saunders <krishna@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 09:48:24 -0800 (PST)
On Wed, 18 Mar 1998, Piero Cavina wrote:
> Why not? That display looks very doable with a 30Hz flicker to me. If it's

With flicker, yes, as long as the gradients in the meter fall within the
2600's 128 color palette (they almost look like straight cut and pastes
from a Jaguar battlesphere screenshot).  The 2 characters at the top look
like they are at 320 resolution, not 160. 

The entire game, however, would likely require as much programming
development as the Jaguar version required (3 years+).  The illusion
really starts to break down when you think about the feasibility of the
entire game.  BS was designed primarily for multiplayer.  This isn't
likely on a VCS version.  Without it, enemy AI has to be good, which is
tough on a machine with very little CPU time leftover for calculations. 
BS uses polygonal ships and DOES have capital ships. I doubt the VCS
version could handle it, rather going for a Star Raiders approach. 

Given the difficulty programmers had in porting Star Raiders over, even
with more memory to work with I suspect there isn't enough "think" to
multitask the display kernal and keep track of the XYZ coordinates of all
the enemies in the sector and the status of all the sectors (in alone vs. 
the empire).  You'd have to get really sneaky like to flash the screen
during explosions or screen changes back and forth to the galactic map and
use the empty kernel for think.


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