>As I'm sure you know by now this is possible and used by many games.
Yes, once you know something can be done, its quite easy to do it. Thanks
for the timings, and to others who helped out.
I am curious, though, if anyone can cite 4 colour playfields in other games.
Truth be known, the ONLY Atari 2600 game I ever saw in the flesh was Pacman.
To date I've not seen a 4 colour playfield in use, though I am sure that,
given this machine is 20 years old now, others have trodden this path long
before me. It has been fun viewing other games on the emulators - but this
brings me to the next comment...
>P.S. You're 4 color playfield doesn't look very good using
> Stella (the emulator) running under X windows. Since
> changing the colors of the playfield every frame makes
> the emulator redraw most of the window every frame. I'd
> suggest limiting the 4 colors to a small part of the
> screen if you want it playable on the emulators.
I'm nonplussed!! It would please me NO END to have something that could
only be used on the original hardware. I am trying something unusual (well,
tell me ... is it, or not?) with the 4 colour playfield, and if it looks OK
on an Atari 2600 proper, running on a standard TV... then I think I should
go with it and say... bugger the emulators!!
What do you guys and gals think... if the emulators can't cope with this,
then that is the emulators' problem, right? Its all to do with a few
things.... the persistance of phosphour on a TV vs. a monitor, the screen
not being synched to the frame rate of the display device on the emulator
(go on, set your emulator frame rate to the same as your monitor and see the
improvement!), and the large intensity variations between colours used on
interleaved frames. I plan to use similar intensities, which will reduce
that markedly. If the emulator can't behave like a true blue 2600, then the
emulator needs to be improved :)
Remember, my final goal is to produce some actual cartridges - so I'd like
to drum up interest in that side of things - if you need actual hardware to
play, you need a cartridge too :) Actually, I've been thinking about cart
release, and plan to release a fully documented development history as part
of the cart's documentation. Along with commented source code - explaining,
perhaps, some of my efforts to keep the code well documented as I go. Ahhh,
but lets get it written first :)
Right now, I'm really in R&D, figuring if the 4 colour playfield idea is
worth persisting with. Right now I think *yes*, and will post a final demo
to the list in a few days, asking for everyone's verdict. Those testing it
on an emulator and complaining about flicker will be ignored :)
Cheers
A
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