At 09:36 PM 9/28/98 -0500, you wrote:
>>That ugly black bar is an artifact built into the 2600's hardware. Look at
>>Berzerk and Missile Command for realy obvious examples of it. You can't do
>>anything except don't use the left 8 pixels of the screen.
>
>
>Do you have any idea how they cleared the problem in games like Combat?
Combat only does one HMOVE per sprite at the top of the screen. The
original Stella hardware designers did not anticipate the need to
reposition sprites more than once per TV frame. These lines only appear
when you reposition the same sprite during the visible scanlines, which was
a tactic first used before the 2600 was even released (but after the
hardware spec was finalized) in Air-Sea Battle. A popular feature, no
doubt, because it can give the 2600 the illusion of having many many times
the number of sprites that it actually has.
Most 2600 fans don't mind the lines. I know I don't. It's part of what
gives the TIA display its uniqueness.
There are ways to cover it up, but all of them involve either wasting a
sprite object (like the ball) and/or constricting your usable horizontal
resolution. I don't really see the need for doing that.
==========================================================================
== Glenn Saunders --3D Graphics / Videography / Web development-- ==
== krishna@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698 ==
== Stella@20 video page http://www.primenet.com/~krishna ==
== President - Lightwave Toaster Flyer group of LA ==
== http://home.pacbell.net/alchemy1/html/ltf.html ==
==========================================================================
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