Re: [stella] Hardware comparisons

Subject: Re: [stella] Hardware comparisons
From: Glenn Saunders <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 17:34:58 -0700
At 06:39 PM 4/20/00 -0400, you wrote:
But the ability to have those colours freely usable on the same
horizontal line more often than not made up for the smaller
palette.

Most of the time Apple II or C=64 games tried to get artistic in the graphics they resorted to ugly dithering, otherwise, like I said, everything looks posterized and unrealistic. Everything is painted in the wrong color just so that it will stand out against the other colors. Whereas the Atari graphics tended to have fewer colors, but more appropriate colors to the scene.


The C=64 also allowed all sorts of split-screen modes - you'd just
change (through the use of interrupt routines) from text/multi-colour
/extended "text" mode (really, 8x8 tiles) to the hires and multi-colour
hires modes.

The thing is, all the modes on the C=64 really look the same for the most part because of the lack of color choice.


This is totally possible and common on the C64 - 8 pixels are drawn for
every 1 processor clock - on an NTSC machine there are always 65 cycles
per scanline, on PAL, 63.  262 scanlines per NTSC frame, 312 per PAL
frame.

But it doesn't gain you as much as on the Atari because it's being able to change the palette that is what allows you to have dozens of colors per screen, whereas there really isn't a pelette per se on the C=64. 16 colors is all you get, period.



Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698 Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc


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