This sits with my recollection of discussions with Paul.
>From memory, he indicated he positioned two balls (left, right edge) on each
line, through table-lookup - and I recall he had blocky background setting
the rest. I recall there being an inner circle, too... The ball only needed
to even-out the steps between the large PF block steps. Sounds pretty
simple. I really should dig up his email(s) for the lists' interest.
I have a recollection that he told me he calculated the table-offsets for
the circle positioning by hand. I've half a hankering to dabble in creating
"The Core Redux" using exactly the same idea :)) boy I wish i had the time!
Cheers
A
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-stella@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-stella@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Glenn Saunders
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2000 10:51 AM
To: stella@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [stella] What happened to "The Core"?
At 02:45 PM 5/3/00 -0700, Pete Holland wrote:
>2600 (comparatively little, but still a starting
>point), those concentric circles look a little too
>neat to be drawn with playfield graphics. Couple that
The concentric circles would need to have been playfield "filled in" with
the ball. However, you'd need two balls, one for the left and one for the
right side. If you used a missile it would have to be the same color as
one of the paddles for the scanlines in which the paddles are visible.
There are other games out there that draw circles like this. I think the
video test pattern program is one. There is at least one game that draws a
smooth circle for its title screen.
There is also a color change on the playfield graphics at certain points on
the same scanline. This isn't a common effect on the 2600, but it's been
done. Because the playfield is a static reflective one, it should be
doable.
Also, aesthetically speaking, the screenshots look genuine. You can fake
things like this with an Atari 8-bit paint program and then taking a
screengrab of that, but other than that, it does look for real.
Is it just me or does this game look unbalanced, gameplaywise?
You've got to imagine that it's a lot easier for the ball to hit the outer
edge vs. the center. Perhaps trajectories were constrained in such a way
that the ball can't bounce off the outer paddle without heading back to the
center. I don't know. It looks like a cool game, but I think the center
player has the real advantage.
Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment
Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698
Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc
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