Re: [stella] Stella Programmer's Guide Overhaul Project

Subject: Re: [stella] Stella Programmer's Guide Overhaul Project
From: Piero Cavina <p.cavina@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 09:03:29 +0200
At 18.57 18/05/00 -0700, you wrote:

>Most games run sprites along horizontal rails so that they can get two 
>groups of sprites, 1, two, or 3 copies a piece, and slide them back and 
>forth.  Megamania and Oystron are good examples of that.  Other games like 
>Journey Escape do regular sprite clones and then scroll those down.

Most Activision games follow these concepts, and don't have flicker at all
(peraphs Commando is the only one with a little flicker.. anyone can
confirm this?).. one side-effect is that many Activision games look the
same :-)
Spider Fighter is very interesting, because it makes you think that the
sprites have an higher freedom of movement. Obviously there's a trick here
too, but it's done very well.

I think that this explains a part of the succes of Activision games over
Atari when they first came out; Atari programmers used a lot of flicker
without too much shame at the time, while the beauty of Activision graphics
was easily recognizable.

BTW, I think that a list of games with descriptions of the different kinds
of "classic" kernels would be a great chapter for a book/faq project.



Ciao,
 P.


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