At 03:08 PM 12/30/2000 +0100, you wrote:
The sound editor allows you to edit a two voice song with about
two octaves. You can select between piano mode and organ mode.
I wonder how it dealt with the atonal qualities of 2600 sound... Could it
have possibly done something similar to Pitfall II?
The text mode is pretty much the same as in Stellar Track. This
is basically a variation on the venetian blinds effect used in
Video Chess. Only this time the start position for the character
shifting gets alternated on each frame. This way you display
the even lines of a character in one frame and the odd lines
in the next, which gets you a more 'solid' look than in Video
Chess.
Carol Shaw refers to this as the "closed venitian blind" effect, as it is
done in Polo.
The CompuMate had 4 4K ROM banks and 2K of RAM. Of the RAM
about 256 bytes get used for the text display etc., so you
only have 1.75K for your programs, graphics or songs.
That's comparable to Bally Basic which allows 1800 bytes (even though the
Astrocade has 4K RAM total). It's unfortunate that Compumate Basic won't
let you do any gfx. If it were possible to do Peeks and Pokes and USR
calls and have inline machine language it would have been able to do some
cool stuff (Combat like games, but with the advantage of more read/write
memory), but then the inner workings of the 2600 were hardly common
knowledge to the hobbyist at the time, and had Spectravideo tried to
publish what it knew, Atari would have been on their case.
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