I want to talk about my title screen next!

I had a code sample that draws a large object using the 6 character kernel.  I did some brainstorming on how I could use this in my title screen.  I came up with having large detailed (and animated!) versions of the ships menacing each other.

Here's the concept drawing vs the end result.

I developed the title screen as a standalone "tech demo" using a full 4KB!  Half the title screen bank is the graphics!  Most of the rest of the bank is code to draw the large objects in the correct positions, orientations, and frame of animation.  I have a separate subroutine to draw every frame of every ship in every frame of animation and orientation.  That's 16 nearly identical subroutines right there!  Not very elegant, but it worked.

I also have fade in and fade out thanks to the large and well organized palette of the 2600.

The floaty motion of the ships is pretty cool.  I created a table mapping the entire sin range to 256 values in C#.  That's a lot of bytes!  Turns out I didn't need such a high resolution of sin values.  I could get away with a range of only 64.  Less than that and the floaty pattern of the ships got jerky and weird.

Here's the artwork the title screen is based on.  Would you hang these on your wall?

And the end results.

Here's all the work in progress steps of the title screen artwork.

Finally here's the end result.  I used fixed point values as input to the "sin function".  This allowed me to have the ships bob up and down at different rates that are determined at random when a new pair of ships are displayed.

There might be an Easter egg on the title screen.    

The title screens features fade in and fade out.  This was possible and actually fairly easy due to the 2600 color palette.

I kinda did a cheesy version of color fade in.  All I did was clamp the luminosity or brightness of each color to a "max brightness" each frame.  The max brightness becomes larger over a few frames up to full brightness ($15) during fade in and likewise max brightness drops to zero over a few frames during fade out.

I chose not to do this between rounds... I wonder if that would have been annoying or an enhancement?  Oh well its fine the way it is.

I made some perler bead designs from my title screen graphics.  I haven't gotten around to making any of these yet.  Hopefully around Christmas.

Here's some perler art I made long ago.