Flicker help

[jcfox]

I have a question concerning flicker. I am attempting to increase the amount of cycles for calculation I have by painting the player sprite and the playfield at regular intervals. The code that does this looks like this: (I'm currently drawing the playfield for 2 frames, then the sprite for 2 frames).

 

lda $f4 ; load flip location ($f4 is inc'd at the end of every frame)

and #2 ; is it every 2nd frame?

beq PictureSprite

 

PicturePlayField

 

 

 

The code to draw the Sprite and playfield are pretty basic, the concepts coming mostly from Andrew Davie's tutorial. I can post more if its needed, but my basic question is this:

 

Is it possible to do this without flicker? (for example, does the 2600 allow double buffering somehow)?

 

Thanks,

 

Jason Fox

Edited April 5, 2008 by jcfox

[jcfox]

Well, I did a little more digging through the forums and found that if I set use phosphor to true in stella and set it to every other frame, it looks great. Does any one know if this is how it would look on a real machine? Or, by doing this, am I in 'emulator only' territory?

[supercat]

Well, I did a little more digging through the forums and found that if I set use phosphor to true in stella and set it to every other frame, it looks great. Does any one know if this is how it would look on a real machine? Or, by doing this, am I in 'emulator only' territory?

 

The only way to really find out is to try it on real hardware. On some games, 30Hz flicker is barely noticeable. On other games, it's a major eyesore.

 

A few general observations: -1- Large areas that flicker in unison are generally bad. Sometimes very bad, even at 30Hz. -2- Small flickering objects against a black background are not so bad as against a colored background. Dark objects flickering against a light background are generally the worst. -3- In some rare cases, it may be possible to flicker alternate scan lines (showing 'even' scan lines one frame; 'odd' scan lines the next. When that's practical (mainly in things like text kernels), it will often help a lot. -4- Sometimes it's necessary to flicker objects between two colors. This is generally not too noticeable, even with large objects, if both colors have similar luminance.

[jcfox]

thanks for the advice