Atari 8bit is superior to the ST

[atariksi]

Wow! That A8 version looks great, so does the 2nd ST pic but gotta say wow for good ol A8!

That picture cannot be displayed by an A8. It uses the A8 palette but completely ignores all the limitations on color usage and resolution on the A8.

none the less quite a lovely pallette and not exceeded till Amiga

 

It may be doable on real A8 at least close to it. He's just speculating because most C64 fans think A8 is limited to 160*200*5 whereas in REALITY it's 160*200*128/256.

[atariksi]

You need to look at worst case analysis so blinking power pills, escalators, bombs, etc. And as far as I see it, this is another one of those ANTIC 4 (five color) modes but this time w/DLI on every mode line. What overhead are you computing to mimic an A8 DLI every 8 scanlines?

 

I looked at all of the levels, and I'm pretty certain that there's always more than 50% 'blank' chars - and as I said in most levels the animating chars are a lot less. So 50% is a good number.

For DLI I'd just use a timerB IRQ on the ST - I've used it for colour graduations before, and the cost should be pretty similar to the A8 interupt as it's only going to change a single pallette entry.

 

What about custom screens? And regarding DLIs, I wanted to know what overhead you had computed since for ST, you have to subtract that from total cycles in the frame unlike Boulderdash which didn't require that DLI overhead. It doesn't matter if overhead is same as A8 since A8 repainting chars or sprites is a breeze compared to ST. A8 can repaint the screen even with a kernel running full-screen mimicing the Copper color re-use.

[Lazarus]

The ST palette looks nicer than A8 too.

You're wrong. That palette is only 128 colors (assuming all 128 are there) not 256.

And A8 can display 128 color images. It all depends on how the mapping works out. And resolution A8 supports is higher than that image which is only 150*200.

Only the 16 lumas GTIA mode has a 256 colors. All the other modes are restricted to a 128 color palette.

[oky2000]

Wow! That A8 version looks great, so does the 2nd ST pic but gotta say wow for good ol A8!

That picture cannot be displayed by an A8. It uses the A8 palette but completely ignores all the limitations on color usage and resolution on the A8.

none the less quite a lovely pallette and not exceeded till Amiga

 

It may be doable on real A8 at least close to it. He's just speculating because most C64 fans think A8 is limited to 160*200*5 whereas in REALITY it's 160*200*128/256.

 

This is pure bollox, show me one GAME from the 80s that uses more than a handfull of colours ANYWHERE on screen ie NOT rubbish limited DLI rasterbar effects on the A8...none then...thought not

 

Even the C64 has demos with complete overscan on horizontal/vertical borders using 16 colours but this isn't possible on a game.

 

The point is on an A8 no matter how good the programmer you will have blocky colour limited smooth scrolling games vs the STs border restricted highly colourful games with not so great scrolling IF the coder is useless and has no talent.

 

The only thing the ST shows up is talentless coders, the A8 just shows it's horribly restricted colour resolution making the excessive palette useless in games production (hence the C64 destroyed it)

[oky2000]

The ST palette looks nicer than A8 too.

You're wrong. That palette is only 128 colors (assuming all 128 are there) not 256.

And A8 can display 128 color images. It all depends on how the mapping works out. And resolution A8 supports is higher than that image which is only 150*200.

Only the 16 lumas GTIA mode has a 256 colors. All the other modes are restricted to a 128 color palette.

 

I'm sorry but the Photochrome pictures are immeasurably superior to any A8 modes with between 32-48/512 colours PER SCAN LINE in 320x200 mode. For static pics only a blinkered A8 fanboy would claim otherwise

[+DarkLord]

I'm sorry but the Photochrome pictures are immeasurably superior to any A8 modes with between 32-48/512 colours PER SCAN LINE in 320x200 mode. For static pics only a blinkered A8 fanboy would claim otherwise

 

I have to agree - I love my 800XL, but I've never seen a picture in any format,

from it, that could touch a Photochrome picture. Or even a well done Spectrum

512 picture.

 

Here is an example:

 

[Rybags]

In other news, seems a new version of SainT is available as of 27/12/09.

[oky2000]

I'm sorry but the Photochrome pictures are immeasurably superior to any A8 modes with between 32-48/512 colours PER SCAN LINE in 320x200 mode. For static pics only a blinkered A8 fanboy would claim otherwise

 

I have to agree - I love my 800XL, but I've never seen a picture in any format,

from it, that could touch a Photochrome picture. Or even a well done Spectrum

512 picture.

 

Here is an example:

 

 

Indeed, in some ways I find Photochrome cleaner than Amiga HAM images generally (a select few 320x512 Dynamic HAM images being the exception)

 

Hats off to the programmer

 

I'm trying to convert some pictures to Quantum Paint too for comparison in my spare time now I have a real copy of said package to use on my Mega.

[atariksi]

The ST palette looks nicer than A8 too.

You're wrong. That palette is only 128 colors (assuming all 128 are there) not 256.

And A8 can display 128 color images. It all depends on how the mapping works out. And resolution A8 supports is higher than that image which is only 150*200.

Only the 16 lumas GTIA mode has a 256 colors. All the other modes are restricted to a 128 color palette.

 

You're comparing ST palette with A8 palette but only using 128 colors for A8.

 

Secondly, GTIA modes can be mixed with CTIA modes.

[atariksi]

I'm sorry but the Photochrome pictures are immeasurably superior to any A8 modes with between 32-48/512 colours PER SCAN LINE in 320x200 mode. For static pics only a blinkered A8 fanboy would claim otherwise

 

I have to agree - I love my 800XL, but I've never seen a picture in any format,

from it, that could touch a Photochrome picture. Or even a well done Spectrum

512 picture.

 

Here is an example:

 

 

He misunderstood the argument. The argument is the picture of parrot using A8 palette -- whether this can be shown on real A8.

[atariksi]

The ST palette looks nicer than A8 too.

You're wrong. That palette is only 128 colors (assuming all 128 are there) not 256.

And A8 can display 128 color images. It all depends on how the mapping works out. And resolution A8 supports is higher than that image which is only 150*200.

Only the 16 lumas GTIA mode has a 256 colors. All the other modes are restricted to a 128 color palette.

 

I'm sorry but the Photochrome pictures are immeasurably superior to any A8 modes with between 32-48/512 colours PER SCAN LINE in 320x200 mode. For static pics only a blinkered A8 fanboy would claim otherwise

 

Go back a few messages and read the argument in its entirety before replying.

[atariksi]

Wow! That A8 version looks great, so does the 2nd ST pic but gotta say wow for good ol A8!

That picture cannot be displayed by an A8. It uses the A8 palette but completely ignores all the limitations on color usage and resolution on the A8.

none the less quite a lovely pallette and not exceeded till Amiga

 

It may be doable on real A8 at least close to it. He's just speculating because most C64 fans think A8 is limited to 160*200*5 whereas in REALITY it's 160*200*128/256.

 

This is pure bollox, show me one GAME from the 80s that uses more than a handfull of colours ANYWHERE on screen ie NOT rubbish limited DLI rasterbar effects on the A8...none then...thought not

...

First of all, the point is whether that parrot of the assumed 128 A8 colors can be shown on A8 and for that I can perfectly and clearly state that it will be more than the handful of colors that you are imagining. It's not a game-- it's a picture. And for games, there are games that use GTIA although not many. But I only need to show one to show what hardware is capable of.

 

Even the C64 has demos with complete overscan on horizontal/vertical borders using 16 colours but this isn't possible on a game.

...

For C64 it isn't because it's more restricted for overscan. For A8, it's a breeze.

 

The point is on an A8 no matter how good the programmer you will have blocky colour limited smooth scrolling games vs the STs border restricted highly colourful games with not so great scrolling IF the coder is useless and has no talent.

...

I don't think the 160*200 games are blocky unless you run them on some hi-res monitor for which A8 wasn't targetted for. Stop your bullcrap about who has talent and who doesn't. You have no idea what you're talking about.

 

The only thing the ST shows up is talentless coders, the A8 just shows it's horribly restricted colour resolution making the excessive palette useless in games production (hence the C64 destroyed it)

More rubbish. A8 destroyed C64 where I come from. I live in logic and proof land. Perhaps, you need to get out of your bubble and see reality for what it is instead of imagining things. Attached is image of a game that uses more than a handful of colors.

[kool kitty89]

Wikipedia has a really interesting pallette comparision here

 

Yep, I've been using those for comparison for a while. (I got that VCS palette immage from the video game color palettes wiki page -all the palette lists use that stock immage) Displays show the entire palette applied at original resolution to the immage and examples of optimized displays the hardware was capable of. (non-dithered in both cases)

Here's the one for 8-bit computers, though the A8 isn't listed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_8-bit_computer_hardware_palettes

[+DarkLord]

He misunderstood the argument. The argument is the picture of parrot using A8 palette -- whether this can be shown on real A8.

 

Oh sorry then - its hard sometimes to keep track on this topic, its

gotten so big and so long, with so many sub-threads going on.

 

I kinda like that though - shows just how many Atarians are still out

there, and how much passion they still have for our beloved machines.

 

[+remowilliams]

In other news, seems a new version of SainT is available as of 27/12/09.

But how fast are the joystick ports !!?!??!!?!

 

 

 

Seriously, thanks for pointing that out.

[atariksi]

In other news, seems a new version of SainT is available as of 27/12/09.

But how fast are the joystick ports !!?!??!!?!

 

 

...

It was pointed out to especially for you in post #896:

 

(1) faster than the speeding bullet

(2) more power than a locomotive

(3) able to leap tall buildings in a single bound

(4) look up in the sky, it's a ...

 

Which one are you contending?

[atariksi]

He misunderstood the argument. The argument is the picture of parrot using A8 palette -- whether this can be shown on real A8.

 

Oh sorry then - its hard sometimes to keep track on this topic, its

gotten so big and so long, with so many sub-threads going on.

 

I kinda like that though - shows just how many Atarians are still out

there, and how much passion they still have for our beloved machines.

 

 

It's not your fault. He always does that-- comes back 24-48 hours later and states the same arguments like:

 

"I have never seen Salamander on A8; A8 is no good for games!"

"I have never heard the guitar type of sound like on SID; POKEY is useless/inferior for sound!"

"In the spec it states A8 has 160*200*4 and palette is useless. C64 has FLI so 16 colors is better than 4!"

"I have brown eyes; my parents have brown eyes; thus, blue eyes are not possible!"

Etc.

[atariksi]

Wikipedia has a really interesting pallette comparision here

 

Yep, I've been using those for comparison for a while. (I got that VCS palette immage from the video game color palettes wiki page -all the palette lists use that stock immage) Displays show the entire palette applied at original resolution to the immage and examples of optimized displays the hardware was capable of. (non-dithered in both cases)

Here's the one for 8-bit computers, though the A8 isn't listed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_8-bit_computer_hardware_palettes

 

Sometimes I wonder about some articles on Wiki-- if they are biased views of someone or just lack of research. That article should be modified or removed-- shows bias toward certain platforms and other problems.

[atariksi]

I am not talking about unreliable means like SYNC scrolling or VSP which put the system in an unreliable state by screwing monitor frequencies or garbling up memory.

Do you actually have any evidence for this for Sync scrolling? - as none of the sync scrolling techniques I've seen change monitor frequencies or garble memory ( no memory seems to be changed at all - the shifter doesn't write after all )

 

Yes. I combined both of those unreliable hacks into one sentence. One uses frequency toggling the other causes memory issues. I have read about both and thus avoided both.

 

Read these articles about ST overscan:

http://alive.atari.org/alive9/ovrscn1.php

http://alive.atari.org/alive11/oscan2a.php

 

Then you will see that the quick toggling of the frequency (as used with overscan or sync scroll) during the display of a line won't change the output frequency. The very short change of the frequency registers only makes that the display enable signal to the shifter is starting earlier or stopping later. The VSYNC and HSYNC output signals are not changed.

 

Robert

 

According to the links that you gave, the person has written: "Thus, while I'm sure of my conclusions,

I don't take any responsibility if some hardware hacker damages his ST by trusting this article."

 

He's either unsure or knows it can cause problems. I didn't see any deductive logic in his article that it wouldn't cause damage although he's claiming it's deductive logic.

 

Here's one link: http://www.codercorner.com/fullscrn.txt

which states: "Being in 71 Hz for a long time can damage your monitor (allthough I've never seen such damages)."

 

Of course, I don't care if some particular person's limited experience has shown damage or not, but whether it's possible to cause damage.

[kool kitty89]

I do think that for the time is wasn't bad at all, but I'm sure there's some cheap reason why they went that route, and I'm sure it's half the reason the A8 got lumbered with essentially single colour players, when at the time everything else with hardware sprites (of >= 2 colours) had fairly restrictive palettes.. I'm not electro-wizard but something smells a bit with that, and it wasn't until quite later that the larger earlier palettes were available on the machines featuring hardware multicolour sprites.. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I found myself thinking about that earlier today in connection with the A8s palette, and I'd never twigged before that the machines with multicolour hardware sprites generally all had fairly limited palettes at the time.. I'd love to know why, or if it was just coincidence..

I think mono sprites were pretty standard for the time, the TM9918 and Intellivision's video hardware are fine examples of this.

 

I don't want to press the issue, but I think that's not universally true for the A8's low color, take Pitfall II as an example: the C64 version has some more detailed trees and a couple other things, but what the hell is with the black background? (that's soemthing common to many C64 games too, not all mid you, but a LOT of games that shouldn't have plain black in the BG do: like altered beast or some of the Dizzy games -THe Great Gina Sisters would be a contrary example showing that it didn't have to be like that)

7800 doesn't count though, because it's all rendered into a RAM buffer.. I mean in proper hardware sprites

THe 7800 is weird and I don't have a good understading of exactly how it works (I have a general idea, but my knoledge it too limited in some areas to really understand it -I'm just starting formal study of computer science and anything else I've learned from discussions or reading on my own -both books and online articles), but from what I understand the 7800 doesnt have hardware sprites as such, it's kind of weird. (I know it's a scanline architecture -double buffered into line RAM- and uses display lists and display list lists, but beyond that MARIA is a bit confusing to me)

 

As for them being ahead at the time with the TIA, hmm I dunno.. As I said before, something just wreaks of it being the cheapest solution, but it worked for what it was designed for

I meant the palette, nothing else specifically. (though it was nice that TIA could do more than just plain square waves+noise -more noticable with the 7800's greater CPU time)

 

I think the Bally Astrocade was the only other machine with a big pallette ( 256 colours ) around that time.

Oh cool, I'd forgotten about that. Do you know what kind of palette it used, like a 16C/16Y set-up like GTIA -and 7800 I thing, or soemthing else like 32c/8y? (let alone the actual color selection)

 

But it's the hardware sprites aspect I was curious about, and the relationship between palette sizes & multi-coloured hardware sprites, because there seems to be hardly any example of machines utilising multicoloured (2bits per pixel or higher) hardware sprites with the larger palettes directly in play in the early days.. Or maybe it's just coincidence

Was the C64 the first home computer/game console to feature multicolor (2-bit color) sprites? (scanline color swapping and paired mono sprites excepted)

 

 

kool kitty89: all over the map

We need a supercat to get this kool kitty to get more focused and drop all this NES/TRS-80/Z-80/etc. crap.

 

I don't know, it seems interesting to include - for the sake of comparison - the NES/Megadrive-Genesis (etc) stuff in the technical discussion because they're somewhat of an analogue to the A8 and ST, graphically capable, and this discussion seems to center around A8/ST graphics and the limitations therein.

Meh. He had a point, or at least made me think a bit more in attemnt at staying on the original topic, (though much of the time I was following another tangent already started). I don't remember mentioning the TRS-80 or Z80 here though (well Z80 on SMS and Genesis), those did come up on the ST vs IIgs thread, but not here. (I mentioned Tandy in the context of the 1000 series along with PC Jr. at some points in this thread though)

Edited December 31, 2009 by kool kitty89

[kool kitty89]

It may be doable on real A8 at least close to it. He's just speculating because most C64 fans think A8 is limited to 160*200*5 whereas in REALITY it's 160*200*128/256.

Why 5 colors rather than 4?

And the limitation is colors per scanline, right? (outside of changing palettes mid-line)

[Crazyace]

According to the links that you gave, the person has written: "Thus, while I'm sure of my conclusions,

I don't take any responsibility if some hardware hacker damages his ST by trusting this article."

 

He's either unsure or knows it can cause problems. I didn't see any deductive logic in his article that it wouldn't cause damage although he's claiming it's deductive logic.

 

Here's one link: http://www.codercorner.com/fullscrn.txt

which states: "Being in 71 Hz for a long time can damage your monitor (allthough I've never seen such damages)."

 

Of course, I don't care if some particular person's limited experience has shown damage or not, but whether it's possible to cause damage.

 

If you switch the frequency to 71Hz for a long time it might cause damage. However none of the border removal routines switch actually cause the hsync frequency to change. They just catch the internal state machine at the point where it asserts or deasserts the display enable.

To actually change hsync you'd have to catch the state machine at the point it asserts hsync ( or leave it switched all the time )

Also if you look at Griff's routine, it only plays around with the borders for 7 lines in the top border - so the rest of the screen is completely untouched.

 

The warning is the same kind of thing I see on any article ( ie - plugging other devices into joystick ports could damage the A8 , but it doesn't in most cases )

 

I think on the ST forum there's actually a much more detailed analysis of the ST timings ( by Ijor I think ) where he explains why there are differences between the various models.

[Heaven/TQA]

kool... he was revering to 5 color charmode on a8...

[Crazyace]

Wikipedia has a really interesting pallette comparision here

 

Yep, I've been using those for comparison for a while. (I got that VCS palette immage from the video game color palettes wiki page -all the palette lists use that stock immage) Displays show the entire palette applied at original resolution to the immage and examples of optimized displays the hardware was capable of. (non-dithered in both cases)

Here's the one for 8-bit computers, though the A8 isn't listed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_8-bit_computer_hardware_palettes

 

Sometimes I wonder about some articles on Wiki-- if they are biased views of someone or just lack of research. That article should be modified or removed-- shows bias toward certain platforms and other problems.

 

I didn't think the pictures would be more biased or not - I only posted it because they show the pallette well and compare directly - unlike the standard colour grid pictures. They weren't meant to be an indication of actual pictures on the A8 and ST.

[atariksi]

It may be doable on real A8 at least close to it. He's just speculating because most C64 fans think A8 is limited to 160*200*5 whereas in REALITY it's 160*200*128/256.

Why 5 colors rather than 4?

And the limitation is colors per scanline, right? (outside of changing palettes mid-line)

 

Yeah, as Heaven stated there's a 5-color mode like the one we were discussing with Boulderdash (ANTIC mode 4). It's 3 bits/pixel where one bit is taken from upper bit of char value but only 5 combinations are used.