How many games were done in Graphics 8 (Antic F)?

Tyrop · November 6, 2010

We got an Atari 800 in 1981 with a casette player only. We initially had Star Raiders and Atari Chess. Later on we got Missile Command and Asteroids carts, and an adventure (Colossal Cave) on tape. One day, I was in the computer lab at school where they had Apple II's with small monochrome monitors. A kid popped in a disk with Apple Panic and a Defender-like side scroller, and I could not believe my eyes - these games seemed to have detailed high resolution graphics and were much better looking than anything I had. All the games I saw on the Atari had blocky, solid shapes. Later on, when more Atari games were written in Antic E or text mode equivalent (Graphics 7 plus as we called it), at the time, I still thought Apple had better graphics and I was always trying to compare games on both computers. I don't know that much about the Apple's specs, but I think Antic F might even be a little higher resolution than Apple's hi res mode. At the time, games written in Antic F impressed me the most because of the more intricate shapes it could make. I only know of a few: Choplifter, Threshhold, Hard Hat Mack, Drol, Spare Change. Where there any others?

phaeron · November 6, 2010

Aren't all of those games originally ported from the Apple II?

ANTIC mode F has a higher resolution (320x192 vs. the Apple II's 280x192), but the pixels are the same size -- the Atari's display is wider.

Rybags · November 6, 2010

There's plenty of games, and you can effectively count many graphical ones that use Mode 2 AKA Graphics 0 as well.

Night Mission Pinball as well as a good number of other pinball games.

Stellar Shuttle as well.

Some of them rely on artifacting, others just utilize the higher resolution.

bfollett · November 6, 2010

Aztec was one that I loved.

Bob

Edited November 6, 2010 by bfollett

ANTIQ · November 6, 2010

They're still making them!

Sleepy · November 6, 2010

First games I´m thinking of are...

Colossus chess 3.0 / 4.0

Head over Heels

Jump man junior

Amaurote

Sleeπ

+therealbountybob · November 6, 2010

Possibly lots of the isometric games Head over Heels, Molecule Man, Knight Lore (2008), am sure there was a another game called Armarote but can't find this on any of the databases....

Plus Kult a decent shoot'em up!

Goochman · November 6, 2010

The Ultima series

Tyrop · November 6, 2010

Thanks for the responses. I forgot about Ultima and the pinball games. THe isometric games look amazing. I definitely would have wanted to show those to my Apple friends back in the day. I will want to play those!

+bcombee · November 6, 2010

A.E. was an Apple II port that used Graphics 8 to good advantage. Lode Runner and Pinball Construction Set were others that I liked.

kool kitty89 · November 6, 2010

Most/all color apple II games ran at an effective 140x192 resolution max with composite artifacting or similar with RGB but looking uglier with the vertical columns not blurred together.

There's a wide range of display modes on the A8 and some smaller/early games may have used lower res modes to cater to small ROM sizes or tape/disk games aimed at 8k (or 16k to a lesser extent), but there's a very large portion of the library that runs in the higher res range.

You of course have the 160x192 4-color mode and 320x192 2-color mode (the latter blurs/artifacts in NTSC composite/RF video and the artifacts differ from CTIA to GTIA so it's not often used for games), and then you have the character mode counterparts with 40x24 2-color characters (8x8 tiles) and 40x24 4-color (4x8 tiles).

The character modes would have been the most desirable to use as they'd save a good deal of memory and/or CPU resource in most cases. (using repeated characters rather than a full bitmap display, it's the same thing that many contemporary consoles and computers did via hardware or via software in some cases though for the latter you still needed memory for a framebuffer -and character/tile graphics were still mainstay for arcade and home game systems up to the mid 90s when computers had long since switched almost exclusively to bitmap graphics with blitters/hardware acceleration or fast CPUs)

The games that do use bitmap modes tend to be those using software sprites in cases where semi-mobile character based objects would be undesirable. (and you use up 7.5kB with a framebuffer in the highest res modes) Using semimobile character based objects is far less intensive though. (especially depending on how optimized the software renderer is -you see a lot of slowdown in A8/5200 Mario Bros for example, something that really should happen given what contemporary 6502 based software renderers managed -Apple II and BBC Micro games are all software rendered and the apple is at about 1/2 the speed of the Atari while the Beebe is a little faster)

And you also have the 4 sprites on top of that for the Atari, and hardware scrolling. (and software sprite multiplexing to allow more on screen -but flicker with more than 4 per line, and common raster effects to change the sprite or BG colors used on a scanline basis as common with many VCS games)

Pitfall and Pitfall II are some examples that instantly come to mind for the 160x192 4-color mode.

The same thing happens with the VCS to some extent: you have some early games (and some later ones depending on the case) that look super blocky for both the sprites and BG at what looks like about 40x48 with sprites that look like they'd be on a 80x96 screen, but then you have later games that have sprites with pixels corresponding to 160x192 and the background at 40x192. (or tweaked even more in some cases to allow some stuff in the BG to appear at 160x192 pixels as well -mainly text/score stuff in some later games, and that's something Atari engineers had apparently thought impossible -the same reason it was thought a computer add-on for the VCS would be impossible, but with tricks a 20x24 text display is possible, or at least something close to that... actually it's odd that Atari staff would think such was impossible given the 1979 BASIC Programming cart did text in a similar manner)

Edited November 6, 2010 by kool kitty89

+MrFish · November 6, 2010

Don't forget XXL...

+MrFish · November 6, 2010

...and the forthcoming Manic Miner port by Tezz:

+Stephen · November 6, 2010

...and the forthcoming Manic Miner port by Tezz:

That's a very nice use of color in hi-res mode!

phaeron · November 6, 2010

Apple II and BBC Micro games are all software rendered and the apple is at about 1/2 the speed of the Atari

Quick note, but I crunched the numbers on this, and the Apple II doesn't really run that much slower since video and refresh cycles are interleaved. For NTSC, the Apple II executes 65 * 262 = 17030 cycles per frame, while an Atari 800 running a 320x192 ANTIC mode F screen executes 19310 cycles per frame, only 13% faster. Even with display DMA turned off, the Atari is only 61% faster.