First Msg and Intv Screen resolution

[fabulous_Muller]

Good afternoon dear freinds , First of all is a pleasure to come to intv world after so many years out. I'm recompounding my console and my collection and I'll be attaching to my TV very soon. Well, I bought "Racing the beam" book and besides an atari description It's a excellent book. I'm try to convince Keith Robison to write or to start a project to write a book about intv for the platform studies series too. For 2 times our friends from MIT said that VCS 2600 has "superior graphics" because of the 128 pallete. Well I tried to research a little deep more and confirmed the 128 color pallete against the 16 color of Intv but with the interesting fact that VCS can only display 4 colors at a time and Intv can do 8 colors . So I asked ny artist wife what she prefered: working with a 128 colors pallete but only 4 at once , or 16 with 8 . She didn't think too much and said 8 colors at once. So I think my suspicious aren't so wrong. Intv may have a small pallete but can do more with that. I'll email the book authors about and hope to have it revised soon.Obviously that the other aspects of the graphics are unbeatable so I still think Intv is also superior in this color aspect too. Anyway what do you think about it ? Follows the video specs that I collect :

 

VCS 2600:

Video

 

Output: Line-by-line (Registers must be updated each scanline)

Resolution: 160x192 pixels (NTSC 60Hz), 160x228 pixels (PAL 50Hz)

Playfield: 40 dots horizontal resolution (rows of 4 pixels per dot)

Colors: 4 colors at once (one color per object)

Palette: 128 colors (NTSC), 104 colors (PAL), 8 colors (SECAM)

Sprites: 2 sprites of 8pix width, 3 sprites of 1pix width

 

Intellivision MCS :

 

2048 × 8-bit Graphics ROM

159 pixels wide by 96 pixels high (159x192 display on a TV screen, scanlines being doubled)

16 color palette, all of which can be on the screen at once

8 sprites. Hardware supports the following features per-sprite:

Size selection: 8×8 or 8×16

Stretching: Horizontal (1× or 2×) and vertical (1×, 2×, 4× or 8×)

Mirroring: Horizontal and vertical

Collision detection: Sprite to sprite, sprite to background, and sprite to screen border

Priority: Selects whether sprite appears in front of or behind background.

 

 

Best Regards....

[Games For Your Intellivision]

I used to have little respect for the Atari VCS....but some of the graphics they are doing with it recently have blown me away.

 

The Intellivision is still my fave console, and I think if programmed to its strengths, it is an amazing little machine.

 

That being said, I think that owning an Atari VCS is required if you are a tretro game fan.

[atari5200dude82]

I agree. i have both systems, since the 80's. The Intellivision is my Favorite console, but i love the Atari 2600 too. The 2600 has more games, and some were never ported to the Intv. They are both unique systems in there own way.

[Games For Your Intellivision]

You can't do Demon Attack on the Intellivision. That is why the Intellivision version is so different. It really should have been called something else.

 

The Imagic games on the Intellivision were amazing for their graphics though.

[Rev]

Welcome, there is still time to turn the other way and run screaming for your life!

 

If you stay, we promise a fun and exciting, if not weird journey.

 

Just watch out for that Dzjay guy.....

[pimpmaul69]

You can't do Demon Attack on the Intellivision. That is why the Intellivision version is so different. It really should have been called something else.

 

The Imagic games on the Intellivision were amazing for their graphics though.

i have never played any other version than inty one and i have only played inty for a year now so can you explain the problem and why.

[pimpmaul69]

Welcome, there is still time to turn the other way and run screaming for your life!

 

If you stay, we promise a fun and exciting, if not weird journey.

 

Just watch out for that Dzjay guy.....

look who's talking. say, werent you in that creeper video?

[Rev]

look who's talking. say, werent you in that creeper video?

 

What creeper video? I must have amnesia

[pimpmaul69]

What creeper video? I must have amnesia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLPZmPaHme0

Edited February 9, 2013 by pimpmaul69

[intvnut]

You can't do Demon Attack on the Intellivision. That is why the Intellivision version is so different. It really should have been called something else.

 

The Imagic games on the Intellivision were amazing for their graphics though.

 

Are you thinking of the same game I am? I watched a video of the game play, and aside from the funky "swoosh" in, it looks more like the Intellivision version than the TI-99/4A version did. Sounds more like the Intellivision version too.

[Games For Your Intellivision]

I am not sure what you mean. Demon Attack on the VCS is quite different than the Intellivision version. The enemies come together from both sides of the screen to materialize above you.....

[Carl Mueller Jr]

The Atari 2600 is capable of some nifty graphical effects, the main reason being that the graphics hardware allows the programmer complete and constant access to it, even during the active display (in fact, if it didn't, all you would see was some vertical bands on the screen, representing the last values written to the playfield and sprite registers).

Because you can access the registers during active display, you can change a "sprite"'s color register after the end of each scan line, which is often called "color banding". If you look at a character like Pitfall Harry, you see it there (there's never more than one color to him on any given line). It's actually really unnatural looking; still, they get a lot of mileage out of the one sprite. It takes the Intellivision three sprites to pull off that kind of effect (although there's no restrictions in that case on where you put your colors).

So yes, the Atari can be sometimes more colorful, but there are great restrictions on where those color changes can take place.

The Intellivision's main strength (graphically speaking) are in its background. It has a one 160 x 96 pixel background which is composed of 240 tiles. Each one of those tiles can be displayed in its OWN foreground and background color (that's two colors per tile – 240 in all) with very few restrictions. That makes for some VERY colorful and sophisticated looking backgrounds. (As a side note, it's also somewhat more powerful than the Colecovision in this respect, since one tile can be displayed only in one color configuration on its hardware, not in multiple different color configurations as the Intellivision can.)

It also doesn't waste CPU cycles building the screen's picture during the active display. That allows games to be far more sophisticated on the Intellivision, rather than trying to squeeze all of the game logic into the tiny amount of time allotted for the vertical blanking period.

The Atari 2600 also only has 128 bytes of memory. The Intellivision blows it out of the water in this respect as well. It even has a fairly large pool of 16-bit RAM, some of which is used for the background and stack, but a large portion is still left over for the programmer's use.

In short, the Intellivision is capable of far more sophisticated games, and far more complex looking backgrounds. It also has eight sprites which can be displayed in any configuration without flicker.

That all being said, the Atari 2600 is awesome and what people are doing with it is truly incredible. I definitely want to own one someday.

Intellivision still has a few tricks up its sleeve though, I feel. The main areas where we can still push it are sound (the PSG has been mostly underutilized), and smoothly updating the graphics (and correspondingly, tightening the controls as well). The Intellivision disc can be sampled at 60 frames per second without the need to de-bounce. This makes a BIG difference to the way games respond. No longer sluggish, the disc feels precise and responsive. Movement feels "crisp".

　

[fabulous_Muller]

Thanks for the explanation Carl, excelent as usual. You said something very interesting, we still have space to growth and thanks for the background tips, I have forgotten how good they are. People are pulling the vcs 2600 to its limits, we did not reach that level, yet. And with all this we still have that awasome work, imagine when we reach that level. Remembering that I just quoted a think from MIT press book for Atari which I didn't agree and will forward these informations to them . I'm trying to convince Keith Robison to write a book , or at least participate, in a similar book for intellivision so the mit guys can also teach it at their classes and get more people to understand this complex miachine . Meanwhile, pls continue the excellent work Carl ,Dz_jay, Joe Zbiciak et all .

[intvnut]

I am not sure what you mean. Demon Attack on the VCS is quite different than the Intellivision version. The enemies come together from both sides of the screen to materialize above you.....

 

It's a nifty effect, but I don't see how it changes the game play. I guess that's why I was confused. The rest of the game mechanic looks pretty much the same.

 

If you didn't draw the planet and stars in the background, you could replicate that materialization on the Intellivision using background cards. But, then you'd have a black, empty screen like the 2600 has...