Wishing for a new Game - Archon

First Spear · September 7, 2014

I played Archon a *ton* on my Apple II. I think it would be great on the Intellivision. Our console could do the strategy board part without a problem, and the battle screen would not be a problem for the hardware, either.

+Tarzilla · September 7, 2014

I think the biggest issue trying to port this over will be the screen resolution. The Intellivision has an effective vertical resolution of 96 pixels. Each playing piece appears to be (at least on the Atari version) 8x16 double wide. We only have 8 MOBs (sprites) even though they can be 8x16 double wide we don't have enough, therefore we'd had to do it with cards. Problem is 9 rows of the board x 16 pixels puts us at 144 (without the text lines above and below the board). So we'd have to go with 8x8 board pieces or make the board bigger than the screen and scroll up and down.

As you can see by the orange blob at the top of the board screen, we lose a lot of clarity of the piece. Not to mention that we don't have enough colors to represent the squares that change color, though I'm with dithering or some other indicator that could be overcome.

First Spear · September 7, 2014

I think the biggest issue trying to port this over will be the screen resolution. The Intellivision has an effective vertical resolution of 96 pixels. Each playing piece appears to be (at least on the Atari version) 8x16 double wide. We only have 8 MOBs (sprites) even though they can be 8x16 double wide we don't have enough [snip]

As you can see by the orange blob at the top of the board screen, we lose a lot of clarity of the piece. Not to mention that we don't have enough colors to represent the [snip]

Thanks for digging into this, I think that scrolling the board and dithering is probably the best way to deal with the resolution limitations, it's funny, I always thought the Apple // version was the most limited in terms of graphics, and thought that if that platform could pull off Archon then the Intv would have no problem. Thanks for straightening me out. I was always mentally focused on the fighting screen and did not think enough about how the strategy board would work.