Genuine FMV video on stock 600XL?

[Foebane]

In this video here, I mean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9mCxIUwVs

 

The guy behind this channel said that the 600XL was totally vanilla, only the cartridge drove the conversion of the video in real-time.

 

What gets me is how can a mere 256 colours, using HSV, recreate the millions of colours needed in FMV? In other videos he made showing off the cartridge, he used Tron and Dire Straits' Money for Nothing, probably because they have bright primary colours to them. Another one was A-Ha's Take on Me, for the drawn animation sequences I imagine.

 

The sound is quite good, too!

 

It certainly shows that Jay Miner hardware was the best at the time.

 

One last question: Can this be emulated in Altirra? I have a few videos I'd quite like to throw at it.

 

[Gunstar]

Millions of colors aren't needed for FMV, remember, you can even have black and white FMV! I've seen Atari 8-bit FMV in both 16-shade gray scale B&W and 256 color. But it is quite good what is possible on essentially 1978 tech. if you have a high-speed streaming option, like that cartridge. If something like this had been done "back in the day" it could have only been very short animation/looping animation due to ram memory constraints, and I'm not even sure if vintage hard-disks could have been fast enough.

 

It still takes modern technology to support such stuff. Just like the awesome still images that Rastaconverter can create with upto 128 colors virtually anywhere on screen in 160 x 240 resolution. To run such an algorithm directly on the 8-bit would take 10 years to produce an image. Not to mention that back then, there weren't any full-color photographic .jpg, .png, etc., images to convert, the best you could do would have been 16-color picture conversions(before VGA and 256 on the PC). Better off to do the art ON the Atari with 128-256 colors to use.

 

It's definitely cool that we can meld modern and vintage tech together!

Edited April 29, 2017 by Gunstar

[Osgeld]

I cant see the video you linked but I did check out some of his others showing different videos

 

I dont know the magic behind this, but I can tell you that 256 colors sent over analog will smooth and blur to reasonable quality just in the video signal, and even back in the old pc days 256 color video wasnt bad to begin with, if just a bit grainy on a super sharp VGA screen

 

also I know there's been a lot done with the C64 and streaming video that looks very good even with 16 colors

Edited April 29, 2017 by Osgeld

[Rybags]

It's not HSV, Atari only has control to the point of selecting 16 colours and 8 or 16 lumas dependant on mode.

Using APAC mode as this seems to be, you actually lose saturation because of how the colour blending takes place, actually many of the resultant colours produced are different to the default 256.

This seems to be better quality and rate than videos I've seen before using IDE type expansions. The problem with many is that the CPU not only has to do the per scanline register changes to get more colours but also has to shovel the incoming data into Ram to be displayed, although pretty sure one of the videos posted by phaeron displayed the pixel data direct from the input buffer without being moved by the CPU.

Also of course the CPU has to take care of the audio waveform playback, in this case it would likely be synchronous with the scan rate, so simply a case of plugging the next sample in when changing the PRIOR register for the alternating col/lum scanlines.

Edited April 29, 2017 by Rybags

[Foebane]

I cant see the video you linked

 

It's called "Olympics 100 Dash", and it's quite impressive.

[flashjazzcat]

Here's the original thread describing this:

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/211689-60-fps-video-using-side-2/

 

Seems to be enjoying quite a resurgence of interest after four years. Various clever tricks are employed to make Antic DMA repeatedly hit the IDE data register instead of pulling display data from RAM. The CPU just handles the audio and colour changes. Remarkable when first released and still amazing today.

[Gunstar]

 

It's called "Olympics 100 Dash", and it's quite impressive.

It says it's blocked in my country (U.S.) by the International Olympic Committee due to copyright issues.

[emkay]

Hehe.... imagine that back in those days

 

 

 

.... a homecomputer presenting the own commercial...

Edited April 29, 2017 by emkay

[_The Doctor__]

It was possible back in the old days... just a heck of a lot bigger and a heck of a lot more Expensive. All kinds of things were possible and done. At the time they just weren't marketable, or at least being led to believe they weren't. Things like who needs a computer to put tv on a tv.... the tv already does that, I kid you not, that's the kind of things you run into.... eventually using 8 bits to control capacitance disks, laserdisk players with accompanied software and gen locking was how some of it was delivered. Hard drives and memory were EXPENSIVE.

 

These are some very excellent sampled conversions btw, nice job n dary!

Edited April 30, 2017 by _The Doctor__

[kiwilove]

Back in the day - I did manage to borrow the ComputerEyes hardware - and capture some stills from various movies - such as Tron, Star Trek 3, Superman, etc - and later I did colourize by hand using Rambrandt a few of these images - can't remember now, how that program worked ...

There was no way I had of trying to create any short animation with them - trying to do it all by hand via individual frames would have been so boring to do - bur what you see in these demo videos would have been the same kind of thing/reward for doing so.

 

With the current method - I'd guess the hardest job - is to find a clip/animation that could end up looking really classy - to compete against the Amiga Robot Juggler or our own Atari Robot walking demo.

 

Harvey

[+remowilliams]

.... a homecomputer presenting the own commercial...

 

Is that available anywhere for download?

[zzip]

In this video here, I mean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9mCxIUwVs

 

The guy behind this channel said that the 600XL was totally vanilla, only the cartridge drove the conversion of the video in real-time.

 

What gets me is how can a mere 256 colours, using HSV, recreate the millions of colours needed in FMV? In other videos he made showing off the cartridge, he used Tron and Dire Straits' Money for Nothing, probably because they have bright primary colours to them. Another one was A-Ha's Take on Me, for the drawn animation sequences I imagine.

If you've ever seen a nice looking animated GIF (and there are many)-- those are limited to 256-colors too. You won't notice much of the time, unless you know what to look for.

 

What's more impressive is pulling off FMV given how limited memory was.

[Foebane]

If you've ever seen a nice looking animated GIF (and there are many)-- those are limited to 256-colors too.

Yes, 256 colours from a customised and optimised palette, ideal for the image. Or am I wrong?

[zzip]

Yes, 256 colours from a customised and optimised palette, ideal for the image. Or am I wrong?

that's right.

[Foebane]

I was just wondering, does every frame of an animated GIF have its own palette?

[phaeron]

I was just wondering, does every frame of an animated GIF have its own palette?

 

Yes, the GIF89a standard allows you to apply a delta frame with its own palette on top of a previous frame with a different palette, with transparency. This means that the composited frame can have well over 256 colors. The files are still huge compared to any real video format, though.