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Was The "Running Man" Pre-Stored on the Console?


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On 4/25/2023 at 2:01 PM, DZ-Jay said:

For those of us who detest the built-in font and do everything in our power to avoid it, ...

Your words are hot daggers stabbing directly into Dave James's heart.

 

James was tasked to design the Intellivision font long before the real chipset was available and was not able to review it on through a real modulator driving a real television set until after the graphics ROM was in production. Harrower and Maine had advised him that the band limits of over-the-air NTSC meant that color changes would require at least a full color carrier cycle to stabilize and strongly recommended that horizontal graphic transition not occur more often than once every two carrier cycles, which for the Intellivision means once every two pixels. James was able to observe this limitation himself on occasions when graphic text was broadcast by TV stations in the course of their ordinary programming.

 

If you examine James' font, you will see that it very closely follows the design rule he was given—almost all horizontal elements of his alphanumeric characters are two or more pixels wide. In cases like the tips of the M and N he deviated from the rule on the presumption that the readability of the character as a whole wouldn't suffer too greatly if those tips weren't rendered as cleanly as he would have liked. For some characters, like the centers of the M, W and zero, James was forced to accept blurring and come up with an overall design for the character that would hopefully nevertheless be readable if not stared at too closely.

 

It is more important for text to appear nice and crisp than it is for animated characters, as our minds are more accepting of fuzzy images when things are moving.

 

The NTSC encoding scheme allows intensity transitions to be sharper than color transitions, and you can make your characters appear sharper by judiciously picking your colors. White, black and gray characters will appear sharper against a colored background than, say the blue on green and red on green used for the Baseball scores. You will be able to support higher resolution characters if you limit yourself to intensity changes (e.g.: black on green, or dark green on light green). The high-resolution character set of the Keyboard Component was generated by modifying the intensity of the STIC video signal but not its color phase and so displayed, for example, light green characters on green or light blue characters on blue. Even there the Keyboard Component font designers tried to make the horizontal luminance transitions as wide as practical.

 

James was designing a font that could be readable for all color combinations. If you try to design a font that adheres to the design rules James was given, you will find your options are limited and your font will look very much like James'.

We today play most retro games in emulation, so we can forget how blurry real NTSC color transitions can be.

 

If you take a look at the M-Network games, you may notice that most of them use the Intellivision's numeric font for the scores, except that each pixel is only one scan line tall. That was done deliberately as a way of tying the games back to the recognizable font of the Intellivision. The numerals are quite legible and, as they are vertically smaller, they are less crayon-like and so you may find them less objectionable.

 

WJI

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On 4/25/2023 at 7:59 AM, mr_me said:

Extending the graphics bus to the cartridge would not only have allowed for cartridge grom but also cartridge gram that could be manipulated with an on cartridge graphics processor. 

True, but that would have been asking a little much in 1977.

 

In 1982, Aphix designers were aware of the benefits of bringing out the graphics bus but there was no practical way to do that with the existing cartridges. Backward compatibility can be such a bitch.

 

WJI

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On 4/25/2023 at 2:01 PM, DZ-Jay said:

I would be happy as a clam if that were available to me.

For what it's worth, Aphix/Coffee/STIC 1B/Intellivision III had no GROM, only 4K GRAM, all of which was accessible in FB mode (using all 16 bits of BACKTAB), which the EXEC pre-loaded with the old GROM character set for the old cartridges but which could be overwritten by new cartridges. What a difference in memory prices five years made, just 43,824 little hours.

 

WJI

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On 4/25/2023 at 10:01 PM, Lathe26 said:

Take things one step further and imaging having bank-switched Graphics ROM in the cartridge.

Take things forty years back back and imagine your frustration when Prodromou tells you that cartridge sale prices are falling and that he won't authorize the expense to use it.

 

WJI

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2 hours ago, Walter Ives said:

Your words are hot daggers stabbing directly into Dave James's heart.


Of course, no offense was intended to Mr. James.

 

2 hours ago, Walter Ives said:

James was tasked to design the Intellivision font long before the real chipset was available and was not able to review it on through a real modulator driving a real television set until after the graphics ROM was in production. Harrower and Maine had advised him that the band limits of over-the-air NTSC meant that color changes would require at least a full color carrier cycle to stabilize and strongly recommended that horizontal graphic transition not occur more often than once every two carrier cycles, which for the Intellivision means once every two pixels. James was able to observe this limitation himself on occasions when graphic text was broadcast by TV stations in the course of their ordinary programming.


I'm sure Mr. James did a great job within the constraints imposed on him, and that his work represents a very reasonable compromise at the time, which is something I can admire at a technical level.

 

But the Intellivision font is still ugly.  Sorry.

 

2 hours ago, Walter Ives said:

If you examine James' font, you will see that it very closely follows the design rule he was given—almost all horizontal elements of his alphanumeric characters are two or more pixels wide. In cases like the tips of the M and N he deviated from the rule on the presumption that the readability of the character as a whole wouldn't suffer too greatly if those tips weren't rendered as cleanly as he would have liked. For some characters, like the centers of the M, W and zero, James was forced to accept blurring and come up with an overall design for the character that would hopefully nevertheless be readable if not stared at too closely.

 

It is more important for text to appear nice and crisp than it is for animated characters, as our minds are more accepting of fuzzy images when things are moving.

 

The NTSC encoding scheme allows intensity transitions to be sharper than color transitions, and you can make your characters appear sharper by judiciously picking your colors. White, black and gray characters will appear sharper against a colored background than, say the blue on green and red on green used for the Baseball scores. You will be able to support higher resolution characters if you limit yourself to intensity changes (e.g.: black on green, or dark green on light green). The high-resolution character set of the Keyboard Component was generated by modifying the intensity of the STIC video signal but not its color phase and so displayed, for example, light green characters on green or light blue characters on blue. Even there the Keyboard Component font designers tried to make the horizontal luminance transitions as wide as practical.

 

James was designing a font that could be readable for all color combinations. If you try to design a font that adheres to the design rules James was given, you will find your options are limited and your font will look very much like James'.

We today play most retro games in emulation, so we can forget how blurry real NTSC color transitions can be.

 

If you take a look at the M-Network games, you may notice that most of them use the Intellivision's numeric font for the scores, except that each pixel is only one scan line tall. That was done deliberately as a way of tying the games back to the recognizable font of the Intellivision. The numerals are quite legible and, as they are vertically smaller, they are less crayon-like and so you may find them less objectionable.

 

WJI


I played my Intellivision games on a standard color television set in the 1980s, and still use an old CRT to play them today (forgoing emulation except during early development phases).

 

I am rapidly advancing in age, and my memory is not what it used to, but I retain a certain set of recollections of the time, and my impressions from back then coincide with my current ones:  the font is legible, yes, but very blocky and crude ... and yes, ugly.

 

    dZ.

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