+Andrew Davie Posted November 21, 2021 Share Posted November 21, 2021 It's coming up on 20 years since the original '2600 Qb, and I was reminded of it today through another related item. Anyway, I got to thinking. Could the "Wen Hop?" engine be used to draw an isometric Qb screen, pretty much like the original Atari 800 version. Would it work? So, here's a very basic "what if" demo showing a few cubes being drawn (on a parallax background, no less!) and moving around. There's a positional bug in the big-ass sprite draw system causing colour changes sometimes (it's a Y-position error getting the triplet-colours out of synch), but ignoring that... it's all pretty solid. So, I'd say the system is quite capable of doing an isometric Qb like the original. There's no real reason I can see why the board can't be much bigger than the screen, because we get the inbuilt scrolling using the WenHop engine. Anyway, I just thought I'd park this here; it's a good demo of the engine's versatility. This took just over an hour to do, from idea to posting this here. Atari 8-bit version (1984)... Atari 2600 version (2003)... 20 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Climber Posted November 21, 2021 Share Posted November 21, 2021 Nice!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted November 21, 2021 Author Share Posted November 21, 2021 Just some minor changes - cubes now constrained and moving on diagonals. Draw in correct y-depth priority order... 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted November 21, 2021 Author Share Posted November 21, 2021 Here's a binary -- all you can do is watch. Or, hold RESET to restart. This almost certainly only runs on stella at this stage... QB3DCDFJ20211122.bin 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JetSetIlly Posted November 21, 2021 Share Posted November 21, 2021 8 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said: Here's a binary -- all you can do is watch. Or, hold RESET to restart. This almost certainly only runs on stella at this stage... QB3DCDFJ20211122.bin 32 kB · 1 download The demo looks very effective. (It also runs on Gopher2600 if you turn cycle counting/enforcement off) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bomberman94 Posted November 21, 2021 Share Posted November 21, 2021 Cool - demo looks very promising! For another „field of application“ it reminds me somehow of Rock’n’Bolt for the C64. I loved that unique piece of software back in the time: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted November 22, 2021 Author Share Posted November 22, 2021 * cubes can be different colours (here, just 2 shown). Each face can be one of 8 colours, including black * The 8-colours can be changed from screen to screen... using the ICC 3-colour blending stuff. * Faces don't have to be a solid colour - if we want (rudimentary) shapes on them, that's fine * double-buffering implemented, so technically we should never get flicker... just slowdown. * Timing is all over the place, but can be fixed; frame overflow is not too bad. * press/hold fire to get random background static QB3DCDFJ20211123.bin.bin 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted November 22, 2021 Author Share Posted November 22, 2021 This could do a 3D-looking Rubik's cube very easily. Even the rotation/animation... wouldn't be too hard. A static one showing the various colours on the faces and allowing you to rotate (without animation) would only take a day or two. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted November 22, 2021 Author Share Posted November 22, 2021 (edited) Here's a more "impressive" version running at higher (movement) speed, and with more cubes. It's pretty cool to watch, actually.... QB3DCDFJ20211123b.bin Edited November 22, 2021 by Andrew Davie 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted November 22, 2021 Author Share Posted November 22, 2021 Just for fun, and last one for today - here's one that I believe is unachievable on real hardware. There's just too much going on to get this into a single frame. But here's what it would look like, just for fun... QB3DCDFJ20211123unachievable.bin 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted November 23, 2021 Author Share Posted November 23, 2021 (edited) wrong thread Edited November 23, 2021 by Andrew Davie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Nathan Strum Posted November 23, 2021 Share Posted November 23, 2021 This is all very cool. Hope you can turn it into a fully working version of Qb. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrTrust Posted December 4, 2021 Share Posted December 4, 2021 On 11/21/2021 at 8:59 AM, Andrew Davie said: This took just over an hour to do, from idea to posting this here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SS Posted December 5, 2021 Share Posted December 5, 2021 If I'm being honest, my favorite version of Qb is the 2600 one. This new 3D one will be very interesting to see develop but the 2600 one is just about perfect in terms of playability. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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