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80 by 192?!


Jess Ragan

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What the heck kind of resolution is that? Not only is it pretty coarse, but it's taller than it is wide, on a horizontally oriented television screen. Are each of those eighty pixels stretched to double width to compensate? (It's an Atari 5200. Probably.)

 

On the plus side, you get a lot of color in that graphics mode, at least by the standards of the time. The ugly fixed color palette on the ColecoVision is starting to chafe... I've got to have me some more and brighter hues.

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I'm using these modes in my new project.  They're actually pretty great if you're willing to go big enough.

 

original_cast.thumb.png.bfb3696cc4cf36a28c90f8700032079e.png

 

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These aren't single screens, but pasted together clips from another screen.  This is the 9 color mode.

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You're right, these are pretty nice. Unexpanded 5200 or one of the 8-bit computers?

 

Also, what freedom do you have to move sections of these graphics around? I used tiles for my ColecoVision game Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons to create the illusion of characters emerging from and diving back into holes. Would that be possible on 5200/8-bit as well?

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This is just plain 5200, but it's a 512KB cart because the images are quite large.

 

I've never tried it, but I believe these modes also work with ANTIC 2 and friends which would enable you to use a tileset.  You would just have 2x8 tiles instead of 4x8.

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Gee. Swinging for the fences with this one, huh? Is this an RPG or an adventure game? Doesn't seem like you'd put this much work into the graphics if you weren't going to flesh these characters out with lots of dialog.

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GTIA modes can be highly useful. Part or all of each screen shown here is using a GTIA mode.

 

The GTIA modes have also been used to make 3D first person shooters and 60 frames/second, full-screen video (with audio) players, on the 8-bit computers (full movies can be encoded for this).

 

apx.png.411d003c9e44c0b49ade4c8698542fae.thumb.png.e0dcd772cd4f1953e35e63b971485fd0.png

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strip2.png.a09c0682710dcfaaeb3830e6c1386ec8.thumb.png.1b2825cc0391b89d23d9a157d4cec902.png

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2007915764_Mandel1.png.bf5b11b4a784189135d1e8796f637aa0.thumb.png.44f40218babcd9ec1bde23c5aa59a501.png

 

 

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They were the only choice for greyscale photo realistic work ie. scanned images / slideshows,  I recall using my Atari STE for similar, setting up the palette in grey scales and then writing a simple TIF file reader in GFA Basic (anyone remember TIF files?), so I could show 640x480 VGA images from a PC from the DOS compatible floppies even though it just showed every other pixel and bought the resolution down to 320x200.

 

Without being able to rotate your family TV on the side, it certainly seemed back in the day that GTIA modes for games would be limited to slideshows.  However, it is possible to do Wolfenstein type 3D engines using line doubling in Mode 10 (using the same LMS on alternate lines) to create 3D games making the pixels square (80 x 80).  At best you get 9 colours per line.  See Shanti's excellent new demo:

 

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Some very fine examples here.  The GTIA modes were very much under utilized.  They were not as limited as we were led to believe as many of the above examples show.

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On 6/29/2024 at 9:38 PM, Stephen said:

Some very fine examples here.  The GTIA modes were very much under utilized.  They were not as limited as we were led to believe as many of the above examples show.

The pixel aspect sucks, but they were good for drawing large objects with intricate shading.   Some of my favorites were the space station some versions of Rescue on Fractalus had as an intro and the walking robot demo Atari used.

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  • 2 months later...
On 7/9/2024 at 4:58 PM, Clint Thompson said:

@MrFish I don't know the poker game name but I need directions to download that :) looks awesome!

It definitely looks better than the Artworx game that I remember!  Ha, fun story, when I first got a copy of that game.. someone had renamed all the files so they started out the in the 'finished' state, and became 'unfinished' as you won...

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Ryan and MrFish, are those images in the Fairy Force game, and also the pictures of the women’s faces, using quad width pixels and thus Antic F in the display list? It sure doesn’t appear to be quad width, from looking at them.  Maybe the images are just big enough that quad width pixels aren’t a problem?
 

I believe, if I understand these modes from what I’ve read recently, you can also use redefined antic 2 character sets with GtIA modes, which have much finer horizontal resolution of pixels.   If this is true, I don’t know how you would really draw pictures of faces using character sets though.??? :) 
 

It would be great to have this question of which Antic mode used answered and clarified! 

 

 

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On 9/24/2024 at 4:31 PM, Cafeman said:

the pictures of the women’s faces, using quad width pixels and thus Antic F in the display list? It sure doesn’t appear to be quad width, from looking at them.  Maybe the images are just big enough that quad width pixels aren’t a problem?

Yes, all GTIA mode 9 -- except the APX logo, which is mode 10.

 

On 9/24/2024 at 4:31 PM, Cafeman said:

I believe, if I understand these modes from what I’ve read recently, you can also use redefined antic 2 character sets with GtIA modes, which have much finer horizontal resolution of pixels.

Yes, but you don't get higher resolution: a GTIA mode is a GTIA mode. It doesn't matter if it's in Antic F or Antic 2; it's going to have quad-width pixels.

 

On 9/24/2024 at 4:31 PM, Cafeman said:

If this is true, I don’t know how you would really draw pictures of faces using character sets though.???

All those images are in character mode (Antic 2). It works because they use however many characters sets are needed to define all the graphics.

 

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On 9/24/2024 at 1:31 PM, Cafeman said:

Ryan and MrFish, are those images in the Fairy Force game, and also the pictures of the women’s faces, using quad width pixels and thus Antic F in the display list? It sure doesn’t appear to be quad width, from looking at them.  Maybe the images are just big enough that quad width pixels aren’t a problem?

 

I'm using Antic F, so my images are all bitmaps.  I'm using the GTIA 9 color mode for these.  The images are in fact only 80 pixels horizontal resolution.  I can't remember how many scan lines tall they are off the top of my head.

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