Fake Borders

[Wrathchild]

Has anyone used stretched missles or players to create a fake border?

I've taken the data from a C64 World Class Leaderboard screen and

worked it into a font-data type arrangement. To make this work, the

colour scheme needed to use 'Brown' as the background - the 'Black'

for the text areas comes from inverting the character there to produce

the 5th colour.

 

Therefore we have:

 

Color0 = Blue (Sky, Water)

Color1 = Yellow (Leaves, Sand)

Color2 = Green (Grass, Mountains)

Color3 = Black (Text Background)

Color4 = Brown (Trees, Dirt)

 

Further simple changes can be made using some DLIs:

 

Clouds become White

Water a deeper blue from the lighter sky.

Top and bottom borders to become black.

 

What I'd like to try is then to add some stretched missles with a colour

of black to overlay the left and right borders changing them from brown

to black. Practical?

 

The final issue would be the text colours. The C64 has the advantage

of controlling this itself with a colour-map. With a little work the A8 can

easily use colours 0,1 and 2 for text but we'd lose the red (well, brown).

 

Another trick could be to display brown squares and then overlay a

player in black to produce a mask, only leaving the character in brown.

Alternatively the whole text area can be handled using players - but

only upto the point of golfer when we'd have to revert to the colours

above.

 

The Font-aliasing causes a bit of grief too, in the C64 the extra bits

are always grey, would it be best to drop this or pair colours?

E.g. blue&yellow use green and green uses yellow.

 

Sticking to this palette would make this a possible candidate for

conversion (along with Bard's Tale / The Sentinel) but changing it,

e.g. make brown the inverse colour, would make reworking the

code/graphics more complex.

 

Finally, for a 200 line screen, how many blank lines do you put at

the top to center the display on an NTSC display? I tend to just

change the 3 '$70' values to '$60' shifting up 3 lines.

 

Regards,

 

Mark

[Shawn Jefferson]

Has anyone used stretched missles or players to create a fake border?

 

Sorry, I don't have any answer for you, but I don't see why it won't be possible...

 

Finally, for a 200 line screen, how many blank lines do you put at  

the top to center the display on an NTSC display? I tend to just  

change the 3 '$70' values to '$60' shifting up 3 lines.

 

I thought the hardware took care of this automatically (centering the screen on PAL vs. NTSC) ?

 

BTW: that looks very cool. Is there a possibility that we will see some c64

conversions soon?

[Schmutzpuppe]

Fake borders are possible using PM (done that in a very old demo) but why do you wanna convert the gfx?

Leaderboard was converted for the good old A8 (as far as i remember it had this unusual dongle protection).

[Heaven/TQA]

reminds my our lovely MCS discussion on the Atari 8 Board...

 

@ schmutz

 

i guess we are talking about the sequel to leaderboard and not the original leaderboard as here you have trees which are missing in the 1st lb.

 

 

hve

[Wrathchild]

After consulting 'Mapping the Atari' last night - the missile idea looks fine. Combining them as a 5th player works well because the playfield 3 colour just happens to be black

 

Expanding them to Quadruple width gives 2*4=8 colour clocks each and so 2 missiles each side of the screen should be plenty to cover the borders. I can also use a non-DMA method of setting the entire height blocked.

 

The other idea I had was to use a 48 rather than 40 wide playfield. The extra characters at the sides can be set to an inverse square taken from the 8 spare characters at the end of each charset. Effectively, as the character area is a repeated 3 line set (plus the top line), this only requires 4*8=32 byte overhead.

 

@Shawn

 

I've been attempting to contact companies to get permission with limited success (e.g. no reponse rather than a no). As soon as I know I'll inform the AA board. These are just proof of concepts at the moment (e.g. Bard's Tale - Barbarian), using a screen like this there's actually little work in porting most of the original. Certainly there were many 'classics' that were technically possible on the A8 but didn't make it because the market had gone.

 

@Schmutzpuppe

 

Heaven's correct - World Class Leaderboard didn't make the A8 (a bit like Tenth Frame didn't too). With trees and bunkers this was more like proper golf than the odd 'water water everywhere' original leaderboard, though that was a great game that I played a lot (and worked out that the dongle was simulating a joystick being up and down at the same time IIRC).

[Wrathchild]

The missile overlay works fine

wcl.zip

[pseudografx]

The missile overlay works fine

I just couldn't resist fixing the palette.. :-)