128 colors squared possible?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

If you have an 8-bit Atari or equivalent emulator installed, you can check out a large library of images in ColorView (aka COLRVIEW) format. This technique was developed years before Andrew glommed onto it, renamed it, and oh-so-cheekily TM'd it.

Maybe you should remember your own posts.

[SeaGtGruff]

If you have an 8-bit Atari or equivalent emulator installed, you can check out a large library of images in ColorView (aka COLRVIEW) format. This technique was developed years before Andrew glommed onto it, renamed it, and oh-so-cheekily TM'd it.

Maybe you should remember your own posts.

966511[/snapback]

The thing about any flickering technique is that... well... it flickers! So even though these demos and games that use flickering are extremely impressive, I think it's best to keep the number of flickered frames to a minimum (i.e., two rather than three), and to keep the amount of flickered colors on the screen to a minimum, otherwise the results can be too distracting to the viewer/player.

 

As for "discovering" techniques that other people have already used, well, it's happened to me in both directions. I was experimenting with "Super IRG" mode some ~10 years before it was apparently given that name, but IIRC my inspiration for it came from something I'd read in "Mapping the Atari," so undoubtedly there were other people out there who'd done the same thing before I tried it; and since I didn't write an article about it or give it a name, I can't quarrel with anyone else for "discovering" and "naming" it several years after I used it privately. But I do know that when I "discovered" it for myself, I kept thinking "Why isn't anyone writing games that use this technique?!?" I never wrote/finished one, so more power to anyone who did!

 

I have a bit of a quandry with this right now, because I've just spent the last few nights working on graphics for a "Dragon Warrior" demonstration that relies on the "flicker/dither"... harumph, I mean "Super IRG"-- technique to get a pretty decent representation of a "Dragon Warrior" screen (on the 8-bit emulator), but really, what's the point? What I mean is, I can finish it and post it to show that a fairly accurate A8 port of "Dragon Warrior" is possible, but if it could never be published anyway, then it would be far more productive to use the technique to create an original game. I've been working in Paint to draw the screen, which I'm now coding for the A8, but even though the picture wasn't done directly on the A8, it should still look pretty close on it, because I picked and mixed the colors on an A8 emulator and saved the screenshot in interlaced mode, then used those color values in the Paint program... although of course it could make a big difference what the palette settings are, and the picture won't look the same on a real Atari as on an emulator, because the colors mix a bit differently. Still, I'm going to post the Paint picture so people can see what I've done. The screen uses a 13x13 map, with each "block" (2x2 characters on a Nintendo) being drawn as a 3x2 block on the Atari, to get 12 pixels across and 16 down in each block-- really 13 and 1/3 blocks across, and 26 lines of GRAPHICS 12 characters to get 13 blocks down. For the blocks that have animated characters/sprites in them, I ended up using a solid background rather than trying to show the terrain behind/underneath the sprite, since my picture assumes that the P/M graphics will be used at quad-width to get a sixth "underlay" color which will replace pixel color "00" in those blocks where the "00" color is from the P/M graphics rather than from SETCOLOR 4. And since each "block" is only 12 pixels across rather than 16, my A8 conversion isn't exactly the same as the Nintendo version. But these pictures should still give an idea of what could be accomplished with flicker/dither.

 

Michael Rideout

DragonWarrior_0000.bmp

[djmips]

Remember... He's not a Zylon, he's the bane of Zylons (and a whole lot more)

 

 

If you have an 8-bit Atari or equivalent emulator installed, you can check out a large library of images in ColorView (aka COLRVIEW) format. This technique was developed years before Andrew glommed onto it, renamed it, and oh-so-cheekily TM'd it.

Maybe you should remember your own posts.

966511[/snapback]

[mos6507]

Hi, Andrew! Are you talking about flickering three frames together-- one with red dithering, one with blue dithering, and one with blue dithering? If so, I've heard of that idea before, but have never tried it or seen it in action. I'll do a search for your chronocolour demos, they sound intriguing.

If you have an 8-bit Atari or equivalent emulator installed, you can check out a large library of images in ColorView (aka COLRVIEW) format. This technique was developed years before Andrew glommed onto it, renamed it, and oh-so-cheekily TM'd it.

966238[/snapback]

 

I used to use that format in the early 90s to view JPEGs on the Atari8.