Did you care about flicker?

[gdement]

 

Well fair's fair...

 

As one poster pointed out with the NES you got the fun of flicker AND slowdowns.

 

-Ray

 

Yup, I always thought it was FAR worse on the NES. It could be pretty bad on the Master System too - Double Dragon for example.

 

 

Got that right. Flicker is so bad on SMS Double Dragon as to make the two player mode...UNPLAYABLE.

 

I am convinced this is why the 2 player co-op moder was left out of the NES version.

 

-Ray

 

This almost ruins River City Ransom also. If it wasn't such an awesome game I wouldn't have been able to stand it. RCR 2-player runs a lot better in emulation.

 

On the Atari, I agree with the earlier poster that flickering makes many games, like Asteroids, feel more eerie.

[AtariLover!]

Some of the discussion in the PB Frogger Vs Starpath Frogger got me thinking:

 

Back in the day, did you really give a crap about the flicker in games???

 

I noticed it, as I'm sure everyone else did, but it never bothered me. I always just assumed it was the atari working too hard It was just a part of playing games. I never got a headache or anything else from playing a game with flicker. Hell, Adventure didn't even bother me. Yeah the stuff blinked when there were too many objects, so I just tried to get as many objects into one room to see how bad I could get it to flicker. It was kind of like hacking the game....making it do something it wasn't supposed to do.

 

I can appreciate the programmers that figured out ways to reduce flicker. Those games do look better, but did I care in 1982? Hell no! I didn't even care in 1992 when SNES Zelda flickered and slowed down!

 

I never even knew that atari games flicker until not that long ago.

[Video]

until the issue was resolved in later memory heavy machines, such as the 16 bit consoles.

And instead we got slowdowns.

 

Well fair's fair...

 

As one poster pointed out with the NES you got the fun of flicker AND slowdowns.

 

-Ray

 

Yup, I always thought it was FAR worse on the NES. It could be pretty bad on the Master System too - Double Dragon for example.

 

How about all those Sonic games? They had flicker and Slowdown also (more slowdown than flicker though) And Lemmings for all the 8 bits had flicker and slowdown, due to most those old systems only being able to do something like 10 sprites, and the game always wanted to do 20.

 

As far as flicker and me... Well I never minded it much. There is points where it becomes unacceptable, but it's gotta drop below 15 hz befor I'd consider that. In fact, till I discovered Activision, I wasn't aware you dould do games without Flicker. That's probably what makes them so great lookign.

 

But in the Case of Pac-Man, I always thought it was done on purpose on there. After all, all the ghosts flicker, reguardless of where on the screen they are. I always thought it was supposed to be Transparancy, which, if you notice, even on 32 bit systems, was often represented by flickering a sprite, rather than useing actual Transparent colors (you got to realise, even computers haven't been able to do true transparrent colors that long)

 

I always took Pac-man as a game they tried to improve on. It wasn't untill I found Atari age that I found people that thought the game absolutely sucked. Certainly no one around here thought it did.