Wrathchild Posted December 9, 2003 Share Posted December 9, 2003 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn Jefferson Posted December 10, 2003 Share Posted December 10, 2003 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schmutzpuppe Posted December 10, 2003 Share Posted December 10, 2003 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). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted December 10, 2003 Share Posted December 10, 2003 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted December 10, 2003 Author Share Posted December 10, 2003 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). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wrathchild Posted December 10, 2003 Author Share Posted December 10, 2003 The missile overlay works fine wcl.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pseudografx Posted June 17, 2009 Share Posted June 17, 2009 The missile overlay works fine I just couldn't resist fixing the palette.. :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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