A8 PAL 'Blending' Bitmap Brothers

[José Pereira]

Hi.

As I was saying on the Progarmming Forum it sure can be an A8 version of Xenon or something like around the same type...

 

PAL Blending cannot be all those changes scan by scanline.

You can even have the same 5colours all screen high..

 

PF0: Gray (0,6)

PF1: White/Light Gray 0,12)

BACKGR.: Black/Darkest Gray (0,2)

 

Then you'll get the blending on

PF2: Blue colour8

PF3: Metalic Blue colour9

 

PRIOR1

 

32Bytes Narrow Mode wide screen (more cycles for the game...)

4Charsets for the Playing Area (Interleaved Charsets: 0,1,2,3,0,1,2,3,...)

Bottom Status area in GR.8 Bitmap Mode with some PMGs overlays (yes, I get the ZX Spectrum version and almost 'pixel by pixel' get it good looking, I think, t the Bottom).

The Left and Right Bars also get the feeling of Walls and as they are 'all high' equal' no problem in having Vertical Hardware scrolling (remember the Walls at their other game Speedball? Maybe the next one to try)

 

This way you get lots of luminances same colour blending PF2 and PF3 with the Gray, White and Black.

At the same time you also get these three colours looking good and no clash to get the Enemy ships as soft sprites only.

Our ship can be two PMGs Multicolour where:

-> Ship it's P0+P1/P2+P3 16pixels wide

-> M0+M1 and M2+M3 gives you the Left and Right Balls around 'our ship'

 

 

Now why this games are ideal for A8? Because we have Pallete to get those nice and caratheristic 'Bitmap Brothers' looking.

We can have a beautiful IMHO with just 5colours more the PMGs on 'our ship'.

So, there's no reason for not having 2D shoots, right?

 

 

-> PAL Blending on Altirra:

-> And for NTSC guys it also looks good and no Blending needed:

 

 

[José Pereira]

The file if anyone wants to try on real computers and then say what you've got on PAL blending the colours.

Thanks.

XENON same sizeBlending _3.xex

[José Pereira]

Oops that file is one of the first tries and not at home so can only post the right one tomorrow.

Sorry.

[José Pereira]

O.k. sorry for this one wrong yesterday.

Here it is Level1 and Level2.

You have also g2f files so you can try, if you want, to change something that you think it may look better for the PAL Blending.

(Level2 it's ported from C64 because the ST and Amiga have lots of shades of the same colour. I bet Level1 from the old P.C. MS-DOS EGA verion but can't find anymore screens than Level1. As I don't have a Joystick to play it and I almost sure can't get it much further with just the keys, does anyone know if the Dos version only has Level1? Even on the Disk cover art it shows just this Level when other versions show also the others...)

http://www.mobygames...xenon/cover-art

 

XENON PAL Blending Level1.zip

XENON PAL Bending Level2.zip

 

I really don't like this much and would like to get the same base as the Level1 but it seems I can't get Level2,3 and 4 on the MS-DOS version and I can't seem to get good results in translate the 'lots of Gray shades' into just 2or3)

Edited January 8, 2013 by José Pereira

[José Pereira]

A little bit of topic but not total...

I discouver this one this morning and it's exactly what we are done in Pac-Mania that hopefully one day day will arrive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8mKUIQjpvA

 

4colours Bitmap Mode Gr.15 (not need PF3 and no clashes problem).

Each guy/sprite Masking priors done in software like in Pac-Mania when Ghots goes in-front or behind (PMGs and soft sprites Masking it's possible as we alrady talked about that) so PRIOR0 is no problem (but most of the times isn't even necessary):

(Gray as PF1 gets the Blending on a second light Brown or Blue (the two colours of the two types of this game screens then with the right PFs choose I can get, like here, all the diferent Enemys good colours and luminances and our guy always these same Blue(s))

[andym00]

Really (really!) like those Xenon mock-ups.. There's a lot of potential there I think..

 

And Wizardy! I used to love that game on the 64.. For a long time I hoped Heavens RPG kind of Diablo game (Heaven and Hell ? iirc?) was going to be something along the lines of this while it was still an isometric point of view..

 

Great game, and one you could do very easily on the A8, nothing technically complicated about it, but it's a massive job to rewrite such a game from scratch.. You'd probably be better off hacking the raw 64 code to run on the A8[1], and then emulate the sprites with the left over time.. I mean, it's nothing but standard multi-colour text mode (I think!), so you could just plonk it as is on the A8, but with better color choices, and it's not exactly bursting at the seams with on-screen sprites That'd be one for the record books, emulating a 64 game on the A8

 

Either way, with the A8s scrolling this game should be a piece of cake on the A8

 

[1] But part of me suspects it's probably full to the brim memory wise anyway.. Oh, and bugger, just forgot about the character set size, still I'm sure there'd be a way round it if since there's not a huge amount of characters on screen at once..

[Creature XL]

Has someone actually tested the XEX's on real HW?

I just did and they suffer from the syncing bug of the G2F generated binaries

However, the 1st is displayed 3 times for just under a second. And what I can see in those few moments looks good

I actually like the status area

 

One should not forget that this is using PAL-blending and therefore should be limited in respect to movement. You have to scroll two scanlines at once else the colors alternate every other frame. so, it better be a faced paced shooter

[andym00]

I don't think the scrolling would be an issue..

Yes, there results are slightly different depending upon the order, ie: colour 0, 1 looks very slightly different to 1,0

Here's the C64 captured doing exactly this, with both odd/even even/odd.. There's not a lot in it, but if you had vast expanses and you were scrolling a one pixel vertically per frame than you may see some very (very!) subtle flickering happening.. Personally, I wouldn't worry about it

http://www.larshaugs...c64/colmix.html

 

The above image is

Row 0 = Col 1

Row 1 = Col1/Col2

Row 2 = Col2/Col1

Row 3 = Col 2

Edited January 9, 2013 by andym00

[Heaven/TQA]

Really (really!) like those Xenon mock-ups.. There's a lot of potential there I think..

 

And Wizardy! I used to love that game on the 64.. For a long time I hoped Heavens RPG kind of Diablo game (Heaven and Hell ? iirc?) was going to be something along the lines of this while it was still an isometric point of view..

 

Great game, and one you could do very easily on the A8, nothing technically complicated about it, but it's a massive job to rewrite such a game from scratch.. You'd probably be better off hacking the raw 64 code to run on the A8[1], and then emulate the sprites with the left over time.. I mean, it's nothing but standard multi-colour text mode (I think!), so you could just plonk it as is on the A8, but with better color choices, and it's not exactly bursting at the seams with on-screen sprites That'd be one for the record books, emulating a 64 game on the A8

 

Either way, with the A8s scrolling this game should be a piece of cake on the A8

 

[1] But part of me suspects it's probably full to the brim memory wise anyway.. Oh, and bugger, just forgot about the character set size, still I'm sure there'd be a way round it if since there's not a huge amount of characters on screen at once..

 

I spotted my name it was my bad coding skills that left ISO-perspective and still what put me down was the coding of the gfx engine which is not my first love... but if someone wants to take the battle engine... go for it... as I said... the battle & combat engine works in Diablo style and can produce more than 16k different loot variants as far as I remember.

[Creature XL]

I don't think the scrolling would be an issue..

Yes, there results are slightly different depending upon the order, ie: colour 0, 1 looks very slightly different to 1,0

Here's the C64 captured doing exactly this, with both odd/even even/odd.. There's not a lot in it, but if you had vast expanses and you were scrolling a one pixel vertically per frame than you may see some very (very!) subtle flickering happening.. Personally, I wouldn't worry about it

http://www.larshaugs...c64/colmix.html

 

The above image is

Row 0 = Col 1

Row 1 = Col1/Col2

Row 2 = Col2/Col1

Row 3 = Col 2

 

One should test it. But theory tells us that it depends on the colors involved.

As PAL rotates the V-component of the YUV-signal 180 degree (guess you can say it does v *= -1 every line). Therefore colors with a low V-value can be used with less visible effects.

 

disclaimer: I am no television technician and no video-coding typa guy. I am only seeing it with some WWW-research and strong mathematical background

Till now I haven't fee the need to pursue understanding of it further. As understanding every detail of PAL will give you nothing in the modern world as far as I see.

If we had analysis in this style http://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/

it might be easy to do the "math". AFAIK the needed information for NTSC is here in the forum bu that doesn't help us much with PAL

[Heaven/TQA]

just watched the video of the mentioned game and it would perfectly fit to my engine and what I had in mind...

[Tickled_Pink]

I just remembered something. I converted the graphics for Xenon on the A8 years ago. It was a somewhat long-winded process involving Degas Elite, probably my Multiface ST, a simple pixel plotting program written in Atari Basic and some graph paper. Probably took me a few days to do but it looked pretty good IIRC.

[+therealbountybob]

I tried the 3 XEXs on my 130XE PAL/CRT:

The status bar is particularly impressive