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The Commodore 64 @ 30

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    #31
    Just had a flashback to the first time I saw Nebulus, as well. Jaw to the floor.

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      #32
      Arguably (actually, possibly unarguably) the smoothest scrolling ever is that of an AGA equipped Amiga i.e. A1200 and A4000 as those machines could perform subpixel scrolling: A low res (as was normal) screen could be scrolled by super-hi-res amounts; same for the sprites. In addition you could have a Hires (or super!) sprite on a low res screen!

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        #33
        Yeah but it's all about that 64 kilobyte *magic*, all on a machine that came out in the 60s, innit.

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          #34
          True. Some C64 games almost look like they could be Amiga games. Some ports are actually better!

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            #35
            Uridium had 50fps scrolling, Braybrook was that good. Admittedly there's enough cycle time to make it happen because it's a 2D scrolling shooter but you still need to implement it. In the same fashion Denis Caswell had the idea for speech in Impossible Mission, and it went in because there was enough room left to accommodate it.

            Btw speaking of cycle counts and IM, there is only one set of agent sprites stored in memory for the game. The game literally flips the sprites on a vertical axis in memory every time you turn around. Bonkers!
            Lie with passion and be forever damned...

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              #36
              That's normal I think (sprite flipping, and rotation even in some cases, and of course palette swapping).

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                #37
                I'm glad I got to meet Ben Daglish a couple of times. Besides his skill with a SID, he was a really funny, entertaining guy. I once went to one of the Back in Time events. There were a lot of slightly awkward people sitting around tables, not speaking very much. Ben was the one who got up on stage and shouted at everyone until they started to dance!

                With regard to C64 versus Amiga scrolling. It's very easy to make the C64 scroll. The C64's screen is made up on 8x8 character blocks. You can move the whole screen a pixel at a time with a simple poke in basic, then once you've moved a full character block, you just need to move the characters in the direction you're going and repeat the process. I think I'm right in saying that the Amiga didn't have characters, so everything had to be plotted onto a bitmap, which took more processing power. It also meant that tricks on the C64 such as simulating parallax scrolling by shifting a character a pixel at a time (which would be repeated for every instance of that character on the screen) were not so easy on the Amiga.

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                  #38
                  Originally posted by ZipZap View Post
                  I think I'm right in saying that the Amiga didn't have characters, so everything had to be plotted onto a bitmap, which took more processing power. .
                  the Amiga's chipset had some lovely features, like a nice fast blitter (which the ST didn't get until later models, so wasn't used much), hardware scrolling and a beam synchronised coprocessor (called the copper) which coupled with the huge number of DMA channels meant you could have a lot of graphics effects running for "free" (using very little CPU time).
                  Games that took advantage of the Amiga could be really impressive. Just look at Lionheart or Kid Chaos.

                  I'm not an expert on how the Amiga tech works, but it certainly had no problems with scrolling.

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                    #39
                    Originally posted by Leon Retro View Post
                    Games that took advantage of the Amiga could be really impressive. Just look at Lionheart or Kid Chaos.

                    I'm not an expert on how the Amiga tech works, but it certainly had no problems with scrolling.
                    I didn't say the Amiga couldn't be made to scroll smoothly, or couldn't do things the C64 can't (the copper is a good example of this; background gradients are even more ubiquitous in Amiga games that character rolling is on the C64!), but there *are* certain things that are easy to do on the C64 that are trickier to do on the Amiga.

                    Edit: There's a thread here (on an Amiga board) that discusses some of the problems that might occur with a 1:1 conversion of Mayhem in Monsterland http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=76317
                    Last edited by ZipZap; 15-11-2018, 17:01.

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                      #40
                      Can I just say that I love reading this thread? I was a pretty fanatical C64 kid. I got my C64 and was a pretty common-or-garden variety of 80s kid- playing and swapping games and doing a bit of basic programming (defining sprites in C64 basic code - LOL!), but when I got my 1541 (after my Nan died - thanks Nan!) I evolved into a game hoarder and was part of an international pirate ring with contacts all over Europe, Australia and a few in the US. We could never play games too deeply as we had to start copying them ASAP to get them out to our contacts. Great fun! It also allowed me to get better at programming as saving your work and retrieving it after a crash became much more convenient than tape.

                      With all the piracy came toys: assembler carts, modems, koala pads and early freeze carts which allowed me to get more hardcore about my coding.
                      I thought I was pretty knowledgable about the C64 amongst most folks from back then but then I came across [MENTION=368]Mayhem[/MENTION] and [MENTION=9465]Brad[/MENTION] here and bow to their in-depth and (in Mayhem's case) fanatical C64 knowledge and devotion.

                      Play on players! :thumbs:

                      Edit: I don't have my C64 anymore alas, I sold it with the 1541 and printer to fund my Amiga 1000 purchase in 1988. So these days I make do with MiST Fpga for my C64 fix - the SID implementation isn't as nice as I'd like but it does handle original joysticks.
                      Last edited by gunrock; 15-11-2018, 19:00.

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                        #41
                        ^ I did that pen-pal piracy thing too, using those freeze-frame carts, etc., and also sold my C64 and 1541 to go next-gen in the late 1980s. I could only afford an Atari ST, though, an experience that was so anaemic and bad - after all the fun I'd had on C64 (and also on my mate's Spec48, to be fair) - that I went into the gaming wilderness for several years afterwards.

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                          #42
                          In terms of console wars of the past there were always arguments for both systems but when it came to Amiga vs ST, if you’d bought the ST then you’d ****ed up and you knew it.

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                            #43
                            Sorry, this is a C64 thread and I think I helped derail it. Back on track though I just got some silicon based oil to grease the tracks in the 1541 floppy!

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                              #44
                              Originally posted by Brad View Post
                              In terms of console wars of the past there were always arguments for both systems but when it came to Amiga vs ST, if you’d bought the ST then you’d ****ed up and you knew it.
                              Yup. I knew it alright. To add insult to injury, my ex-Spec48 sparring buddy got the Amiga.

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                                #45
                                Originally posted by Brad View Post
                                Arguably (actually, possibly unarguably) the smoothest scrolling ever is that of an AGA equipped Amiga i.e. A1200 and A4000 as those machines could perform subpixel scrolling: A low res (as was normal) screen could be scrolled by super-hi-res amounts; same for the sprites. In addition you could have a Hires (or super!) sprite on a low res screen!
                                Yep, think the Amiga had scrolling in hardware down to a quarter of a pixel, I used to use Videoscape 3D and Scala and the scrolling was better than a mega pc with PowerPoint can to today, add in overscan modes, hardware genlocking and background transparency it was an absolute monster of a graphics machine compared to anything else a home user could buy at the time.

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