Retro Gamer forum

the speccy palette is basically 8 colors each with 2 brightnesses which hardly differs, while the c64 has 16 truly individual colors. No, by that score the C64 has just nine individual colours: Five shades of grey (including black and white); two shades each of red, green and blue; and one each of ...

Here are a few random pieces of Spectrum artwork. There are plenty more to be found at Demotopia http://stuweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~bm10/Spec/1102.png http://stuweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~bm10/Spec/1103.png http://stuweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~bm10/Spec/1232.png I guess things are always going to be a little subjective w...

Generally, the VIC-II is the "magic" and the 6510 doesn't add anything to to the pot by itself, in fact it's only a few minor tweaks away from being a stock 6502. What gives the C64 a speed advantage over the BBC, CPC or Spectrum is the character-based screen modes; most scrolling games run in char...

Which scrolls ridiculously fast because the hardware can't move it any more finely (the CTRC steps through in two byte increments i believe?) - from what i gather, Fres Attack was written more as a proof-of-concept for the scrolling than as an actual game and it's not the most playable title on the...

those high resolution modes cannot be use for a playfield since they are slow and has like 2 colors == > unusable. That's an utterly ludicrous statement. Those modes are no "slower" than any others on the machines. Whilst most of the games that use them are text adventures, it's perfectly possible ...

that shows how bad the ULA was designed, it would be possible to read the colors only once for each char row, and then buffer them - like the c64 gfx chip does :lol: I suspect the VIC-II does it that way because it has to. It's already a very hot chip running at 8MHz. Double that and you'd be able ...

The basic trick to multicolour rendering on the Spectrum is changing the attributes between scanlines. Then, the next time the ULA reads them for the following line, you'll get different colours. Because it's so timing critical, it's really hard to get it working inside an action game where code wil...

I first got a ZX81 because they were cheap and nobody really knew what a home computer was back then. It was always going to be a limited machine, but it was an incredible bit of design to build a computer from just four chips at the time. I liked it so much that I persuaded my parents to get a Spec...

If you want some evidence that the Atari 8-bit scene is very much alive and kicking, have a look at this Spectrum emulator that was recently written for the machine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksoIdQ-p910

I think that's worth a few brown pictures, eh?

Don't forget Acornsoft's Defender... oops! I mean Planetoid too.

Revs is worth a mention too. The best racing simulator around until Geoff Crammond did it again with Formula 1 Grand Prix on the 16-bits. OK, there was a port to the C64, but that's like playing the game at half-speed compared to the BBC version. I'd guess that where the BBC loses out is that it did...

so the video chip does not steal extra cycles when it comes to more colors? a z80 at 3.3 MHz doesnt sound much faster than a 6510 at 1mhz. :P Especially when you lack charmode for moving level data fast. No. The only cycles stolen on the CPC are so that instruction timings are bumped up to the near...

oswald wrote:btw when you are in 16 color mode dont you loose all cpu power ?

No. Whatever gave you that idea?

The CPC has far more CPU power in all graphics modes than the C64, that's for sure.

oh missed this one amongst the lines, okay now show us what pictures can you do with your machines :lol: Here are some CPC ones I had lying around: http://stuweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~bm10/CPC/oeil.gif http://stuweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~bm10/CPC/landscape.gif http://stuweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~bm10/CPC/almaden.gif

What is the deal with the CPC and scrolling? I've heard about it having some kind of smooth scroll capability, but just about every CPC game I've seen has jerky scrolling. Did it have some kind of hardware scroll feature that most programmer's didn't use or didn't know about? It supported a quick a...