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Thanks for the submission. One thing I'm confused about. So, he said that in the animated scenes, the animation was done with palette shifting, and not separate

by Lich 10y ago

Thanks for the submission. One thing I'm confused about. So, he said that in the animated scenes, the animation was done with palette shifting, and not separate components/layers. I understand that bit. However, how would the animation be done in the game? Does he mean that the palette shifting is implemented within the game, or is the palette shifting technique to easily and quickly produce art assets?

roywiggins 10y ago
Video cards supported swapping palettes out in real time. http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5 http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S... > Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer could change this palette at will, and all the onscreen colors would instantly change to match. It was fast, and took virtually no memory. Thus began the era of color cycling.
- kd5bjo 10y ago
  The technique is even older than that -- most graphics modes on the 8-bit Ataris only supported a 4-color palette. To get more colors on the screen, you had to take an interrupt partway through the frame to swap out some of the colors and then put them back during the vertical blank to be ready for the next frame.
corysama 10y ago
The pallete shifting was implemented in the game. At the time, the video cards worked by having a 4 or 8 bit image resident in video RAM and also a 16 or 256 entry pallete of colors as well (18 bit was common in VGA, you didn't even get 24bit palletes!). The card would do the pallete transform every frame pixel by pixel as it scanned out the image to the CRT. The point being: at no point in time did a 18 bit, full color image exist anywhere in RAM. That meant even on a machine that was too slow to even just upload a whole frame of 320x200 8 bit pixels 30 times/second, you could still easily upload a pallete of 256 colors every frame. Just doing that would change how the whole image displayed without actually doing the work of touching any of the pixels.

by Lich 10y ago

roywiggins 10y ago

Video cards supported swapping palettes out in real time. http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5 http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S... > Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer could change this palette at will, and all the onscreen colors would instantly change to match. It was fast, and took virtually no memory. Thus began the era of color cycling.

kd5bjo 10y ago
The technique is even older than that -- most graphics modes on the 8-bit Ataris only supported a 4-color palette. To get more colors on the screen, you had to take an interrupt partway through the frame to swap out some of the colors and then put them back during the vertical blank to be ready for the next frame.

corysama 10y ago

The pallete shifting was implemented in the game. At the time, the video cards worked by having a 4 or 8 bit image resident in video RAM and also a 16 or 256 entry pallete of colors as well (18 bit was common in VGA, you didn't even get 24bit palletes!). The card would do the pallete transform every frame pixel by pixel as it scanned out the image to the CRT. The point being: at no point in time did a 18 bit, full color image exist anywhere in RAM. That meant even on a machine that was too slow to even just upload a whole frame of 320x200 8 bit pixels 30 times/second, you could still easily upload a pallete of 256 colors every frame. Just doing that would change how the whole image displayed without actually doing the work of touching any of the pixels.