3 ms·
The bottom 8 bits were alway zero, so all you could really do was 8 row (1280 byte) vertical scrolling. I don’t think you could change the screen base address m
by to3m 9y ago
The bottom 8 bits were alway zero, so all you could really do was 8 row (1280 byte) vertical scrolling. I don’t think you could change the screen base address mid-frame either, so you’d need a double-height buffer to do a continuous scroll.
The STe fixed both of these problems, and had variable wid5h rows and the pixel offset thing too. That meant a setup that was roughly equivalent to a 4-bit Amiga screen, though with interleaved bitplanes (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
- cmrdporcupine 9y agoThe STe Blitter was really great, but totally underutilized because it was such a small fraction of the ST market. Atari really dropped the ball by getting the Blitter to market so late. Interesting the different approaches. Commodore shipped the Amiga 1000 at too expensive a price point, and so Tramiel (who had rushed the ST to market just before the Amiga) got in with a rock bottom priced machine that initially looked like it would kill the Amiga (which was his intention.) But Commodore followed up with the cost reduced Amiga 500 which ended up winning against Atari Corp in the home gaming market (though IMHO the ST and offshoots were still far better productivity machines than the Amiga and did well in that market in Germany). Going back to some of those ST games I loved, they have really crappy frame rates and high latencies.