6 ms·

In the 1980's there were no fancy scanline tricks to get more colours out of the Spectrum. Game developers just did an extremely good job of working around the

In the 1980's there were no fancy scanline tricks to get more colours out of the Spectrum. Game developers just did an extremely good job of working around the limitations of having two colours in an 8x8 block of pixels. Play anything by 'Ultimate Play The Game' to see how gameplay worked, unimpeded by attribute clashes. I am amazed that decades after the Spectrum was current that clever code has been written to get more colours than previously thought possible in an 8x8 area. However, none of this was available in the 1980's, when people actually used/played games on these home micros. The situation was different with the ZX81. Originally this had the lamest display ever, black and white, 40 x 25 characters. Some characters were graphics, i.e. a bit like very blocky unicode. Notionally that was the best you could get. However, you could re-map the characters to RAM and in RAM you could put your own character definitions, e.g. the letter 'A' could be made to be your own 8x8 pixel black and white character. If you re-mapped every character then you could create a rudimentary 'high resolution' game environment. This technique actually required 'shadow RAM' in the 8-16K part of memory. You then had to enter characters the hard way, working out from graph paper what the binary was to be. At the time this was mind blowing. The iphone launch was nothing compared to the excitement of getting high res black and white graphics on the ZX81. But, it was on the BBC Micro where real mind blowing stuff happened. The game Elite did something utterly crazy with graphics on the BBC B. The top part of the screen was in high res black and white and the lower dashboard/console was in chunkier four colour graphics. The Braben/Bell team had managed to not only think of switching modes mid screen, they implemented it and they did it all with genuine 3D. This only worked on the BBC Micro, other variants of Elite were not as good as there wasn't the hardware on other systems to do truly cool stuff. Imagine if you went to a web page and the top part had 4K monochrome video even if you didn't think your computer did 4K with the part below the video at 720p with HDR colours, with there being both modes on screen at once. You would be in awe of that, and this is the best analogy I can think of to think of what Elite did. Elite was a 1980's game and this hardcore hacking of the display modes was available at the time and not something developed demo-scene style decades later. Elite defied so many things that should not have been possible. As well as the funky screen modes there were things like the thousands of planets, far too many and far too detailed to fit into RAM. This was tantamount to magic. I never felt that any of the hacks on the Spectrum had that jaw-dropping awe factor, it is a shame that the subsequent video hacks were not available at the time, in the 1980's.

vidarh 8y ago
> However, none of this was available in the 1980's, when people actually used/played games on these home micros. I don't know whether or not it was used on the Spectrum in the 1980's, but here is one from 1990: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBOPdiGC5EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBOPdiGC5EY Though these kind of raster effects were absolutely staple of both demos and games in the early 80's on the C64, so it'd surprise me if there aren't earlier examples on the Spectrum as well. I'm not sure when exactly it became common, but e.g. pretty much all pseudo-3d racing games for the C64 used raster effects, as you can see in this video of Pole Position (1984) for example: https://archive.org/details/C64Gamevideoarchive104-PolePosition https://archive.org/details/C64Gamevideoarchive104-PolePosit... There's is brief flickering of the stripes on the road at the beginning (most visible from around 15-30 seconds; when the game starts it shifts too fast to be very noticeable) - this is due to poorly timed colour changes; an interrupt handler was used to switch the background colour for the stripes, but you want to do so in the horizontal blank, and you'd regularly see them miss-time this. I can't tell if the ZX Spectrum version of Pole Position used the same trick, or if it just flipped colour per character block: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76omr-7FDXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76omr-7FDXo > But, it was on the BBC Micro where real mind blowing stuff happened. The game Elite did something utterly crazy with graphics on the BBC B. The top part of the screen was in high res black and white and the lower dashboard/console was in chunkier four colour graphics. The Braben/Bell team had managed to not only think of switching modes mid screen, they implemented it and they did it all with genuine 3D. Are you sure? I don't see any signs of this here: https://www.mobygames.com/game/bbc-micro_/elite/screenshots/gameShotId,439590/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/bbc-micro_/elite/screenshots/... https://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/elite/screenshots/gameShotId,131048/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/elite/screenshots/gameSho... They both seem to have identical resolution. The C64 version would have been capable of that level of colour in both it's bitmap modes (320x200 and 160x200), as it could do a minimum of two colour per 8x8 cell in the 320x200 mode as well. [EDIT: Actually, there are things in the image that would require the "lores" 160x200 mode on the C64; so it might be that both of them do the mode switching; it'd be able to use multiple colours but some of them seem to use two foreground colours per 8x8 block and that wouldn't work in hires - though it'd be possible to achieve the effects shown with a couple of sprites and some raster colour changes, it'd probably be more trouble than it'd be worth vs. a mode change] Though the bitmap modes were overall very rarely used on the C64 (Elite was a very notable exception) as it was more common to use tiles with custom character sets combined with sprites, even for pseudo-3d games like Skyfox as it was much faster (at the cost of jerkier movement and more memory for multiple scaled copies of graphics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNkFD_jMzto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNkFD_jMzto > This only worked on the BBC Micro, other variants of Elite were not as good as there wasn't the hardware on other systems to do truly cool stuff. There were 16/32 bit version of Elite that did much better, but of course that was a few years later. Here's the Amiga version: https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/elite/screenshots https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/elite/screenshots

vidarh 8y ago

> However, none of this was available in the 1980's, when people actually used/played games on these home micros. I don't know whether or not it was used on the Spectrum in the 1980's, but here is one from 1990: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBOPdiGC5EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBOPdiGC5EY Though these kind of raster effects were absolutely staple of both demos and games in the early 80's on the C64, so it'd surprise me if there aren't earlier examples on the Spectrum as well. I'm not sure when exactly it became common, but e.g. pretty much all pseudo-3d racing games for the C64 used raster effects, as you can see in this video of Pole Position (1984) for example: https://archive.org/details/C64Gamevideoarchive104-PolePosition https://archive.org/details/C64Gamevideoarchive104-PolePosit... There's is brief flickering of the stripes on the road at the beginning (most visible from around 15-30 seconds; when the game starts it shifts too fast to be very noticeable) - this is due to poorly timed colour changes; an interrupt handler was used to switch the background colour for the stripes, but you want to do so in the horizontal blank, and you'd regularly see them miss-time this. I can't tell if the ZX Spectrum version of Pole Position used the same trick, or if it just flipped colour per character block: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76omr-7FDXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76omr-7FDXo > But, it was on the BBC Micro where real mind blowing stuff happened. The game Elite did something utterly crazy with graphics on the BBC B. The top part of the screen was in high res black and white and the lower dashboard/console was in chunkier four colour graphics. The Braben/Bell team had managed to not only think of switching modes mid screen, they implemented it and they did it all with genuine 3D. Are you sure? I don't see any signs of this here: https://www.mobygames.com/game/bbc-micro_/elite/screenshots/gameShotId,439590/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/bbc-micro_/elite/screenshots/... https://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/elite/screenshots/gameShotId,131048/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/elite/screenshots/gameSho... They both seem to have identical resolution. The C64 version would have been capable of that level of colour in both it's bitmap modes (320x200 and 160x200), as it could do a minimum of two colour per 8x8 cell in the 320x200 mode as well. [EDIT: Actually, there are things in the image that would require the "lores" 160x200 mode on the C64; so it might be that both of them do the mode switching; it'd be able to use multiple colours but some of them seem to use two foreground colours per 8x8 block and that wouldn't work in hires - though it'd be possible to achieve the effects shown with a couple of sprites and some raster colour changes, it'd probably be more trouble than it'd be worth vs. a mode change] Though the bitmap modes were overall very rarely used on the C64 (Elite was a very notable exception) as it was more common to use tiles with custom character sets combined with sprites, even for pseudo-3d games like Skyfox as it was much faster (at the cost of jerkier movement and more memory for multiple scaled copies of graphics): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNkFD_jMzto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNkFD_jMzto > This only worked on the BBC Micro, other variants of Elite were not as good as there wasn't the hardware on other systems to do truly cool stuff. There were 16/32 bit version of Elite that did much better, but of course that was a few years later. Here's the Amiga version: https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/elite/screenshots https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/elite/screenshots