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The smooth scrolling is pretty hard. One of my favorite bits of Masters of Doom about id Software was when they hacked a port of Super Mario Bros 3 to the PC, b
by gaogao 8y ago
The smooth scrolling is pretty hard. One of my favorite bits of Masters of Doom about id Software was when they hacked a port of Super Mario Bros 3 to the PC, but as history can tell, Nintendo didn't bite on that one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWD6Y9FUuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWD6Y9FUuw
- NeoBasilisk 8y agoBut we got Commander Keen, which will always have a special place in my heart.
- thatoneuser 8y agoI read that book as a teenager and it made me want to start my own gaming company just so I could throw keyboards at my coworkers :D
- carmate383 8y agoWhich book is that?
- akovaski 8y ago"Masters of Doom"
- benj111 8y agoDo you tell that story at job interviews?
- thatoneuser 8y agoHaha no but that's actually a solid idea. I've been freelancing lately but if I ever go back Ima need some material so thanks!
- BurningCycles 8y agoWell this is on the Commodore 64, and smooth scrolling was quite easy on this machine as it had hardware support for scrolling and raster interrupts.
- gaogao 8y agoI stand corrected, as what I had mentioned was only necessary given lack of hardware support for scrolling. Good catch.
- codesushi42 8y agoYes. It was hard for Commander Keen because DOS used a screen buffer that was written to first before rendering the pixels to screen, which was quite slow back then. In comparison, game consoles used blitting, and would directly send the lines to the CRT to draw. I assume C64 is the same.
- comex 8y agoThat’s true, but this is from the readme > VSP (VARIABLE SCREEN POSITIONING) > This port relies on the VSP-technique for scrolling. If you experience crashes while playing the game, this is most likely the issue. You may find out if your computer is prone to crashing by running VSP Lab. I don’t know anything about the C64, but it sounds like scrolling the screen in this case wasn’t easy at all, if it required a technique that outright crashes on some C64s.
- jepler 8y agoBest explanation of vsp (or, vsp-induced crashing) I'm aware of: https://www.linusakesson.net/scene/safevsp/index.php https://www.linusakesson.net/scene/safevsp/index.php
- codesushi42 8y agoInteresting. So is VSP something that was officially documented, or was it an undocumented hack that was discovered? The blast processing trick on the Genesis would be something similar then. There's a syncing issue with that one too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvvL6S5Buiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvvL6S5Buiw
- skocznymroczny 8y agoIt's kind of ironic, that smooth scrolling was killing PCs at the time and consoles had it easy, but then Doom came out and until Playstation no console could handle it properly (because they were so optimized for sprite based games, I suppose).
- tboughen 8y agoiD made the Doom port for the Atari Jaguar, and apart from missing a few levels, was an awesome port.
- skocznymroczny 8y agoIt was missing the music too.