4 ms·
Well, technically Asteroids was always played on an oscilloscope, of course.
by Vivtek 16y ago
Well, technically Asteroids was always played on an oscilloscope, of course.
- joezydeco 16y agoAhem, we prefer vector monitor thankyouverymuch. =) Actually the architecture of those old Atari vector games is pretty remarkable given the technology at the time. You had a 6502 with the game logic, generating a list of items to be drawn by a second CPU, implemented entirely in TTL with a custom opcode set of it's own. All in under 16K of object code. http://www.philpem.me.uk/elec/vecgen.pdf http://www.philpem.me.uk/elec/vecgen.pdf
- arethuza 16y agoWas that what was used for the Atari Star Wars arcade games of the mid 80s?
- joezydeco 16y agoYup. The color vector games had next generation set of hardware, but same idea. The color was a neat hack by varying the intensity of the beam, hitting differently colored phosphors layered on the inside of the glass.
- msarnoff 16y agoThe color/3D Atari vector games used the Analog Vector Generator, which used op-amps to trace smooth lines of arbitrary length and angle on the screen. It also seems to fall out of calibration as the years go on, which is why you see a lot of Star Wars and Tempest machines with jittery images. More information on the Atari vector hardware, written by one of the original engineers, is here: http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm
- joezydeco 16y agoIf you really want to get esoteric and hackish, the Cinematronics vector games of the era had NO microprocessors in them at all. It's all bit-sliced TTL gates and EPROMs to hold the object code. Wrap your noggin around that one.
- arethuza 16y agoAbout the same time I was playing too much Atari Star Wars I was also using HLH Orions on my CS course - the early models had bitslice based CPUs and had user programmable microcode: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion
- arethuza 16y agoThanks - I knew it looked like a proper vector display but assumed that it couldn't have been due to the fact it had color.