3 ms·

Blitting refers to rewriting bytes, yes. It does not imply dedicated hardware to do so, which is why Apple games flickered. Calling Atari and Commodore graphic

Blitting refers to rewriting bytes, yes. It does not imply dedicated hardware to do so, which is why Apple games flickered. Calling Atari and Commodore graphics "awkward" in the scenario you describe sounds like laziness in learning and taking advantage of new graphics hardware. The sole "awkward" thing on the Atari was that, for some reason, the sprites were as tall as the screen and therefore the only way to achieve vertical movement of a sprite was indeed to move it through memory. But you could do this even in BASIC by setting the sprite data up in a character string and using the fast string functions to move it. Both the Atari and Commodore made graphics programming decidedly non-awkward by providing automated collision detection between the sprites, and also with the background. Moving sprites around during screen refresh was common on both platforms. On the Atari, the technique (called a display-list interrupt) could also be used to put 256 colors on the screen at once and simulate multi-color sprites. An innovative use of display-list interrupts gave rise to this cool effect that was called (by LucasArts if I recall) "altered-perspective scrolling." Check it out here in BallBlazer, a soccer-type game written for the Ataris: https://youtu.be/_tkwWD_BWWQ?t=631 https://youtu.be/_tkwWD_BWWQ?t=631

satisfice 4y ago
No, Apple games did not flicker. We used screen swapping to stop that. It's the first lesson I learned as a video game programmer: flicker not allowed. I don't know what your deal is with the word "awkward." As someone who wrote a lot of games on Apple, C64, and one each on the PC and Amiga, I've earned the right to use whatever innocuous word I want to describe a vague feeling that I have. Mind you, all that more than 35 years ago. Perhaps I am misremembering how non-awkward it all was. I did not do anything with the Atari. I was merely told by my boss and friend Dale Disharoon how strange he found it. Yes, we liked the C64 collision detection. The main awkwardness about the C64 was, at the time I was first working with it, that it was all undocumented. I just think it's awkward to call information to get the phone number of a writer of a magazine article in Toronto to find out how to work the vertical blank interrupt, since there was no reference manual at that time. The Amiga manuals were full of errors when they first came out. I suppose I am a lazy learner. As you can read all about in my book about being a high school dropout, published by Simon and Schuster (get your copy in Korean today!). Also see page 60 of this issue of Compute Gazette (https://archive.org/details/1983-11-computegazette/page/n59/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1983-11-computegazette/page/n59/...).
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  Apple games flickered and sucked ass. It's time to admit it, bro. Also: The sound of a planet blowing up on an Apple resembled someone spilling a bowl of pistachio shells.
  - satisfice 4y ago
    It sounds more like you want to say that the Apple II+ sucked. That’s fair. I don’t disagree with that. The sound was generated by a single click which if repeated fast enough became a buzz. I wrote a nice little routine to emulate pink noise, once, so it would sound like a car skidding. That was kind of cool. I sense that you are too young to have first hand knowledge of these things, but if you do then your memories are just as faded as mine. I remember that we didn’t have flicker. And I was in the industry at the time developing games for the Apple II.
- kazinator 4y ago
  Apple II games didn't flicker, but exhibited tearing because there was no indication of the vertical retrace: no I/O pin or interrupt, nothing. I don't remember a lot either and am searching for this now. It looks like the Apple IIe added a bit at $C019 for detecting vertical retrace, but the II+ and earlier didn't have it.

satisfice 4y ago

No, Apple games did not flicker. We used screen swapping to stop that. It's the first lesson I learned as a video game programmer: flicker not allowed. I don't know what your deal is with the word "awkward." As someone who wrote a lot of games on Apple, C64, and one each on the PC and Amiga, I've earned the right to use whatever innocuous word I want to describe a vague feeling that I have. Mind you, all that more than 35 years ago. Perhaps I am misremembering how non-awkward it all was. I did not do anything with the Atari. I was merely told by my boss and friend Dale Disharoon how strange he found it. Yes, we liked the C64 collision detection. The main awkwardness about the C64 was, at the time I was first working with it, that it was all undocumented. I just think it's awkward to call information to get the phone number of a writer of a magazine article in Toronto to find out how to work the vertical blank interrupt, since there was no reference manual at that time. The Amiga manuals were full of errors when they first came out. I suppose I am a lazy learner. As you can read all about in my book about being a high school dropout, published by Simon and Schuster (get your copy in Korean today!). Also see page 60 of this issue of Compute Gazette (https://archive.org/details/1983-11-computegazette/page/n59/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1983-11-computegazette/page/n59/...).

NonNefarious 4y ago
Apple games flickered and sucked ass. It's time to admit it, bro. Also: The sound of a planet blowing up on an Apple resembled someone spilling a bowl of pistachio shells.
- satisfice 4y ago
  It sounds more like you want to say that the Apple II+ sucked. That’s fair. I don’t disagree with that. The sound was generated by a single click which if repeated fast enough became a buzz. I wrote a nice little routine to emulate pink noise, once, so it would sound like a car skidding. That was kind of cool. I sense that you are too young to have first hand knowledge of these things, but if you do then your memories are just as faded as mine. I remember that we didn’t have flicker. And I was in the industry at the time developing games for the Apple II.
kazinator 4y ago
Apple II games didn't flicker, but exhibited tearing because there was no indication of the vertical retrace: no I/O pin or interrupt, nothing. I don't remember a lot either and am searching for this now. It looks like the Apple IIe added a bit at $C019 for detecting vertical retrace, but the II+ and earlier didn't have it.