3 ms·
Others have mentioned some other good games (Ms Pac, Keystone Kapers, River Raid, etc). There was something about the first generation Activision games that se
by lowercased 4y ago
Others have mentioned some other good games (Ms Pac, Keystone Kapers, River Raid, etc).
There was something about the first generation Activision games that seemed to stand out compared to the rest. Whether simple or complex, they had some hard to pinpoint quality that was just... 'good'. David Crane mentions this in one of the linked videos. "2 line kernel didn't look good. 1 line kernel was harder to do, but looked better, so we just did that". He's referring to doing more work to be able to make visual updates every scan line, instead of every other scan line. This made their games so much more visually sharp and appealing compared to what came before on the same hardware.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoSo the TIA (the Atari video chip) has a "delay" slot for its "player" graphics--a player being an 8 dot wide object - the CPU is supposed to program in new data the player graphics register during the HBLANK portion of the display for each scaline it's visible. The intention was that the CPU would spend 1 scan line updating P0 graphics, then the next scan line updating P1 graphics, and by setting the delay for P0, both player graphics would appear on the same 2-line portion. So "2 line kernels" were doing it in a way the TIA supported and providing time to do other things like check paddle status (because you're supposed to be programming a Pong game). Of course the TIA has been wonderfully pushed and twisted in ways never imagined by the designer. I think someone even experimented with interlaced 160x400 graphics.
- lowercased 4y agoThanks for the extra details :)