2 ms·

My experience with vector displays is <that> years old, but as far as I know it was functionally impossible. Granted Cinematronics was using even older hardware

My experience with vector displays is <that> years old, but as far as I know it was functionally impossible. Granted Cinematronics was using even older hardware, but literally the refresh rate became a consideration doing the equivalent of boss-death/cut scenes. The more (length of) lines you draw the more the display begins to look like an old-timey submarine radar display.

PaulHoule 2y ago
That's the physical limit -- the length of the line you can draw; probably you can sweep the voltage faster when you are moving from one line to the next. Here's the best example of text display I've ever seen on a vector display https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJv94FPRddA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJv94FPRddA where you see about 60 "words" on the screen albeit with variable size and other effects you wouldn't see on computer displays at the time. The lines would be short on a full screen of word processing text but the total length would add up to more line than you'd see in those kind of games. I'd imagine you'd need a huge display list though for large amounts of text, 10 points per char and probably more like 10 bits than 8 bits worth of coordinate though you could probably store deltas to get it down to 8 bits in the display list. That gives you a 40kb long display list for 2000 which is most of the address space of an "8-bit" computer though you could fit BASIC in the remainder of one. Thus it's interesting to think of something like the character generator ROM or something that could draw circles or Bezier curves. Sorry, but I like to geek out about old-school display controllers which have an astonishingly high parts count like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Dazzler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Dazzler unless they include an ASIC. People making retrocomputers today struggle to build display controllers that don't live on an FPGA or a microcontroller (ESP32 is fast enough to do something like "cheap video" https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancaster https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancast... with high end performance for a 1980s home computer.)
- gcanyon 2y ago
  Yep, Atari was always a challenge to us on the vector front. I think the most drawing we ever did was the center of the Cosmic Chasm, about 2 minutes in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ0Szz8gpiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ0Szz8gpiE Fun fact: at the end of that video, the default high score list includes me! I'd forgotten this, so thanks for the bump to find this.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Now that I think about it I remember these things which used a storage tube and really could show a whole screenful of text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010 which I think you could have made a word processor for even though it couldn’t scroll. I remember drawing charts on it though, not looking at a lot of text. I think the one I used was side-by-side with a WYSE terminal that was VT-something compatible.

PaulHoule 2y ago

That's the physical limit -- the length of the line you can draw; probably you can sweep the voltage faster when you are moving from one line to the next. Here's the best example of text display I've ever seen on a vector display https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJv94FPRddA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJv94FPRddA where you see about 60 "words" on the screen albeit with variable size and other effects you wouldn't see on computer displays at the time. The lines would be short on a full screen of word processing text but the total length would add up to more line than you'd see in those kind of games. I'd imagine you'd need a huge display list though for large amounts of text, 10 points per char and probably more like 10 bits than 8 bits worth of coordinate though you could probably store deltas to get it down to 8 bits in the display list. That gives you a 40kb long display list for 2000 which is most of the address space of an "8-bit" computer though you could fit BASIC in the remainder of one. Thus it's interesting to think of something like the character generator ROM or something that could draw circles or Bezier curves. Sorry, but I like to geek out about old-school display controllers which have an astonishingly high parts count like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Dazzler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Dazzler unless they include an ASIC. People making retrocomputers today struggle to build display controllers that don't live on an FPGA or a microcontroller (ESP32 is fast enough to do something like "cheap video" https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancaster https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancast... with high end performance for a 1980s home computer.)

gcanyon 2y ago
Yep, Atari was always a challenge to us on the vector front. I think the most drawing we ever did was the center of the Cosmic Chasm, about 2 minutes in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ0Szz8gpiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ0Szz8gpiE Fun fact: at the end of that video, the default high score list includes me! I'd forgotten this, so thanks for the bump to find this.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Now that I think about it I remember these things which used a storage tube and really could show a whole screenful of text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010 which I think you could have made a word processor for even though it couldn’t scroll. I remember drawing charts on it though, not looking at a lot of text. I think the one I used was side-by-side with a WYSE terminal that was VT-something compatible.