4 ms·
> to Commodore 64 level That’s unfair to C64 which can smooth scroll very well.
by sedatk 8mo ago
> to Commodore 64 level
That’s unfair to C64 which can smooth scroll very well.
- nine_k 8mo agoNot by repainting the whole screen every frame!
- sedatk 8mo agoModern browsers don’t repaint the whole screen every frame either.
- npsomaratna 8mo agoI owned a C64. Remember how buttery smooth the interfaces of those '80s computers were?
- ekianjo 8mo agofewer layers between software and hardware...
- cryptonector 8mo agoNot Apples. But Amigas, omg those were smooth.
- guenthert 8mo agoI was green with envy, when I saw how fast and smooth a C64 scrolled some text (iirc it was some machine code monitor). My Amstrad CPC464 had no text mode and the Z80A CPU was clearly overwhelmed with shifting the whopping 16KiB RAM of the graphics buffer or even just rendering a line of text.
- sedatk 8mo agoCPC allows some level of smooth scrolling, albeit not as good as C64. Lack of a text mode is a problem too as you said.
- sehugg 8mo agoEh, the NES is better because you get two entire screen buffers. The C-64 gives you only one offscreen row or column to repaint every coarse scroll, and the colormap is fixed so you gotta move all of its bytes while racing the beam.
- weinzierl 8mo agoExactly! The C64 could control where the beam started painting. To move the screen a pixel you just wrote the the x and y offsets to two 8-bit I/O registers. Only after scrolling 7 or 8 pixels you had to copy memory around. I was relatively easy to get this right smoothly and since everything was in sync with the beam it was easy to make tear free. Shaking effects that did not require memory copy were even easier.