TC <do-not-reply@i-do get-enough-spam-already-2498.com> wrote:
> >  I still don't buy a *sine wave* taking *10 minutes* to draw, even if you
> > used BASIC.

> I think the sine-function was not the problem. The drawing of the pixels 
> was. Maybe my method of determining which bits were set was the culprit, I 
> don't remember. Maybe PEEK and POKE did take extra time.

  I still have hard time believing some peeks and pokes consuming 3 million
clock cycles in order to draw one pixel, no matter what the system.

> Besides, to get a smooth curve you had to compute more than one pixel per 
> column.

  A smooth curve? What do you mean? Like antialiasing? Color gradients?
On a Vic-20?

> The Spectrum seems to have had way better graphics than the VIC.

  Quite poorer than most systems of the time. Only 16 (well 15 in practice)
fixed colors (no palette of any kind), and you can use only 2 colors for
each 8x8 pixels square on screen. This limits graphical possibilities quite
a lot (and many games had to be extremely ingenuous to try to circumvent
this limitation; most games didn't even bother and just used full-screen
2-color graphics). Forget about eg. smooth scrolling of colored images.

  Most other systems had hardware tiles and sprites. For example on the NES
you could use 4 colors (from a palette of almost 64) on each 16x16 pixel
background tile, and you could scroll this background smoothly. Additionally,
you could have a number of 8x8 sprites at any location on screen (with
certain limitations), and these sprites could use 4 colors each (one of them
could optionally be transparent), independently of the background tiles.
Since the tiles and sprites were handled by hardware they didn't stress the
CPU, and thus you could achieve more impressive graphics even though the
CPU was much slower than the one on the Spectrum.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message