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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
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TC wrote:
> Did you really order those stamps? And if, what happened when you did use
> them?
I'm afraid not. I was just having a Steven Wright moment a few weeks ago...
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Stefan Viljoen wrote:
> Ever had something "saved" to an audio cassette, and you had to PLAY it back
> to the computer? And if it played too softly or loudly it would be
> scrambled?
Ah yes! You get brinky-brinks on TRS-80 when tape is right! :-)
> I remember doubling them (they held 120KB if I remember right) by turning a
> store-bought one over, and cutting another write-protect notch at the
> opposite side, so I could write on the "backside" of the disc, storing 240KB
> (wow, that's a LOT!) on one disc.
That too.
I remember when Myst came out on CD too and thought "Well, so much for
pirating games. You've got like 20x the size of a hard drive on this thing,
you could never copy it." :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Stefan Viljoen <pov### [at] polard com> wrote:
> Ever had something "saved" to an audio cassette, and you had to PLAY it back
> to the computer? And if it played too softly or loudly it would be
> scrambled?
It was possible to recognize the type of data by the sound. For example,
the very first thing that the vast majority of Spectrum games did was to
load a loading screen (usually a depiction of the cover art, sometimes
something else), and that made a very distinctive sound which I could
instantly recognize even today.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> which I could instantly recognize even today.
That's hardcore. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > which I could instantly recognize even today.
>
> That's hardcore. :-)
Puts me in mind of the blind character in 'Sneakers' who could tell what sort of
wiring they were snooping by the buzz it made over his speaker.
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Darren New wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>> which I could instantly recognize even today.
>
> That's hardcore. :-)
That's nothing.
I saved specially designed images to tape to try to reverse-engineer the
algorithm for turning colours into tones. I figured out that if you save
in image composed of horizontal bands of colour, the tape contained a
series of long, continuous tones, and they changed order depending on
which colours you used.
(Recall that the Spectrum stores scanlines in a weird order though...)
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> That's nothing.
>
> I saved specially designed images to tape to try to reverse-engineer the
> algorithm for turning colours into tones. I figured out that if you save
> in image composed of horizontal bands of colour, the tape contained a
> series of long, continuous tones, and they changed order depending on
> which colours you used.
Have you ever heard of sing-song?
This was a C64-program that played a tune on your floppy by repositioning
the read/write head.
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TC wrote:
> This was a C64-program that played a tune on your floppy by repositioning
> the read/write head.
I wrote a program once that you could set a radio on the console and it
would play music with the interference from the bus lines. You know, back
in the days when instructions ran at roughly the speed of AM radio
wavelengths. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Darren New wrote:
> TC wrote:
>> This was a C64-program that played a tune on your floppy by repositioning
>> the read/write head.
>
> I wrote a program once that you could set a radio on the console and it
> would play music with the interference from the bus lines. You know, back
> in the days when instructions ran at roughly the speed of AM radio
> wavelengths. :-)
I consider THAT hardcore.
I remember how my dad cursed when he found out the Apple interfered
precisely on his ham radio frequencies.
No, he never bother to try shielding it, we got a IBM PC next. As I remember
it was still noisy in the ham bands but much less than the Apple was.
--
Stefan Viljoen
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