I'm not sure you would call it vertical rupture, but I had two independently moving screens displayed in late 82 when I was starting on Rally-X for the first time! I wouldn't call it vertical rupture as it had two vsyncs per 50Hz, but one got ignored because it was half way down the screen - I'm sure it wouldn't have worked on many displays but it used two start addresses to display different things - this was before I realised that one would scroll into the other ![#-o]( "d'oh!")
The horizontal resolution for hardware scrolling is twice as chunky as the beeb, so you would need to quadruple buffer to achieve the R-Type like game that I did a demo for.
The palette is probably the best 8bit palette although I think the first palette extenders for the beeb came out in 82 I think they mostly only allowed 8 colours to be redefined but for the right game e.g. Frogger this isn't a problem.
Being z80 it could have got different direct arcade ports than the beeb, but I don't think there were any bitd.
I certainly think it makes a good 8 bit games machine but bitd, I think it was which company was prepared to spend the money or developer the personal time to make something stand out.
It was also much later, so should have been much better, although comparing it to a Master would probably be a fairer comparison and then it only has the palette advantage, so on balance, I would say it is about the same.
The Spectrum was hampered by character aligned colour/attribute mode but was forced to a resolution that made monochrome with a little colour look great.
The C64 was hamstrung by the very slow CPU and I would count the sprites as a mixed blessing, great for cheap games, but seductive causing games to look cheap!
They all had their strength and weaknesses and all got some great games.
The horizontal resolution for hardware scrolling is twice as chunky as the beeb, so you would need to quadruple buffer to achieve the R-Type like game that I did a demo for.
The palette is probably the best 8bit palette although I think the first palette extenders for the beeb came out in 82 I think they mostly only allowed 8 colours to be redefined but for the right game e.g. Frogger this isn't a problem.
Being z80 it could have got different direct arcade ports than the beeb, but I don't think there were any bitd.
I certainly think it makes a good 8 bit games machine but bitd, I think it was which company was prepared to spend the money or developer the personal time to make something stand out.
It was also much later, so should have been much better, although comparing it to a Master would probably be a fairer comparison and then it only has the palette advantage, so on balance, I would say it is about the same.
The Spectrum was hampered by character aligned colour/attribute mode but was forced to a resolution that made monochrome with a little colour look great.
The C64 was hamstrung by the very slow CPU and I would count the sprites as a mixed blessing, great for cheap games, but seductive causing games to look cheap!
They all had their strength and weaknesses and all got some great games.
Statistics: Posted by tricky — Sat Dec 21, 2024 11:45 am