How Sprites saved Video Games in the 1980s. Hardware Sprite Generation, Software Techniques
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- @acs8-bitzone651 Beginning a series on Sprites, Animation, Graphics, and Programming Video Games on Retro console gaming and home computer systems from the 1980s. Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer. Atari 800XL. Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Commodore 64.
You’re a hero! I found your two videos on sprites fun and inspiring. I’m currently researching some classic game history for a book I’ve been writing. Great to see the old school tech again!
welcome!!! thanks for your videos and nice to see you in action again!!!
Great to see that you're making clear quality videos again! Can't wait for part 2!
Nice, clear introduction! I am looking forward to seeing more!
Welcome back! Looking forward to the rest of this series 👍
The Atari 7800 was awesome at sprites!
Yes!
Thank you for your time and explanation. I hope to make a nice 8-bit game, 1 day.
Please do!
Awesome, can't wait for part 2!!!
Excellent
Great stuff!
Great video!
No blitting technique could match hardware sprites back in the day because sprites were a part of the video controller's scanout process. The video controller would select whether to pull pixel data from the background pattern table or a sprite pattern, in real time, as the beam scanned so there was no masking through bitwise operations.
Amiga programmers' use of the blitter to draw BOBs (blitter objects) came close to sprites in speed. And today we have GPUs that can just slam arbitrary pixels into the frame buffer at high speed. But back in the early 80s, if you didn't have hardware sprites, you were incurring a performance hit.
Back in the day color was limited. So you used up all available (16) colors for your background already? Here comes the Amiga with 16 more colors for your sprites. Or the C64 with one individual color per sprite. If there would just have been 256 colors in total! I still don't get the MegaDrive. It seems that they had to use a chip from TI and could not place the palette after the sprite engine. So the full colors where funneled through the circuitry ( and not spriteNo+ColorIndex ). Thus cheap MegaDrive has lower number of colors than Amiga or AtariST.
The TI-99/4 (no "a") came out in 1979 I believe. It also had sprites but no bitmap mode.
Yes. Correct.
Atari 8-bit computers only had 4 real sprites (or "players") that were 8 bits wide. They also had 4 "missiles" that were just 2 bit dots. The 4 missiles had the same colors as their corresponding players. You could group the 4 missiles together to form a 5th player, but it would have to be the color of playfield color register 3. Both the players and the missiles could be reused on multiple horizontal rows on the screen. You could put more than 4 in a horizontal row if you used flicker to display them in alternate frames.
It doesn't sound easy! I think the Atari game programmers were even more amazing for producing the effects they did. The hardware provided just enough for them to pull off amazing looking effects at the time.
@@acs8-bitzone651 , I agree. Atari programmers did amazing things with only 4 sprites. They were able to replicate "arcade quality" games through about 1984. That was pretty impressive on a computer that came out in 1979. Around 1985 the arcade games were getting too complex to recreate very well on Atari 8-bit computers.
LOVE IT!
TY!
Interesting!
I didn't remember that GET and PUT accepted boolean operators (AND, OR, etc.). Is this only for CoCo 3 or works on CoCo 1/2 with Extended Color BASIC, too?
They sure do, and on the 1/2 as well. It may be only in extended CB and not in CB, but I'm not sure on that as my Cocos have ECB.
some corrections on sprites for atari & TI99. The Atari 8-bit could only produce 4 bands called players that were the length of the screen that could be defined into sprite like. A 5th player could be created by merging the 4 2 bit wide missiles that were assigned to each player. so, the Atari, without fancy software tricks, could have a max of 5 sprite like players.
also the TI-99/4a could create a max of 32 real up to 16x16 1 color sprites BUT only 4 per horizontal line could be seen at a time.
Thanks for the corrections. I didn't use the TI-99 much. The 4 per line limit probably made game programmers get creative in their timing and layouts.
Good thing with the Atari 8-bits though was that those "fancy software tricks" were running on a 1.79mhz cpu. It wasn't actually ".79mhz" faster in performance since it was limited by ram speed, but compared to the C64 for instance, it could keep up quite well, simply because it had a few thousand more cpu cycles available per video frame.
The TI-99/4a though.... well, it had a really interesting 16bit cpu but could only access main ram which was 8bit, though the video chip.
Most of the 6502 machines had 2mhz ram with 1mhz cpu and video so they interleaved accesses seamlessly between the two. The poor TI had no such luck...
1:02 - Bad example. Boulder Dash does not use sprites. Even the player character is made up from screen characters. Because the game does not _need_ to go more complicated for the result it creates.
Ah, so no sprites in that one, eh. I was unsure myself, but one clue is the slight jumpiness of the motion. However, as you said, it works fine for this style of game.
Hi Sir, Which software is best for 8 bit sprites editing? I want output as hex code.
Hi, while I was trying to determine how to answer this question, I found this video from Cocofest 2022. ua-cam.com/video/QJr_rRs_7Y8/v-deo.html Mr. Paul Thayer shows how he uses Piskel for sprite editing. I haven't tried it myself. I use a home brewed BASIC program for making my sprites. Thanks for reaching out, and let us know if Piskel looks good to you.
@@acs8-bitzone651 Thanks for Reply, I will check that
Hey are you available to handle project?
I have a project that I want to work on
You can respond to this comment let's know what's next
Regards
David
He's ba-aaaaaaack! Good to see! Neat episode! Fun and informative!
Looking forward to the next part already, very nice new format. It's nice to see you back!
Awesome. Nice to hear from you 8bits! Been enjoying your stuff as well!
Great video! Thank you.
TY!
This was fascinating. Interesting how old tech is new again. Very cool.
Thank you for making this informative video.
YW!