Since NTSC has 227.5 chroma cycles per line, each line of NTSC should also naturally be 180 degrees out of phase with the previous line, shouldn't it? Or does NTSC intentionally reset the phase on each line? Regardless, most video display generators didn't conform 100% to broadcast specs anyway.
@@lev7509 PAL stands for Phase Alternating Line, because each line is 180 degrees out of phase with the line before it. This was intended as a sort of "error-cancelling", since an error caused by interference in one line would be compensated for by a mirrored error in the next line. It DID result in better color stability on receivers made with 1960s technology, something early NTSC televisions had difficulty with. (Those problems went away as receivers got more advanced.)
@@CptJistuce By line you mean scanline? If I understood correctly, you mean the phase is flipped every scanline to... prevent neighboring scanlines from blending too much?
I had a digital design course where we made our own vector games and displayed them via the XY input of an oscilloscope. Custom, hand-wrapped, controlled by a Motorola 68k running our assembly code. That was the closest I’ve ever felt to an old-school arcade designer until watching this video. This is stunningly thorough. Thank you for taking me one step further.
i dont think he animated it by hand, like long-name-mcGee above me said, its automated, here is what RGME said himself: I took a snapshot of VMEM from an emulator, ran a script to convert the raw hex data into VG instructions, stripped the parameters from that file and formatted it into an After Effects keyframe format, then used After Effects expressions to pull from that keyframe data to make the animation.
@@QuotePilgrim How would he do this in under a couple of hours? What would the process be? Don’t disparage artists. This shit is hard work. This animation, combined with the framing and resolution doesn’t exist anywhere else. Someone created it. There is no “convert these vector coordinates from this other machine, into my computer, into Adobe Animate and/or Flash, in the exact way that my brain is thinking” button. It’s not as quick as it looks.
I've always explained it in an oversimplified way as an electronic equivalent of an Etch-A-Sketch(because the electron "pen" directly traces the image out on the screen).
Mainly just After Effects! I do some preprocessing of data before importing it through various scripts, but most of it is just done within AE using its expression engine.
@@JimLeonard Many emulators (including MAME) give you the ability to introspect into the memory of the system, and many of its parts. And there are a number of tools out there that can help. Digging into the MAME source code can also reveal a lot about how memory is mapped in the virtual machine. :)
A couple years ago I went to an arcade with my family, and after drifting a bit I found myself oddly attracted to asteroids and tempest. The perfectly straight, piercing white lines of asteroids are almost unreal in person. It was honestly pretty moving.
agreed. I had no idea video games were ever that sharp in the arcades, especially when you consider the age. it is truly something you have to see to appreciate.
Vector displays were something of a dead end--they couldn't fill in a solid area with color, and were limited to drawing lines--but I love that look. For a little while, they seemed impossibly advanced compared to raster games, and they could easily display rotating objects and perspective 3D graphics. Modern emulations of them don't quite capture the dynamic brightness range they were capable of, either--those vectors could be intensely bright and made glowing halations on the screen just as a physical byproduct. Atari also discovered that you could make the screen flash just by drawing an intense white line off screen, so the electrons got scattered all over. It was an odd physical hack.
@@johneygd yeah I can see where you’re coming from with that, I’m hope no one makes any platformers using Vectrex style graphics, unless the shapes made from the lines were shaded or something
Man, it always amazes me how you manage to explain everything so clearly and make some of the best dynamic graphics, heck, explanatory graphics in the platform. Cheers, dude.
It's even funnier when you think about how the Playstation 1 makes everything out of triangles, and doesn't really have a "depth" but rather, has a "z" deformation value. It's like the same idea exactly! (I could be remembering it wrong though...) (Modern vintage gamer has a video about it vs the N64 method, which would be a good sequel to this, though it's about graphics generation, not screen writing.)
@@williamdrum9899 it had a lot more complex effects since it had the super fx 2 chip. Some bosses like the sluggy have some crazy sprite deformation that i have yet to see in any other super Nintendo game
2:00 is genuinely the first time I've seen NTSC or PAL waveforms in motion like that. I love your visualizations and explanations of these topics so much.
At 1:38, the video says that the PPU "forms a picture" and encodes it into a video signal. I know what the author meant, but strictly speaking, the PPU never makes a picture. It takes the contents of VRAM, its line counter, its pixel counter, and other information to generate and send an NTSC, PAL, or SECAM video signal on the fly. It never has a buffer that stores an entire frame like modern graphics cards. No part of the image is ever stored in a form different from how it looks in VRAM, so in fact, if you are using a CRT, an entire frame never exists anywhere except in your brain due to the persistence of vision.
I tell you what. Back when I was a kid, and even today, I much prefer the look of vector graphic games, when compared to ones that used raster. The vector graphic games just look.. more "video game" to me than raster graphic games. I just.. like the look of them.
Gaming visuals had essentially evolved from vector graphics to sprite-based raster graphics to 3D objects represented by vectors rendered to a raster display, all while at the same time the previous rendering styles became an art form for many contemporary games. This is among the reasons I'm looking for a way to express these styles in a series of videos I've been planning, and this video (the entire channel, even) is one of the core insights I've been looking for.
I spent as much time as I could (which at 3 credits per play, wasn't very long) in a Star Trek II sit-down cabinet at the local arcade. It was more futuristic than actual Star Trek.
Ingenious animation at the end. I think using the scale as an inverse is a clever idea. Normally to get proper 3D perspective you need to divide by the distance, but that's expensive for computers and this lets you avoid it.
I wish vector monitors were still being produced today. I can only imagine how the technology would have advanced by now. Like say: XX simultaneous vector beams drawing at once with XX times the speed, millions of dynamic colors and brightnesses, raster type levels of detail drawn with vector beams, and new things I can't think of. Wow.
I'm surprised how close this is to the line drawing methods in modern graphics libraries as far as the position, draw, brightness and color calls go. I wonder how hard it was for them to do fast rotation math on sets of points since all that floating point math would be really slow. Maybe hard coded lookup tables or some clever integer-only math. Your videos are super awesome man. Same level as something like 3Blue1Brown. It is very difficult to make good videos on CS topics specifically, your channel is one of the very few that do a really good job explaining topics that are super interesting and visually appealing. I've learned more about ASM from this channel than anything else. I'm a software engineer, but I've never needed to use low-level languages, everything I use is memory managed with auto garbage collection.
Most modern graphics libraries are based on research and precedents with roots in this era. I was wondering whether some of the other machines' vector processors had more features. In Asteroids Deluxe, almost everything on the screen simultaneously rotates, so without rotation support you couldn't just render them directly out of ROM. And Star Wars is doing perspective projections on 3D wireframes!
They didn't do the rotation math, at least for asteroids. Haven't checked the other games. In Asteroids, the ship can face one of 64 directions, some of which are hardcoded into VROM, but some can be flipped from the hardcoded examples so don't need to be stored. The ship's thrust fire works a similar way.
for some things, fixed-point math (where each number is pre-multiplied by some constant, usually a power of 2) is adequate addition and subtraction in this format are the same as integer math with multiplication you multiply the numbers together and then divide by the constant with division you first multiply by the constant, and then divide the numbers together with complex math like atan2 or trigonometry you either use CORDIC or data tables as suggested.
Ahhh, RGMEx, I've missed you. Been a while since I've played any of these vector games, but it's nice to know how they did these things back in the day. Thanks for the info, you absolute legend!
Seeing the final animation made me truly realize the unnecessary precision of the Quadrascan. Compared to other home-console graphics, it was kind of incredible, and while I can see why later consoles would focus more on scanlines, it would have been cool to have some sort of progress on the processing power of the Quadrascan, given the relatively robust graphical precision.
This is amazing, essentially a GPU with late 1970s technology! Great video, by the way, especially showing the Tempest scene being drawn while the drawing code scrolled by.
Great video, with an incredible amount of work going into the visuals, especially the last explanation. Very impressive! I made an Asteroids clone last year where it read the data from the arcade ROM, parsed the opcodes you described and turned that into OpenGL lines (why draw your own graphics when you can instead spend many hours deciphering the cryptic rom data!), so I could have done with your help then. Gives a good understanding into the beauty and genius of the system
It's surprising how much this old tech has in common with modern versions. 3D graphics are all vectors, drawn by display lists (which have subroutines, but no conditional logic) that use commands like "move to X,Y,Z, draw to X,Y,Z". In more modern systems there's a lot of indirection, but the concept is still the same. (Eg a command might be "using items 3-27 of the index buffer, draw triangles; each item gives the index of a coordinate in the vertex buffer" - that way you avoid specifying the same coordinates multiple times.)
Goes to show that, like many other things in computer science, many of these problems were already tackled (and solved in most cases) many, many years ago. :) Most of what we have today is just the same stuff at far greater scale.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Even in software drawing libraries, the methods to draw lines are very similar as well as far as position, line, brightness and color go.
The whole idea of a display list definitely goes back to this time. Even the Atari home computers had the concept, though instead of drawing primitives the display list controlled how video memory was mapped to different zones of the screen, as rasters or characters. I used a different version of them in the early days of laser printers, when you wanted to implement a page description language but didn't have enough RAM on board to represent the whole page as a bitmap. The trick was to divide the page into horizontal bands and have the interpreter parcel appropriately clipped graphics primitives (geometric shapes, font characters, scaled image patches) out between the bands. A second thread would run the display list renderer that would try to race the page through the printer, rasterizing the bands just in time to get them to the laser. (If it wasn't fast enough, the printer would have to pause and you couldn't print at speed.)
Love the details... I spent many years in the late 70s with vector, and until a few years ago owned a Space Duel... Today I work in laser projectors, which is still using this technology, X/Y blanking and such... It still lives on! Thanks!
You're expecting too much from me, haha! I took a snapshot of VMEM from an emulator, ran a script to convert the raw hex data into VG instructions, stripped the parameters from that file and formatted it into an After Effects keyframe format, then used After Effects expressions to pull from that keyframe data to make the animation.
@@RGMechEx That's cool! I can imagine how satisfying it was to have directly converted the bytes from the game's memory from the emulator to After Effects through several steps and eventually have it work. It's definitely a cool way of doing it.
@@chyza2012 lol, I get what you're saying and all, but if he did any manual intervention in the data to handle edge cases, that could end up being hours of scripting for something that he only needed once for the video. Would I have made a tool? Probably? But I get that's not for everyone or every situation
@@tigerofdoom "that could end up being hours of scripting for something that he only needed once for the video" - I would expect nothing less from this beast of a channel
I'm not a gamer, but I've been hooked on the creation and manipulation of computer-based vectors in one form or another since the 80's, and this was thoroughly enjoyable and brilliantly done. I know this has been up for a couple of years now, but I just came across it and as a dork that incorporates "vector" into his email addy, I had to stop and look. I loved this to no end, and even learned a number of things! Cheers from Louisiana!
How in the world you managed to figure out the inner workings of those components and how they communicate with each other is absolutely amazing. All that engineering technology could be accessed for a quarter! Sure was a lot of fun that's for sure. Thanks for the video my friend, excellent job!
This brings back memories. I actually played Asteroids, Battle Zone, Star Wars, and Tempest. At college, they had a monitor that drew in line graphics, and programmed it in FORTRAN. I programmed it to draw a scene from.Battle Zone. I feel freakin’ old now.
Watching the frame being drawn at the end ( 18:45 ) was fascinating. In particular, watching it scroll through the lines of code...feels like CPUs were a lot faster back then than I thought they' be! haha
Please do a video on the Vectrex! It's a super interesting console from the 80's that only uses vector based graphics. Would love to watch a detailed breakdown of how it works
Excellent Video. Back when asteroids was popular I ( along with others) could play forever on a single quarter. One problem that the game designers did not anticipate was that with each bonus ship it added more and more objects on screen. The bonus ships would line up across the top until they were off the screen. It was my impression at the time that the game logic was still trying to draw bonus ships even off the screen. The game became slower and slower, thus easier and easier to play. If a person kept winning bonus ships at some point (a few hours) a integer overflow would happen (256 bonus ships?) and the game would crash with a hard reset and the game would reboot.
I recently saw an original Asteroids machine that was still working at a local arcade. The brightness of those glowy graphics don't begin to describe how epic it was to see it up and running on unrestored hardware.
It is amazing to watch your animation at the end, 102 seconds for 1 frame. I had to slow it down to .5 speed to catch some of the details, like how the colour resets to white between drawing each object. Oddly, the sunbursts specify "yellow 12-bright" twice during their drawing cycle.
Vector drawn graphics are beautyful, thank you for explaining this well, giving the Quadrascan an spotlight and congrats on the great effects achieved in this video... that final part, really nice.
What a superb quality video. I played plenty of Asteroids and Tempest in the 80s.. and programmed the 6510 in my C64, so this video really took me back in time! Thx!
18:48 I think this might become among my favorite of art forms: converting game instructions into a step-by-step visual rendering! Better yet, there is much more information in the animation than one would normally expect: by slowing down the video, one can more distinctly see an additional detail about the relationship between the instruction set and the drawing cursor's behavior, in which certain groups of lines are drawn as though they were a single object... wait... As I was writing this comment, I've just realized It's all literally just a computerized Etch-a-Sketch! Consider my mind thoroughly blown!
It's cool to see that there is a value for brightness for the vectors. If anyone has ever played an Asteroids machine in person, the brightness of the player's bullets is very notable. I haven't seen an emulated version really imitate it well.
this is the best channel on youtube i love how technical yhou go there, and it makes me want learn more and more, and even try to see if can debug the games on my own after.
The video's visual representation made everything clear, as always. Great job! Oh and uh... at 5:06 the subtitles say "absoslute" instead of "absolute".
It's crazy when you see that beam drawing the image bit by bit at the end and realise how fast it must be moving to do this in normal speed, and at a speed where the eye doesn't even perceive it's not all drawn at once. :-o
I wish to know why this channel is undersubbed. It is a beautiful channel that can explain really cool mechanics in a simple enough to follow way that even my simple-tech-minded father could follow along with absolutely zero questions! The animations, and "behind the scenes" look at the mechanics... its so well done!
I am surprised by the level of detail your videos have. I was always curios about retro tech. Sadly, so much of the terms and concepts are on a high level and are unknown to me. But, they have sparked an inspiration for me to learn more.
Rez Infinite actually almost looks like vector graphics if you crank supersampling all the way up, though. It's also amazing that you might still be able to get 200fps after that.
@@FlameRat_YehLon Yeah. Rez is definitely trying for the vector look a lot of the time. It is difficult to achieve, though. (In some respects, the Dreamcast version had it easier despite the lower resolution. Raster CRTs achieved much higher contrast levels than LCDs for a long time, and vector displays are very high-contrast by nature.)
@@CptJistuce Since we have OLED now, the same (infinite) contrast can be achieved again. Though Rez in a lot of cases don't use pure black background, and it's also apparent that there's a lot of textures going on, both makes CRT not having much advantage there.
@@FlameRat_YehLon You are indeed correct, and I can't wait for OLED to come down in price. (I hope it goes mainstream, and doesn't just become the quirky also-ran like plasma discharge did. (I actually fired up Rez Infinite for a little while last night after making my previous comment. First time I've run it without the VR headset, which is the absolutely Rezziest way to play Rez.)
I felt that way when I first started this video since I never played any of the vector gfx games. Glad I watched though, this video was great. Way more relevant and interesting than I could have ever imagined.
Really enjoyed your video. One of the best I've seen on Vector graphics. I really wish this tech was still being developed. I know it would be really niche but I can't stop thinking about how much further along it would be with all of the advancement in RAM and CPUs. Perhaps even a CRT with multiple guns so you could draws enough lines that every pixel on screen could be drawn to per frame. Then you could have Vector graphics that are more than just outlines. I know crazy talk but just imagine, (In movie theater guys voice) In a world where Vectors graphics never died.
this channel is yet another reason why i dont bother with actual telly. well done. i played these games new and had a zx81 with a ram pack and did machine code on it. trust me - im old - to experience the old games you just need a modernish pc with mame. in the late 1990s (just when the internet started) i was in dublin as a techy in an office. i used mame to play these sorts of games on pentium 133s . soooo weird - its 2021 - your talking about old games - that i played on emulators in the late 1990s - on pcs - that i had played on the original hardware when it came out in 1979,1980,1981. the best thing about mame is the bugs carry through - for instance on original missile command if you clocked it to 800,000 points it gave you about 150 bonus cities. and pacman can be played all day on mame just like the old days on the original arcade hardware - if you know the tricks. the noises on williams robotron (and joust and defender), watching someone who knew a game well and the smells of the old arcades - all magical times. if you wanna watch repair of the original hardware "joe's classic video games" on youtube. the guy is a legend. genius. best wishes from whalley range manchester uk
I love this video. Having grown up in the 80s doing some programming, I can appreciate how innovative algorithms and techniques had to be to accomplish things with limited hardware. When I look at today's games/simulators, there's massive inefficiency caused by layers and layers of frameworks, APIs, wrappers, and sub-optimal routines.
The amount of work that those cabinets had to put into drawing a single frame, as illustrated by your demonstration at the end, is nothing short of insane! To think that all of those individual shapes and lines are drawn in 1/60 or 1/50 of a second. Definitely more technically demanding than just drawing a bunch of horizontal lines in different color intensities.
I've always had a soft spot for vector games. The monitors used back then made the colored lines look way sharper & more colorful than how they appear in ported versions using your TV/monitor at home. "ZEKTOR" "TAC/SCAN" "ELIMINATOR" "COSMIC CHASM" "TEMPEST" "SPACE DUEL" "STAR CASTLE" were among some of my favorites. It would be great if of all the vector games were compiled & released in one collection remastered for modern consoles. Sadly license issues will probably keep that from ever happening.
Really enjoyed this one. I actually, as part of my day job, still work with cursive displays, albeit these days working with actual CRTs is a rarity. Interesting that the Atari H/W worked with relative co-ordinates as X/Y offsets though, the hardware I use is similar in some ways, in that we also have absolute (undrawn) position instructions, but from there it's mostly polar coordinates, which simplifies rotation, since you essentially get that for free as we have a global rotation that just modifies all subsequent vectors. Also, very very impressed with that simulated replay at the end! Kudos.
Good presentation. The problem with it is that it somewhat mixes up vector and raster displays with vector and raster graphics, which are completely different. For example, it is very common to use SVG nowadays which use vector graphics, but our monitors are far from being vector displays. Even raster displays didn't need to lign-up each display element with a pixel in the image and the beam could light parts of an element in the grid without issue, having effectively more resolution than the CRT grid actually had, many grids in professional monitors weren't even rectangular at all. So both are completely different things.
Wow, what a fabulous explanation of Atari's vector graphics! Instant subscribe. The hardware they used is fascinating, too... The vector generator is essentially a 7-instruction CPU (complete with registers, a stack, and micro-instructions) built entirely out of rudimentary 74-series logic chips, plus a PROM to guide it from one state to the next. If anyone is interested in the gory details, search for "The Secret Life of Vector Generators" by Jed Margolin, an Atari engineer from back in the day.
Would consider making a similar video describing how the Cinematronics hardware draws vectors on their Vectorbeam XY black and white monitors? I know the CCPU board supplies digital data to the video board’s DAC-80 chips which then translate that data to analog voltages. These voltages causing the yoke to deflect the cathode beam in the monitor. The Cinematronics system always generated smooth vector lines with no aliasing, unlike Atari’s first games (Lunar Lander and Asteroids).
this has a fantastic level of detail, and I apricate the effort put in. I do wish for a little more discussion of how the scaling worked, and perhaps a little less on how the opcodes were formed. either way, it's great work though.
Makes me wonder just how the heck the programmers figured all this out and actually wrote the games to the hardware. Definitely helped to see the code actually running to build the frame, puts all the abstract world of memory locations, opperands, etc. into focus.
1:57 I love the fact you decided to display PAL signal with some shaking to clearly indicate phase is alternating.
The level of details on this channel is stunning.
Small errors do creep up. But there's also small details added that some people might not notice.
Please elaborate.
Since NTSC has 227.5 chroma cycles per line, each line of NTSC should also naturally be 180 degrees out of phase with the previous line, shouldn't it? Or does NTSC intentionally reset the phase on each line? Regardless, most video display generators didn't conform 100% to broadcast specs anyway.
@@lev7509 PAL stands for Phase Alternating Line, because each line is 180 degrees out of phase with the line before it. This was intended as a sort of "error-cancelling", since an error caused by interference in one line would be compensated for by a mirrored error in the next line.
It DID result in better color stability on receivers made with 1960s technology, something early NTSC televisions had difficulty with. (Those problems went away as receivers got more advanced.)
@@CptJistuce By line you mean scanline?
If I understood correctly, you mean the phase is flipped every scanline to... prevent neighboring scanlines from blending too much?
I had a digital design course where we made our own vector games and displayed them via the XY input of an oscilloscope. Custom, hand-wrapped, controlled by a Motorola 68k running our assembly code.
That was the closest I’ve ever felt to an old-school arcade designer until watching this video. This is stunningly thorough. Thank you for taking me one step further.
Wow, that final animation is some of the most effort I've ever seen put into a youtube video. I can't fathom the time it must have taken.
Automation is win.
i dont think he animated it by hand, like long-name-mcGee above me said, its automated, here is what RGME said himself:
I took a snapshot of VMEM from an emulator, ran a script to convert the raw hex data into VG instructions, stripped the parameters from that file and formatted it into an After Effects keyframe format, then used After Effects expressions to pull from that keyframe data to make the animation.
@@raafmaat Sounds impressive
He didn't animate it by hand and it's probably only taken him like a couple hours, if even that.
@@QuotePilgrim How would he do this in under a couple of hours? What would the process be? Don’t disparage artists. This shit is hard work. This animation, combined with the framing and resolution doesn’t exist anywhere else. Someone created it. There is no “convert these vector coordinates from this other machine, into my computer, into Adobe Animate and/or Flash, in the exact way that my brain is thinking” button. It’s not as quick as it looks.
Vector graphics always seemed to be the result of some strange voodoo to me. Nice to have gained some understanding of the incantations , thx.
I've always explained it in an oversimplified way as an electronic equivalent of an Etch-A-Sketch(because the electron "pen" directly traces the image out on the screen).
its weird to think abt some games are too pixelated and some arent at all, even down to the code
2:01 Holy crap, you actually animated the PAL colorburst phase-inversion on alternate lines. I applaud your attention to detail, sir!
Hm, curious what exactly the signal is though. Wonder if we could reverse engineer it and find a fun little Easter egg?
It doesn't show up on 30fps!
Your procedurally generated videos are a piece of art. I'm really curious what tools you are using to achieve such fantastic results.
Mainly just After Effects! I do some preprocessing of data before importing it through various scripts, but most of it is just done within AE using its expression engine.
@@RGMechEx Pretty cool
@@RGMechEx I think I remember you made a video on this, how you actually do the data processing for the scripts. Pretty interesting stuff!
@@RGMechEx Yes, but how did you obtain the arcade game data for this video? Is there an emulator with this kind of observability?
@@JimLeonard Many emulators (including MAME) give you the ability to introspect into the memory of the system, and many of its parts. And there are a number of tools out there that can help. Digging into the MAME source code can also reveal a lot about how memory is mapped in the virtual machine. :)
A couple years ago I went to an arcade with my family, and after drifting a bit I found myself oddly attracted to asteroids and tempest. The perfectly straight, piercing white lines of asteroids are almost unreal in person. It was honestly pretty moving.
agreed. I had no idea video games were ever that sharp in the arcades, especially when you consider the age. it is truly something you have to see to appreciate.
Vector displays were something of a dead end--they couldn't fill in a solid area with color, and were limited to drawing lines--but I love that look. For a little while, they seemed impossibly advanced compared to raster games, and they could easily display rotating objects and perspective 3D graphics. Modern emulations of them don't quite capture the dynamic brightness range they were capable of, either--those vectors could be intensely bright and made glowing halations on the screen just as a physical byproduct. Atari also discovered that you could make the screen flash just by drawing an intense white line off screen, so the electrons got scattered all over. It was an odd physical hack.
I’ve always loved the look of Vector style graphics, it’s got its own feel to it that I’ve always liked
I sadly don’t like it, circles look more like patatos being peeled off😒
@@johneygd yeah I can see where you’re coming from with that, I’m hope no one makes any platformers using Vectrex style graphics, unless the shapes made from the lines were shaded or something
Me too. Having grown up with a Vectrex, I am perhaps biased, but I adore the look and feel of vector displays.
The arcade Battlezone was FAR better than ANY raster version. I long for the day.
@@johneygd What do low resolution raster circles look like to you?
Ah. Tempest. One of the games that made me a retro gamer.
I remember playing it with no idea of what was going on.
Was just about to mention Tempest 2000, but he beat me to it. Yeah that game is just Tempest but better in every way
@@mechanismeight9565 I personally disagree on that. I never actually liked Tempest 2000 all that much - it just didn't feel the same.
@@KieferSkunk I can see where you're coming from, the two games definitely have a different feel.... I just like 2000 more, it's got style.
@@mechanismeight9565 Fair enough. :)
TIL that pixel is short for "picture element"
I learned something new today.
And voxel is Volume + Pixel
@@internetuser8922 You sure it's not Volume Element?
@@nezatrebovan Actually yeah, that makes more sense.
Also "bit" is short for "binary digit".
10:45 "Well really, they don't talk to each other. It's just the main CPU telling the Vector Generator what to do."
Sounds like my mom
And who would be the "Vector Generator" in this scenario?
@@videopsybeam7220 It would be Joe.
@@forgiveman correct.
Relax, someday you'll have a wife take over from mom.
Man, it always amazes me how you manage to explain everything so clearly and make some of the best dynamic graphics, heck, explanatory graphics in the platform. Cheers, dude.
So the scale factor ends up being used like a Z coordinate in Tempest. Interesting.
That is so dope
It's even funnier when you think about how the Playstation 1 makes everything out of triangles, and doesn't really have a "depth" but rather, has a "z" deformation value. It's like the same idea exactly! (I could be remembering it wrong though...)
(Modern vintage gamer has a video about it vs the N64 method, which would be a good sequel to this, though it's about graphics generation, not screen writing.)
Can you do a video about yoshis island advanced effects? Like the bosses and the nep-enuts ?
Ooh, yes! That sounds like it would be really interesting!
Was it just sprite scaling or something more complicated?
@@williamdrum9899 it had a lot more complex effects since it had the super fx 2 chip. Some bosses like the sluggy have some crazy sprite deformation that i have yet to see in any other super Nintendo game
I'd be curious about how the layer 3 objects work in that game. They're almost 3D at times but yet seem to just be distorted tiles...
What about Knuckles' Chaotix?
2:00 is genuinely the first time I've seen NTSC or PAL waveforms in motion like that. I love your visualizations and explanations of these topics so much.
I never thought I'd be actually learning how these vector graphics work any time soon but I'm glad I have the opportunity to!
At 1:38, the video says that the PPU "forms a picture" and encodes it into a video signal. I know what the author meant, but strictly speaking, the PPU never makes a picture. It takes the contents of VRAM, its line counter, its pixel counter, and other information to generate and send an NTSC, PAL, or SECAM video signal on the fly. It never has a buffer that stores an entire frame like modern graphics cards. No part of the image is ever stored in a form different from how it looks in VRAM, so in fact, if you are using a CRT, an entire frame never exists anywhere except in your brain due to the persistence of vision.
I tell you what. Back when I was a kid, and even today, I much prefer the look of vector graphic games, when compared to ones that used raster. The vector graphic games just look.. more "video game" to me than raster graphic games. I just.. like the look of them.
Gaming visuals had essentially evolved from vector graphics to sprite-based raster graphics to 3D objects represented by vectors rendered to a raster display, all while at the same time the previous rendering styles became an art form for many contemporary games.
This is among the reasons I'm looking for a way to express these styles in a series of videos I've been planning, and this video (the entire channel, even) is one of the core insights I've been looking for.
I spent as much time as I could (which at 3 credits per play, wasn't very long) in a Star Trek II sit-down cabinet at the local arcade. It was more futuristic than actual Star Trek.
i like some of the games more, but the lack of shading and color kills it off for me.
Ingenious animation at the end.
I think using the scale as an inverse is a clever idea. Normally to get proper 3D perspective you need to divide by the distance, but that's expensive for computers and this lets you avoid it.
Hi I'm just here to feel inferior
Hey there! I figured you would watch this kind of video. I enjoy his videos and yours as well!
A great man in here. I'll be watching your new video as soon as you upload it.
LUL you guys are both heroes
No way. Two cakes
Where were you when I saw a girl standing next to an icicle! Really could have used you banana. For scale.
I wish vector monitors were still being produced today. I can only imagine how the technology would have advanced by now. Like say: XX simultaneous vector beams drawing at once with XX times the speed, millions of dynamic colors and brightnesses, raster type levels of detail drawn with vector beams, and new things I can't think of. Wow.
I'm surprised how close this is to the line drawing methods in modern graphics libraries as far as the position, draw, brightness and color calls go.
I wonder how hard it was for them to do fast rotation math on sets of points since all that floating point math would be really slow. Maybe hard coded lookup tables or some clever integer-only math.
Your videos are super awesome man. Same level as something like 3Blue1Brown. It is very difficult to make good videos on CS topics specifically, your channel is one of the very few that do a really good job explaining topics that are super interesting and visually appealing. I've learned more about ASM from this channel than anything else. I'm a software engineer, but I've never needed to use low-level languages, everything I use is memory managed with auto garbage collection.
Most modern graphics libraries are based on research and precedents with roots in this era.
I was wondering whether some of the other machines' vector processors had more features. In Asteroids Deluxe, almost everything on the screen simultaneously rotates, so without rotation support you couldn't just render them directly out of ROM. And Star Wars is doing perspective projections on 3D wireframes!
They didn't do the rotation math, at least for asteroids. Haven't checked the other games.
In Asteroids, the ship can face one of 64 directions, some of which are hardcoded into VROM, but some can be flipped from the hardcoded examples so don't need to be stored. The ship's thrust fire works a similar way.
for some things, fixed-point math (where each number is pre-multiplied by some constant, usually a power of 2) is adequate
addition and subtraction in this format are the same as integer math
with multiplication you multiply the numbers together and then divide by the constant
with division you first multiply by the constant, and then divide the numbers together
with complex math like atan2 or trigonometry you either use CORDIC or data tables as suggested.
Me yesterday: Hmm... I wonder how quadrascan worked.
RGME:
When the world needed him most, he returned
Ahhh, RGMEx, I've missed you. Been a while since I've played any of these vector games, but it's nice to know how they did these things back in the day. Thanks for the info, you absolute legend!
Seeing the final animation made me truly realize the unnecessary precision of the Quadrascan. Compared to other home-console graphics, it was kind of incredible, and while I can see why later consoles would focus more on scanlines, it would have been cool to have some sort of progress on the processing power of the Quadrascan, given the relatively robust graphical precision.
Hmm. This is actually closer to Sierra AGI/SCI background artwork than I expected. Which is to say, not that close but more than I thought.
no idea how they work but it sounds cool 😅.
It is very impressive how you used vector graphics for your entire presentation. Keep up the quality work!
This is amazing, essentially a GPU with late 1970s technology! Great video, by the way, especially showing the Tempest scene being drawn while the drawing code scrolled by.
Can we appreciate how the font used in the videos is always fitting to the topic. Here the font is vectory. Cool!
So cool.. It would be really fun to play around with one of these old "color" vector displays.
Great video, with an incredible amount of work going into the visuals, especially the last explanation. Very impressive! I made an Asteroids clone last year where it read the data from the arcade ROM, parsed the opcodes you described and turned that into OpenGL lines (why draw your own graphics when you can instead spend many hours deciphering the cryptic rom data!), so I could have done with your help then. Gives a good understanding into the beauty and genius of the system
Don’t mind me, just trying to pay attention to what’s going on on-screen while trying to ignore how impossibly beautiful everything looks.
That Tempest slow motion blew my mind. Thank you.
It's surprising how much this old tech has in common with modern versions. 3D graphics are all vectors, drawn by display lists (which have subroutines, but no conditional logic) that use commands like "move to X,Y,Z, draw to X,Y,Z".
In more modern systems there's a lot of indirection, but the concept is still the same. (Eg a command might be "using items 3-27 of the index buffer, draw triangles; each item gives the index of a coordinate in the vertex buffer" - that way you avoid specifying the same coordinates multiple times.)
Goes to show that, like many other things in computer science, many of these problems were already tackled (and solved in most cases) many, many years ago. :) Most of what we have today is just the same stuff at far greater scale.
mathematically, is the same concept, vectors in memory to form a polygon in 3D space, but the draw part is classic raster
I was thinking the exact same thing. Even in software drawing libraries, the methods to draw lines are very similar as well as far as position, line, brightness and color go.
reminds me of writing/generating SVG. :)
The whole idea of a display list definitely goes back to this time. Even the Atari home computers had the concept, though instead of drawing primitives the display list controlled how video memory was mapped to different zones of the screen, as rasters or characters.
I used a different version of them in the early days of laser printers, when you wanted to implement a page description language but didn't have enough RAM on board to represent the whole page as a bitmap. The trick was to divide the page into horizontal bands and have the interpreter parcel appropriately clipped graphics primitives (geometric shapes, font characters, scaled image patches) out between the bands. A second thread would run the display list renderer that would try to race the page through the printer, rasterizing the bands just in time to get them to the laser. (If it wasn't fast enough, the printer would have to pause and you couldn't print at speed.)
Love the details... I spent many years in the late 70s with vector, and until a few years ago owned a Space Duel... Today I work in laser projectors, which is still using this technology, X/Y blanking and such... It still lives on! Thanks!
Is that visualization at the end some kind of simulator program? I'd love to toy around with that!
You're expecting too much from me, haha! I took a snapshot of VMEM from an emulator, ran a script to convert the raw hex data into VG instructions, stripped the parameters from that file and formatted it into an After Effects keyframe format, then used After Effects expressions to pull from that keyframe data to make the animation.
@@chyza2012 well, link us to your github when you've got it ready :-D
@@RGMechEx That's cool! I can imagine how satisfying it was to have directly converted the bytes from the game's memory from the emulator to After Effects through several steps and eventually have it work. It's definitely a cool way of doing it.
@@chyza2012 lol, I get what you're saying and all, but if he did any manual intervention in the data to handle edge cases, that could end up being hours of scripting for something that he only needed once for the video. Would I have made a tool? Probably? But I get that's not for everyone or every situation
@@tigerofdoom "that could end up being hours of scripting for something that he only needed once for the video" - I would expect nothing less from this beast of a channel
I'm not a gamer, but I've been hooked on the creation and manipulation of computer-based vectors in one form or another since the 80's, and this was thoroughly enjoyable and brilliantly done. I know this has been up for a couple of years now, but I just came across it and as a dork that incorporates "vector" into his email addy, I had to stop and look. I loved this to no end, and even learned a number of things! Cheers from Louisiana!
The visualizations on this are UNREAL. Awesome !
The font you use fits so well! It looks so good when alongside the vector graphics.
How in the world you managed to figure out the inner workings of those components and how they communicate with each other is absolutely amazing. All that engineering technology could be accessed for a quarter! Sure was a lot of fun that's for sure. Thanks for the video my friend, excellent job!
This brings back memories. I actually played Asteroids, Battle Zone, Star Wars, and Tempest. At college, they had a monitor that drew in line graphics, and programmed it in FORTRAN. I programmed it to draw a scene from.Battle Zone.
I feel freakin’ old now.
I watched this video once when it came out and I’m still amazed at the detail here. I love the NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM animation
Best visualisation & explanation about a very complexe subject. Great work!
Watching the frame being drawn at the end ( 18:45 ) was fascinating.
In particular, watching it scroll through the lines of code...feels like CPUs were a lot faster back then than I thought they' be! haha
Please do a video on the Vectrex! It's a super interesting console from the 80's that only uses vector based graphics. Would love to watch a detailed breakdown of how it works
Excellent Video. Back when asteroids was popular I ( along with others) could play forever on a single quarter. One problem that the game designers did not anticipate was that with each bonus ship it added more and more objects on screen. The bonus ships would line up across the top until they were off the screen. It was my impression at the time that the game logic was still trying to draw bonus ships even off the screen. The game became slower and slower, thus easier and easier to play. If a person kept winning bonus ships at some point (a few hours) a integer overflow would happen (256 bonus ships?) and the game would crash with a hard reset and the game would reboot.
so you beat asteroids
The level of detail in your animations is truly unbelievable
your videos are super informative and carries a lot of effort, they look like they're from a masterclass or something.
I recently saw an original Asteroids machine that was still working at a local arcade. The brightness of those glowy graphics don't begin to describe how epic it was to see it up and running on unrestored hardware.
So over my head, but when I was a kid, Tempest was my favorite game :) Thanks for a look behind the scenes
It is amazing to watch your animation at the end, 102 seconds for 1 frame.
I had to slow it down to .5 speed to catch some of the details, like how the colour resets to white between drawing each object.
Oddly, the sunbursts specify "yellow 12-bright" twice during their drawing cycle.
5:30 This reminds me of programming in Logo/Turtle Graphics.
0:11 What the hell? I’ve been playing video games for 35+ years, and I just now learned that the word pixel is a shortened form of picture element.
The animations and general presentation in this video are amazing. Thank you so much for making this complicated topic so understandable.
Vector drawn graphics are beautyful, thank you for explaining this well, giving the Quadrascan an spotlight and congrats on the great effects achieved in this video... that final part, really nice.
What a superb quality video. I played plenty of Asteroids and Tempest in the 80s.. and programmed the 6510 in my C64, so this video really took me back in time! Thx!
18:48
I think this might become among my favorite of art forms: converting game instructions into a step-by-step visual rendering! Better yet, there is much more information in the animation than one would normally expect: by slowing down the video, one can more distinctly see an additional detail about the relationship between the instruction set and the drawing cursor's behavior, in which certain groups of lines are drawn as though they were a single object... wait...
As I was writing this comment, I've just realized It's all literally just a computerized Etch-a-Sketch! Consider my mind thoroughly blown!
How I've missed this channel up to now is beyond me.. Fantastic video.. I need to watch it a few more times.. just wow... Subscribed.
It's cool to see that there is a value for brightness for the vectors. If anyone has ever played an Asteroids machine in person, the brightness of the player's bullets is very notable. I haven't seen an emulated version really imitate it well.
What an absolutely fantastic video! The final segment with the frame being drawn blew me away!
Thank you, this is one of those subjects I’ve wanted to learn about for many years, but never took the time! Excellent work as always!
You deserve some kind of youtube creator's award for that animation at the end. Amazing work.
As a former games programmer from the 1980’s, I really enjoyed this!
arcade games?
this is the best channel on youtube i love how technical yhou go there, and it makes me want learn more and more, and even try to see if can debug the games on my own after.
The video's visual representation made everything clear, as always. Great job!
Oh and uh... at 5:06 the subtitles say "absoslute" instead of "absolute".
fixed
The brightness value gives you 15 shades of gray. hot
It's crazy when you see that beam drawing the image bit by bit at the end and realise how fast it must be moving to do this in normal speed, and at a speed where the eye doesn't even perceive it's not all drawn at once. :-o
Oh haha. I like the patreon icon walls; it's clever and fun and visually engaging and not tedious like reading a list.
This entire explanation feels like how old school plotters worked. I remember making pictures like this in CAD programs in highschool.
I wish to know why this channel is undersubbed.
It is a beautiful channel that can explain really cool mechanics in a simple enough to follow way that even my simple-tech-minded father could follow along with absolutely zero questions!
The animations, and "behind the scenes" look at the mechanics... its so well done!
I am surprised by the level of detail your videos have. I was always curios about retro tech. Sadly, so much of the terms and concepts are on a high level and are unknown to me.
But, they have sparked an inspiration for me to learn more.
Modern games: 4K resolution!
Vector monitors: That's cute
Rez Infinite actually almost looks like vector graphics if you crank supersampling all the way up, though. It's also amazing that you might still be able to get 200fps after that.
imagine using pixels smh
@@FlameRat_YehLon Yeah. Rez is definitely trying for the vector look a lot of the time. It is difficult to achieve, though. (In some respects, the Dreamcast version had it easier despite the lower resolution. Raster CRTs achieved much higher contrast levels than LCDs for a long time, and vector displays are very high-contrast by nature.)
@@CptJistuce Since we have OLED now, the same (infinite) contrast can be achieved again.
Though Rez in a lot of cases don't use pure black background, and it's also apparent that there's a lot of textures going on, both makes CRT not having much advantage there.
@@FlameRat_YehLon You are indeed correct, and I can't wait for OLED to come down in price. (I hope it goes mainstream, and doesn't just become the quirky also-ran like plasma discharge did.
(I actually fired up Rez Infinite for a little while last night after making my previous comment. First time I've run it without the VR headset, which is the absolutely Rezziest way to play Rez.)
Incredibly clear, detailed, and well presented. Fantastic work
Amazingly well presented video and I'm stunned and awed by the visuals. You have some of the best production craft!
I don't think I'll ever use this in my life. Why can't I stop watching it?
I think you are not a magician too but I think you like to understand the clever methods behind the magic trick.
Same way this is why we are here.
I felt that way when I first started this video since I never played any of the vector gfx games. Glad I watched though, this video was great. Way more relevant and interesting than I could have ever imagined.
Fantastic video and excellent animations. I loved the NTSC, PAL, and SECAM waveforms.
You've done amazing work visualizing these concepts, you even have all the fonts use vector lines!
A new RGME vid makes any morning feel like Christmas! :3
Really enjoyed your video. One of the best I've seen on Vector graphics. I really wish this tech was still being developed. I know it would be really niche but I can't stop thinking about how much further along it would be with all of the advancement in RAM and CPUs. Perhaps even a CRT with multiple guns so you could draws enough lines that every pixel on screen could be drawn to per frame. Then you could have Vector graphics that are more than just outlines. I know crazy talk but just imagine,
(In movie theater guys voice) In a world where Vectors graphics never died.
this channel is yet another reason why i dont bother with actual telly. well done. i played these games new and had a zx81 with a ram pack and did machine code on it.
trust me - im old - to experience the old games you just need a modernish pc with mame. in the late 1990s (just when the internet started) i was in dublin as a techy in an office. i used mame to play these sorts of games on pentium 133s .
soooo weird - its 2021 - your talking about old games - that i played on emulators in the late 1990s - on pcs - that i had played on the original hardware when it came out in 1979,1980,1981. the best thing about mame is the bugs carry through - for instance on original missile command if you clocked it to 800,000 points it gave you about 150 bonus cities. and pacman can be played all day on mame just like the old days on the original arcade hardware - if you know the tricks.
the noises on williams robotron (and joust and defender), watching someone who knew a game well and the smells of the old arcades - all magical times.
if you wanna watch repair of the original hardware "joe's classic video games" on youtube. the guy is a legend. genius.
best wishes from whalley range manchester uk
yes 810,000 - not 800,000 :-)
Crazy high quality and awesome explanations. Easy to understand.
High quality video as always. Love to see wacky custom asm lanuages explained so clearly.
I have always wondered how those games worked. Great vid!
I love this video. Having grown up in the 80s doing some programming, I can appreciate how innovative algorithms and techniques had to be to accomplish things with limited hardware. When I look at today's games/simulators, there's massive inefficiency caused by layers and layers of frameworks, APIs, wrappers, and sub-optimal routines.
The amount of work that those cabinets had to put into drawing a single frame, as illustrated by your demonstration at the end, is nothing short of insane! To think that all of those individual shapes and lines are drawn in 1/60 or 1/50 of a second. Definitely more technically demanding than just drawing a bunch of horizontal lines in different color intensities.
It's actually probably less technically demanding than tile-based graphics, at least if there's a decent number of layers in the latter.
I've always had a soft spot for vector games. The monitors used back then made the colored lines look way sharper & more colorful than how they appear in ported versions using your TV/monitor at home. "ZEKTOR" "TAC/SCAN" "ELIMINATOR" "COSMIC CHASM" "TEMPEST" "SPACE DUEL" "STAR CASTLE" were among some of my favorites. It would be great if of all the vector games were compiled & released in one collection remastered for modern consoles. Sadly license issues will probably keep that from ever happening.
Excellent video, I learned a lot. I'd love to watch a similar video on how Zaxxon and its isometric scrolling and object hit detection was programmed.
Really enjoyed this one. I actually, as part of my day job, still work with cursive displays, albeit these days working with actual CRTs is a rarity. Interesting that the Atari H/W worked with relative co-ordinates as X/Y offsets though, the hardware I use is similar in some ways, in that we also have absolute (undrawn) position instructions, but from there it's mostly polar coordinates, which simplifies rotation, since you essentially get that for free as we have a global rotation that just modifies all subsequent vectors.
Also, very very impressed with that simulated replay at the end! Kudos.
I wonder how games like this handled rotation since rotating sets of coordinates would probably be too slow to do in real time on this hardware.
Good presentation. The problem with it is that it somewhat mixes up vector and raster displays with vector and raster graphics, which are completely different. For example, it is very common to use SVG nowadays which use vector graphics, but our monitors are far from being vector displays. Even raster displays didn't need to lign-up each display element with a pixel in the image and the beam could light parts of an element in the grid without issue, having effectively more resolution than the CRT grid actually had, many grids in professional monitors weren't even rectangular at all. So both are completely different things.
Wow, what a fabulous explanation of Atari's vector graphics! Instant subscribe.
The hardware they used is fascinating, too... The vector generator is essentially a 7-instruction CPU (complete with registers, a stack, and micro-instructions) built entirely out of rudimentary 74-series logic chips, plus a PROM to guide it from one state to the next. If anyone is interested in the gory details, search for "The Secret Life of Vector Generators" by Jed Margolin, an Atari engineer from back in the day.
Beautifully animated and presented thank you, this was really interesting.
Would consider making a similar video describing how the Cinematronics hardware draws vectors on their Vectorbeam XY black and white monitors? I know the CCPU board supplies digital data to the video board’s DAC-80 chips which then translate that data to analog voltages. These voltages causing the yoke to deflect the cathode beam in the monitor. The Cinematronics system always generated smooth vector lines with no aliasing, unlike Atari’s first games (Lunar Lander and Asteroids).
this has a fantastic level of detail, and I apricate the effort put in. I do wish for a little more discussion of how the scaling worked, and perhaps a little less on how the opcodes were formed. either way, it's great work though.
Makes me wonder just how the heck the programmers figured all this out and actually wrote the games to the hardware.
Definitely helped to see the code actually running to build the frame, puts all the abstract world of memory locations, opperands, etc. into focus.
The vector instructions are fairly similar to the Canvas API in most modern browsers to draw vector images.
11:50 Now I wonder, what type of "garbage" would it draw? from a glitch art perspective
That was very deep hahaha, I feel like I just read the reference manual for drawing vector on this device :-) excellent video!
I never played Major Havoc back in the day, but I really enjoy the game. Good heroic music.
when it was so silent at the end, i actually expected some sort of jumpscare ^^