I am surely not a coder so that I cannot really understand the challenge hidding behind this 0 bitplane compo, except that you cannot use any handmade gfx nor anything stored in memory. Sounds insane to me.
It is perfectly fine to use handmade graphics stored in memory. Just not in bitplane (pixel) format. Everything is displayed using rasters of some sort, similar to how oldschool plasmas are done on ST. Everyone in the compo dug deep and went further than most have done before. Big
The coders have given their explanation but let a lamer like me explain it another way. Instead of using the 16 colours available (from a palette of 512) they can only use 1 colour (all the bitplanes set to 0) and then they need to change that 1 colour to each and any of the 512 as the cathode ray makes its way down the tube 50 times a second. For example, you could have a completely white screen and halfway down you change your colour value to black, to get a screen that is half white and half black. Then back to white at the start of the next frame. So even just displaying a simple screen like that would require the poor old 68000 to be doing palette swaps 100 times per second. This comp requires the coder to basically write a software driver to microcontrol the CRT gun. The Amiga has the copper chip which can do this, but on the ST the 68000 has to do all the work. The horizontal resolution of the screens is kind of low and chunky because it's impossible to change the palette every pixel, even on Amiga with Copper. I think the typical resolution is 8 pixels wide for 1 "virtual" pixel. I would also add that this is how the Atari 2600 worked, all games had to be coded this way. So what we are seeing is kind of like if an Atari 2600 was upgraded to 1mb of RAM and an 8mhz 68000 😂
Excellent & colorful !! Fit perfectly the technical constraint 😁 Nice job guys !
Well done Dbug 😎
those 0 bitplane demos are a treat! i hope there will be more such challenges!
I am surely not a coder so that I cannot really understand the challenge hidding behind this 0 bitplane compo, except that you cannot use any handmade gfx nor anything stored in memory. Sounds insane to me.
It is perfectly fine to use handmade graphics stored in memory. Just not in bitplane (pixel) format. Everything is displayed using rasters of some sort, similar to how oldschool plasmas are done on ST. Everyone in the compo dug deep and went further than most have done before. Big
Ofc it's possible to do pixel graphics in this mode, you just have to use a 8x1 canvas, because this is (normally) the minimum size of a '0bl pixel'.
@@evldhs sick, verynice
The coders have given their explanation but let a lamer like me explain it another way. Instead of using the 16 colours available (from a palette of 512) they can only use 1 colour (all the bitplanes set to 0) and then they need to change that 1 colour to each and any of the 512 as the cathode ray makes its way down the tube 50 times a second. For example, you could have a completely white screen and halfway down you change your colour value to black, to get a screen that is half white and half black. Then back to white at the start of the next frame. So even just displaying a simple screen like that would require the poor old 68000 to be doing palette swaps 100 times per second. This comp requires the coder to basically write a software driver to microcontrol the CRT gun. The Amiga has the copper chip which can do this, but on the ST the 68000 has to do all the work. The horizontal resolution of the screens is kind of low and chunky because it's impossible to change the palette every pixel, even on Amiga with Copper. I think the typical resolution is 8 pixels wide for 1 "virtual" pixel. I would also add that this is how the Atari 2600 worked, all games had to be coded this way. So what we are seeing is kind of like if an Atari 2600 was upgraded to 1mb of RAM and an 8mhz 68000 😂