Page 1 of [VIDEO] How old school graphics worked

Nothing most of us didn't already know but still a lovely piece of nostalga:

I remember when they introduced sprites. They actually talked about them in their marketing to show how advanced computer gaming hand become. I was suitably impressed at the time...

Because so much of the video circuitry was analog back then, it was very common to abuse it to show more sprites than the machine was designed for. If you made it so you never needed more than the number of hardware sprites in the top half of the screen, you could time the raster beam so when it reached halfway you knew the sprites had been drawn, and could then reposition them to appear in the bottom half of the screen.

That's also how the BBC version of Elite had one display mode for the top 3/4s of the screen and a much more colourful but lower resolution mode for the HUD at the bottom.

Also how they did rainbow processing on the ZX Spectrum (and have since managed to achieve some pretty CPU intensive but multi-colour graphics way beyond what it was originally capable).

The downside of sprites is when you run out, if your hardware can only do say 16, and you need 20, a common issue on consoles, you'd only see the first 16. So they got away with it by not showing all the sprites they wanted on any given frame, hence the flickering. Something I hated on my SMS. :)


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I feel all warm and nostalgic now.







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In that case, feel very warm and nostalgic (if you ever had a Speccy):
http://zxds.raxoft.cz/games.html


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Yep, played a lot of those. I know it had a limited colour palette, but I still rate the Speccy as the best of the 8-bit computers. RoboCop was better than the arcade version!







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Quote:
Rob Shepherd says...
"In that case, feel very warm and nostalgic (if you ever had a Speccy):
http://zxds.raxoft.cz/games.html"
Some class games on that list - includes most of my favourites and some I just looked at and thought "Wha????".

Disappointed not to see any of the Monty Mole series though...


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Yeah odd that there was no Monty Mole. But then there were a few others I think are great that didn't make it like Dark Star, Armourite and Colony.

Want to see what people can do with the Spectrum these days?

Part 2, which also briefly touches on some of the techniques used in BiFrost (the multicolour graphics lib for the Speccy used in Complica)...

How oldschool computer sound worked: