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Phanatic posted:This is a solid book about it, if you're into that kind of thing: There is a very odd sentence in the synopsis provided for that book: quote:Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS--often considered merely a retro fetish object--is an essential part of the history of video games. Who exactly is looking at the best selling console from the first decade of home video gaming as some quaint collectable for retro geeks? xanthan posted:Different how? That sounds kind of interesting and I want to learn more. From the Atari 2600 Pac man Wikipedia article, you can get a bit of a sense of how the Atari did things differently to make them work. quote:With limited memory, Frye simplified the shape of the maze with block corners as opposed to rounded ones and a less intricate pattern of corridors. The round, white pellets in the original were changed to rectangular, brown ones on the Atari 2600. This change was to consolidate resources by using the same sprite used to create the walls. To achieve the visual effect of wafers disappearing after Pac-Man eats them, the console redraws the entire maze and wafers, excluding those that had been eaten. To accommodate technical limitations the sprites were animated differently. The Pac-Man character sprite as well as the maze and wafers sprites are drawn every frame, while the four ghosts are drawn at intervals. The four different ghosts take turns displaying on the screen and only one ghost is present at any given time, which creates a flickering effect. This effect takes advantage of the slow phosphorescent fade of CRT monitors and the concept of persistence of vision, resulting in the image appearing on screen longer than once every four frames.[6] I recall some sort of near trick in programming to get as many sprites on the screen as was managed for Space Invaders as well, but I can't remember it.
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Mar 10, 2016 20:41
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xanthan posted:Different how? That sounds kind of interesting and I want to learn more. Biggest example is probably the Atari 2600 port of Pac Man. The restrictions of the platform meant that it could only be vaguely like the arcade game. They had to do a whole lot of tricks to get it to work at all within the limitations of a 4K ROM. The Atari only supports two independent sprites, but the game has four ghosts and a player, the only way to draw all of them at once is to change the contents of the register after the electron beam draws a horizontal line and resets to draw the next; the phosphor that was illuminated won't fade before the beam comes back around again, so you can go ahead and draw the same object on the next line in a different position and it's no problem. That was a known trick at the time for the 2600, and had been done previously a lot of times like in Space Invaders. But in those previous times, the redrawn sprites are just sharing the same *vertical* column, the same sprite doesn't have to move independently in both the horizontal and vertical planes. Like Space Invaders: the upper row is *only* a flying saucer, then you have the field of invaders, then you have the missile shields, then you have the player, they're all stay in separate regions. In Pac Man, all the ghosts needs to move freely around the maze, so what they had to do (given the time and budget constraints; you could do even do this without flicker but it'd take more time to code and wouldn't fit in a 4k ROM) was to draw the ghosts on alternate fields. The electron beam draws two ghosts in one field, then when it resets back to the top of the screen it draws the next two, and only drawing an object every *other* field caused a very noticeable flicker. This technique was used in a lot of games to get more sprites on the screen, but if you play that on an emulator that isn't trying to simulate the limitations of the hardware, the flicker won't be there, because it's doing what modern hardware does: writing data into a frame buffer that then gets sent to the video hardware as a big bitmap..
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Mar 10, 2016 22:17
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Phanatic posted:Biggest example is probably the Atari 2600 port of Pac Man. The restrictions of the platform meant that it could only be vaguely like the arcade game. They had to do a whole lot of tricks to get it to work at all within the limitations of a 4K ROM. The Atari only supports two independent sprites, but the game has four ghosts and a player, the only way to draw all of them at once is to change the contents of the register after the electron beam draws a horizontal line and resets to draw the next; the phosphor that was illuminated won't fade before the beam comes back around again, so you can go ahead and draw the same object on the next line in a different position and it's no problem. That was a known trick at the time for the 2600, and had been done previously a lot of times like in Space Invaders. But in those previous times, the redrawn sprites are just sharing the same *vertical* column, the same sprite doesn't have to move independently in both the horizontal and vertical planes. Like Space Invaders: the upper row is *only* a flying saucer, then you have the field of invaders, then you have the missile shields, then you have the player, they're all stay in separate regions. Is the reason when more than three(?) sprites were on the same horizontal level on my NES they would flicker related to something like this?
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Mar 11, 2016 00:02
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ryonguy posted:Is the reason when more than three(?) sprites were on the same horizontal level on my NES they would flicker related to something like this? Different issue IIRC, I think the NES simply couldn't draw all of them quickly enough in the span of a horizontal refresh cycle and so it dropped frames
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Mar 11, 2016 01:05
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The NES also had a hardware sprite limit. I think it was 8 with a lower number allowed on an individual scanline.
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Mar 11, 2016 01:12
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ryonguy posted:Is the reason when more than three(?) sprites were on the same horizontal level on my NES they would flicker related to something like this? The NES was limited to 8 sprites per scanline and 64 sprites per screen. Any more than that per scanline would cause flicker. Remember though that sprites were limited to 8x8 pictures and many times characters on screen would be made up on multiple sprites. And also keep in mind that sprites weren't just used to draw the player character and enemies, but also objects such as pipes. or obstacles. Instant Sunrise has a new favorite as of 01:22 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 01:20
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Flickering isn't the hardware's default behaviour. Normally if there are too many sprites on the same scanline the remainder won't draw, and this is used in a few places as a mask effect - by putting enough invisible sprites on a scanline, you can cause part of another sprite to not draw. The flickering or slowdown and flickering of sprites is implemented on purpose by programmers to allow you to at least see everything when poo poo goes crazy, even if it isn't the ideal solution.
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Mar 11, 2016 01:24
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I used to have a CRT rear projection 55 or 60 inch Hitachi. Had to have been several hundred pounds. Had its own built in wheels on the bottom. I bought a flat screen at Best Buy because they'd come take the old one for free.
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Mar 11, 2016 01:46
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I sold my rear projection TV - also with built-in wheels - a month before the one of the first Black Friday that featured LCDs & Plasmas cheap enough for most people to buy. I lucked out on that. I think it was in 2005.
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Mar 11, 2016 02:07
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Slanderer posted:I didn't save the article, but I read something about CRT emulation a while back that decried the proliferation of scan-line effects and sharp pixels in "retro" games. The game examples of raster-patterns and showed how they were meant to be blended together by the display, and not rendered as perfect bitmaps. It's very much a real thing. I have a supergun I built by hand and the difference between running it on a CRT TV like my PVM and a flat panel LCD is staggering. With later more advanced games the difference doesn't really matter too much, a lot of places used flat panels or other display methods for things like MvC2 or CvS2 anyways so it's kind of whatever (Last Blade 2 for instance looks just fine on a flat panel or a CRT). But it makes a huge difference on older stuff like Super Turbo, or in my case what I usually have hooked up to my supergun: a PGM/PGM2 system which has very "pixely" graphics. This was actually the original purpose of the long hated Eagle/SAL filters that proliferated across early emulators. Decent scanline emulation is hard but doing a sort of smear effect that renders everything as it's own "drawn" sprite is fairly easy. I'm not a huge hater of filtered graphics, but it's definitely not as good as just having a decent small CRT to work with instead. Late era Neo Geo games especially can look really good on filters since they were already starting to go towards that with their default art style which had tons of really really gradual shading, and eventually you end up with stuff like GG and Melty Blood which just straight up use that sort of semi-filtered/high res image art style. The CRT smear on 3D is real as well. Ocarina of Time looks like total rear end on a modern TV because so much of it's really dirty pixel and texture art was being hidden in the fuzziness of CRTs. Hell, I remember when my friend got one of the really early "high def" CRTs back in like 2000 and we played Perfect Dark on it, we were blown away by how sharp and crisp everything looked but then we put in Ocarina and Jet Force Gemini and were stunned by all the lovely blocky pixels that magically appeared everywhere.
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Mar 11, 2016 02:14
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Shifty Pony posted:Slightly different subject but you might also be interested in learning about CGA composite colors which are an amazing example of turning what should be a bug (certain pixel arrangements caused massive color distortions when when output over a composite video interface) into a feature. Essentially the programmers traded resolution for a greatly expanded color palette. Back in the Olden Times of the late 80's, I had a program for the Atari 800XL that would take advantage of this- it would take a 256-color .gif (.jpg hadn't been invented yet) and split out the color information into three different files. Then it would cycle the three different images, using the fact that you were watching on a 19" color TV to fake the RGB separation. Presto: 320x240 flickering .gifs in glorious 256 colors! What I'm saying is: back then, we had to -work- for our porn. You kids these days don't even know.
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Mar 11, 2016 02:18
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And even in the modern days of actually having monitors as high resolution as 640x480 or even 800x600, the struggles still existed. This was in no way an exaggeration (aside from the lightning quick load time of the popup)
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Mar 11, 2016 03:34
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El Estrago Bonito posted:I have a supergun I built by hand They say he carved it himself...out of a bigger bat. 
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Mar 11, 2016 03:54
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well I saw HitClips in the thread but I haven't seen this fuckin' thing  mmmm, look at that 1.5inch screen. and it's black and white, too. the thing had very little skip protection and if you bumped it while watching SpongeBob, you'd have to wait for the drat thing to reboot. it would actually show a loading screen, then a boot animation, and THEN go back to playing the tiny proprietary mini-DVD
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Mar 11, 2016 06:01
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Has Tiger Electronics ever created anything that wasn't loving terrible poo poo.
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Mar 11, 2016 08:03
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Shifty Pony posted:Slightly different subject but you might also be interested in learning about CGA composite colors which are an amazing example of turning what should be a bug (certain pixel arrangements caused massive color distortions when when output over a composite video interface) into a feature. Essentially the programmers traded resolution for a greatly expanded color palette. as evidenced by this demo (and writeup) that debuted last year at revision on an 8088: http://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
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Mar 11, 2016 08:33
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Turdsdown Tom posted:mmmm, look at that 1.5inch screen. and it's black and white, too. I don't think you're doing the quality of the screen justice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MhzJ3EO3Rc
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Mar 11, 2016 12:08
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Horace posted:I don't think you're doing the quality of the screen justice. Thanks, Viacom! 
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Mar 11, 2016 12:16
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I love old mp3 players. Anyone else own one of these? Inside was a 5gb micro hard drive, which was a massive failure point. I went through like 3 of them that luckily Creative covered under warranty. Couple years later they started using flash, and I got one of these bad boys:  It could play video!!! (but only if you converted it to some obscure file format, and also they took up like half of the thing's tiny amount of storage space)
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Mar 11, 2016 17:53
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Just saying, am I the only one that completely skipped mp3 players? I went from portable cassette players to cars, moving out, home stereo, work/career, social night life and all sorts of life stuff, that by the time I though about getting one, hey, my phone can do that anyway. Just at the wrong/right time I guess.
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Mar 11, 2016 18:06
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Fo3 posted:Just saying, am I the only one that completely skipped mp3 players? Yeah IDK, I used an MP3 player from like 2004 to 2012. Had a flip phone until then 
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Mar 11, 2016 18:14
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Instant Sunrise posted:The NES was limited to 8 sprites per scanline and 64 sprites per screen. Any more than that per scanline would cause flicker. Remember though that sprites were limited to 8x8 pictures and many times characters on screen would be made up on multiple sprites. One of my favorite things to notice about early NES limitations is the huge bosses in Megaman. So like you said, many characters would be made of multiple sprites. These guys were so big they'd have to be made of a ton of sprites, which would cause issues with drawing mega man and his buster shots and everything on screen at once. So what did they do? Pretty clever trick. You'll notice that all of the bosses in mega man that are bigger than mega man (not the "heat man" type bosses) have solid black backgrounds, even though the rest of the game has very detailed tiled backgrounds. Why? The boss *is* the background. In order to get around sprite size limitations, they draw the boss as the background surrounded by black, then they move the character and the camera around relative to the background to give the illusion of a moving boss. Then they only have to draw sprites for the parts of the boss that have to move, such as the mecha dragon's wings or mouth. The main body of these huge bosses stays completely still because its just a background image and not a sprite. Whole lotta clever tricks going on in NES games. Also the blue bomber himself is blue because of the NES limitations. The limited color palette had one additional shade of blue than any other color, so they made him blue so they could still have a couple different colors for megaman and have another shade of blue left over for backgrounds, to stand apart, so megaman wouldn't blend in to the backgrounds. Jmcrofts posted:I love old mp3 players. Anyone else own one of these? I had one similar, I forget the exact model name. I remember the internal memory being so terrible that I had to re-encode .mp3 files as lower than loving radio quality in order to get multiple albums to fit on it, so I'd actually have a decent amount of music to listen to.
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Mar 11, 2016 18:19
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Fo3 posted:Just saying, am I the only one that completely skipped mp3 players? I still use my Sansa Clip Zip, to avoid using up all the battery on my phone 
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Mar 11, 2016 18:24
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I had a Pine D'Music back in like 2000, the thing could hold 16mb, and had an 16mb expansion card. When encoded just right I could fit a whole two albums on it! At the time I didn't realize that my computer had USB ports on it, so I selected this one because it connected through the printer port. I still have the thing in a box somewhere although the cable has been long lost, and I'm pretty sure that Pine is now PNY and makes flash sticks and motherboards.
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Mar 11, 2016 18:29
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Turdsdown Tom posted:well I saw HitClips in the thread but I haven't seen this fuckin' thing Jesus there were 5 of these things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoNow#Types Edit:  even Mattel got in on the action with the Juice Box, and it's even worse:Wikipedia posted:However, the small screen and poor quality (6 frames per second maximum) alienated most people. 
XYZ has a new favorite as of 19:15 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 19:05
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The screen on the juice box was amazingly poo poo, too. I did use one as my mp3 player for a while...
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Mar 11, 2016 19:38
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Horace posted:I don't think you're doing the quality of the screen justice. here's one that (should) work. I seriously don't remember the screen being that bad but this video is fuckin' horrible. I had no concept of quality back then I guess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFJSas2Tl9c i had one as a slightly older youngin' and i still enjoyed watching Fry Cook Games on this poo poo during car rides. at least until my grandparents bought a Honda Odyssey with a straight up VCR combo in it 
barnold has a new favorite as of 19:43 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 19:38
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Jmcrofts posted:I love old mp3 players. Anyone else own one of these? Shiiiit, that's luxury. My MP3 player was a 96MB Soulmate that I bought for around $120. It also used its own clunky and proprietary software to load the device (one file at a time if I remember right), just like the GBA flash carts of yore 
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Mar 11, 2016 20:44
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I stuck with my (cheap and lovely) discman for a long time. My first MP3 player was a Jens of Sweden MP-400, chosen chiefly because it was the least expensive player with ogg vorbis support. 256MB storage, no expansion slots. The OLED display was very cool, but also glitchy as hell.
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Mar 11, 2016 20:55
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Horace posted:I don't think you're doing the quality of the screen justice.
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Mar 11, 2016 21:01
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I still have my 20gb HP branded iPod that I bought from MicroCenter. Firewire for life, yo.
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Mar 11, 2016 21:06
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Iron Crowned posted:... I'm pretty sure that Pine is now PNY and makes flash sticks and motherboards. PNY has been PNY since 1985. Maybe they bought Pine or something, but I purchased PNY memory in 90s when making desktops systems.
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Mar 11, 2016 21:46
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Jmcrofts posted:I love old mp3 players. Anyone else own one of these? My brother went through three or four of these (through warranty returns,) but IIRC he kept having issues with the play/pause button dying.
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Mar 11, 2016 23:00
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I finally found it, a picture of the worst goddamn cell phone I have ever owned. This was back when smaller was cooler (think razor era) I got it in college and it lasted for about 6 month before all the buttons except answer call stopped working. It was super small, so I also lost it around my apartment a lot. Texting was almost impossible because the buttons were so small. Just thinking about it makes me angry that I dropped like $100+ on the piece of poo poo > 10 years ago. My next phone was the HTC 9500 which was the second worst phone.    e - VV I has one of if not the first portable MP3 CD players. I don't think it even showed tags, just file numbers. So I would make a playlist or import a folder of a few hundred songs in winamp put them in alphabetical order then export to html and print it so that I could quickly skip to the right song (after burning all those MP3s to a CD). Every CD I made had to have a loving guide to get the right song. I thought it was hot poo poo at the time. Plinkey has a new favorite as of 23:30 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 23:17
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Another alternative to hard drives Creative used were CDs assisted by large buffers to prevent skipping. Of course it meant carrying around a CD wallet as you didn't get that many MP3s onto 650mb. (man writing that makes me feel old). CD-RW's were sort of your "flash memory" for 2003. It also had no real sophisticated way of browsing, everything was alphabetically sorted and at best you had a "Skip 10" items button.You had an LCD screen showing you just how garbled your MP3 tags were. There were no playlists but I vaguely recall it was possible to navigate directories, but it was so clunky I gave up and just dumped everything on there. I think I did an effort post ages ago about the evolution of CD walkmans and how by the end of their life they'd hit the wall with any new abilities as they couldn't get any smaller than a CD and skip-buffering had gotten pretty efficient at stuffing half the song into the RAM available.
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Mar 11, 2016 23:27
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Zaphod42 posted:Also the blue bomber himself is blue because of the NES limitations. The limited color palette had one additional shade of blue than any other color, so they made him blue so they could still have a couple different colors for megaman and have another shade of blue left over for backgrounds, to stand apart, so megaman wouldn't blend in to the backgrounds. The NES palette wasn't limited, it was inexplicable  No yellow and ten blacks, and the colors are very uneven
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Mar 12, 2016 01:04
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SwissCM posted:Has Tiger Electronics ever created anything that wasn't loving terrible poo poo. To solidify your question. No - they also invented the Furby with help from Hasbro.
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Mar 12, 2016 01:52
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More bad MP3/video players: The Philips GoGear. It was okay for a while, then it would lock up at the end of a song for no good reason. I always had a paper clip handy to reset it. Video required a weird-rear end, but relatively efficient converter.
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Mar 12, 2016 01:59
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My parents bought one of those gargantuan 36" Sony WEGA Trinitrion TVs because it was HD and looked better than the alternative of a CRT rear-projection HDTV. It weighed over 250 lbs, almost all of that in the first 6 inches of the display. A friend of my parents liked it so much he ended up buying the 40" version for himself which weighed almost 350 lbs. The display was beautiful, but once actual HD content started making it out there, a new TV was needed because it didn't support digital inputs or HDCP.
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Mar 12, 2016 02:15
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Fo3 posted:Just saying, am I the only one that completely skipped mp3 players? I owned two MP3 players. I got some lovely store brand 512MB USB flash one for $5 well after everyone already had iPods, and later some Philips brand one for free with some other purchase because the store obviously couldn't sell them. I could never rationalize buying something with a hard drive in it that I was pretty sure was going to get wrecked pretty quick if I used it when I was walking or running like it was (I think) intended. The $5 one still works because it just takes a AAA battery, the Philips one's battery died really really quickly but still functions as an oddly-shaped 2GB flash device that needs a mini USB cable.
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Mar 12, 2016 02:20
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