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Arcade game graphics, explanations and demos
#385360 - 02/27/20 06:09 AM
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| gregf |
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Ramtek's Trivia promoter
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Reged: 09/21/03
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Posts: 8603
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Loc: southern CA, US
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Re: Arcade game graphics, explanations and demos
[Re: MrBrow]
#385361 - 02/27/20 09:52 AM
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>I've also done entries on graphics from discrete components and sprite extraction.
See my old post regarding PSE's Desert Patrol and grab Marc Lafontaine's [deceased? going by from what I had read in the past] Ripper program that I uploaded in my 2014 post.
It works with some of the black/white simple images from various 1970s era roms.
--
time for PSE Desert Patrol mini thread *edit*
10/02/14 11:22 AM Attachment: rip081.zip 152 KB (17 downloads)
https://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/sh...part=1&vc=1
Marc Lafontaine's program called Ripper which can be grabbed from here as a zip file attachment.
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>I imagine there are a lot of people on here who are knowledgeable about these topics and
>would welcome comments and/or constructive criticism. I'm also open to suggestions of
>games to study, especially from 1980 and earlier.
Check Keith Smith's golden age / bronze age blog site that has info of some of 1970s era coinop games since there might be some games (not yet emulated) that might be worth a couple sentences or two. Keith used to write past articles on GameRoom magazine and interviewed game designers such as Allied Leisure's Jack Pearson back in post 2000A.D. era.
If you haven't done so yet, maybe have an entry for upright cabs (either Midway 8080 hardware or Gremlin z80 vic/dual hardware) that have monitor mounted on bottom of upright cab projecting the monitor screen output onto a reverse mirror and projects images on to a backdrop scenery piece that is mounted on back end of interior of upright cab? This was done for a few black/white monitor games [some also used color overlay strips placed on to monitor that also projected on to back end of cab such as Midway Space Invaders] to make up for being unable to display complex images [ie graphics] on screen. There were a fair number of 1970s era upright games that had a setup as described. Gremlin's Frogs [one of my favorite 1970s era games], Gremlin's Safari, Midway Space Invaders, Midway baseball games [Tornado Baseball, Extra Innings etc.], Midway Boot Hill, PSE Desert Patrol, and a few others I forget.
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Re: Arcade game graphics, explanations and demos
[Re: MrBrow]
#385363 - 02/27/20 10:38 AM
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Tilemaps come in all different forms. Have you looked at games with ROM-based tilemaps? Dooyong hardware supports absolutely massive ROM-based tilemaps for the scrolling backgrounds, of which MAME just renders a small slice at a time. Then there are row scroll and column scroll effects (e.g. the water effects in Raiden Fighters games). Some hardware supports mid-tile palette changes (e.g. Laser Battle).
Animating sprites is typically faster than animating objects in tilemaps - you only need to update the coordinates and sprite code. You can also do simple collision calculations on the sprite RAM itself. Animating with tilemaps is slower because you need to go from object position to tile location, and update the tile codes for the old and new positions. Collision calculation will be less efficient too if you rely on scanning tilemap memory. On top of that you're more limited in how you can place objects, because you won't have tiles for overlapping objects.
Sprite generators generally have per-frame and per-line sprite count limits. This may tip the balance in favour of a tilemap if you're animating a large number of objects that move in formation.
Anyway, I think a lot of your assumptions and conclusions are wrong. It would pay to understand the hardware a bit better before writing "informative" stuff like this.
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Re: Arcade game graphics, explanations and demos
[Re: Vas Crabb]
#385365 - 02/27/20 01:22 PM
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While I won't pretend to know everything about all of the hardware that's out there (that is, in fact, one of the reasons I wrote this post), several of the points that you just made are already in my blog entries. I devote a whole section to object overlap issues with tilemaps and sprite counts (per-line or otherwise) are a well-known limitation that I cite in multiple entries.
The other information you've given is useful, thank you -- I haven't come across ROM-based tilemaps, row/column-scrolling or mid-tile palette changes yet. But it's not clear that it would have been anything more than an asterisk in the articles I wrote (if that), since they weren't about games that had those capabilities.
I've tried to restrict my statements to the games I've already studied and the things I *do* know about; in particular, I avoid making any general statements about what "all" games are capable of, since such statements are almost invariably going to be shown wrong in one case or another. But if you come across a case where my writing has been overly general, I appreciate that being pointed out.
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Re: Arcade game graphics, explanations and demos
[Re: gregf]
#385367 - 02/27/20 01:25 PM
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