I saw a game called Xevious on the CPC the other day, it was really smooth, I was impressed. I'm curious about what the average fps of the Spec games were, I'm assuming around 25 with the very optimised ones getting to 50 maybe depending on the graphics. But then some aren't scrolling per pixel and different parts are at different rates I think so it's hard to get a straight answer. But I saw a conversion 'Nothing' on the spec by some Russian guy that really looks close to a modern indie game in performance, though I guess maybe it's 25fps in reality.
So if available, the double buffer would generally be used to avoid 'racing the beam' to stop flicker? That's one thing I'm concerned about on the 48k spec, if it can't do double buffer and there's all that trouble. I'm not sure if it can't at all, I just read that somewhere.
That is the skeleton in the maze game, right, I saw that and it got me thinking about spectrum versus early DOS because I thought it was running good and I was trying to remember how the games on my family 286 as a kid were, like Alley Cat and so on.
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I was looking at the Amstrad for a bit, partly because I wanted some midtones and the colours are pretty nice I think, better than the c64. But I learned about the screen memory and it seemed that it could never be as fast as the Spectrum. Though I came across some French guys who were talking about some way to get hardware scroll by exploiting something, they were still waging the war against c64 and Spectrum haha. Speaking of the screen memory, I assume the Spectrum would maybe outperform the early CGA PCs with the early 86's since I think the CGA is 16k or something screen memory, but I wonder if it would even compete with the 286 with bitmap graphics performance. What do you think?
Yeah, I think the N64 was using some derivative of OpenGL so I guess if people wanted to program that it would still be useful. I think for the newest 3D stuff I can understand they want the most powerful and so on and will discourage people from investing in it if they want to do the latest games, I guess.
Is the Amstrad screen layout weird like the Spectrum?
That guy is on here, so maybe you already follow him. But his YT channel is this.
https://www.youtube.com/@speccyrook
The Russian/East Europe spectrum scene is pretty hilarious because they just put everything on there they can. There's a cool Abe Odyssey I saw and Doom was on there somehow, maybe with sped-up emulator. But this Denis guy just does originals by the looks of it.
Hm, that's an interesting comment about the APIs and encouragement to learn software rendering. I did notice OpenGL was on its way out, but I think I went that way because I found freeglut or some such recommended to get a window up to allow drawing of primitives (I didn't realise in the beginning you couldn't interact with the video system directly like on the old hardware), though maybe people use SDL now. That's why I just started doing stuff on the GBA because it has a bitmap mode and I didn't have to worry about the API stuff for now. But also seeing your DOS 3D it made me wonder whether that's a better way. Yeah that's kind of ironic that the APIs keep changing yet they are designed to kind of universalise it all.
To me the super scaler stuff seemed more like scaling and rotation but not distorting in 3d, but I don't know much about the hardware. I thought the Saturn was doing stuff more like the CEL, and possibly copied it. I remember people saying they weren't 'real' polygons but distorted sprites.
I don't know if you're interested in some of the 8bit homebrew but there is some impressive Russian stuff on the Spectrum. There's a guy called Retrosouls who does a special colour engine which allows more colours per 8x8 block. He just released another one, Yazzie Junior, I think. But there's an Alien Breed demake that looks really cool with this colour mode.
Thanks, I'll check some of those things out. A goal of mine was to understand how computer graphics were done and then be able to program some 2d graphics and 3d graphics in the 'old' way, either with C or perhaps with assembly for 2d. So I know now how this stuff works in a basic sense and can make some graphics, but mastering the programming methods is a lot of work especially when needing to learn specific hardware. So I definitely have gone all over the place but that's partly because I like both bitmap stuff and polygons so I get inspired when I see one or the other, also there are just so many systems and languages since the early days and then I also thought I should learn some kind of OpenGL/DirectX to do Windows stuff or just because that's the way now with the api's, so I went that way a bit too. But I'm more drawn to the older methods as far as understanding what's happening.
I guess the CEL system is maybe one of the first to do sprites like textured polygons?
Hey, thanks, that's interesting to hear you learned like that, and is good motivation to keep chipping away myself. I've collected some books and a bit of old source code and whatnot, it more that yeah it's all over the place, different systems, languages, 'pseudo-code' etc, I was drawing some lines and triangles in a GBA emulator just to get a 'raw' system without the modern gpu stuff. Most of the learning material around is directed towards the modern api's and so on. I wonder how they learned software 3d back in the 80's/90's, I guess it was through universities or amongst teams, not sure.
I took a break from the 3d and have been studying some sprite stuff for Spectrum and Amiga. I think I found your channel because I was wondering about the 3d0 2d ability and I read something about it having a blitter based on the amiga/atari concept but it seems quite obscure with the cel thing.
That gamepark, I guess it's similar capability to the N-Gage, maybe similar ARM chip.
Maybe you know this guy, but he is porting this 3d platformer to many retro systems including the 3d0, might be of interest to you. https://www.youtube.com/@noahthepoohloudies8752
Hey, cool graphics. I stumbled across your YT channel and have been watching a bit. I'm curious how you learned to do software-rendered 3D, I'm guessing you're a professional programmer though, so maybe it's different to someone coming at it as a hobbyist. It feels like a wild goose chase, the resources are just all over the place and unfinished tuts everywhere etc. Anyway, it's interesting seeing the performance you can get on the 386/486 without acceleration, I've been curious how many flat-shaded polys could be pushed on those computers to make a smooth game. I felt like the framerates were often really poor back then but perhaps they were just going for too many polys because your game is looking sharp.