That wavy effect

stalepie · Post by **stalepie** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:55 am

That wavy effect that you see in the lava level of Thunderforce 3 and when you warp in Landstalker (with the magic trees), that was a hardware effect, right? What was it called?

Gerrie · Post by **Gerrie** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:08 pm

Raster effects ?

GManiac · Post by **GManiac** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:35 pm

VDP can scroll horizontally Planes of raster and even single lines, it has HSRAM for it. To make "veritcal sine" effect ("underwater") you should set VDP HScrolling mode to Single Lines and to write into HSRAM numbers which represents template of sine, for example:
0 1 2 3 4 4 5 5 5 5 4 4 3 2 1 0 -1 -2 -3 -4 -4 -5 -5 -5 -5 -4 -4 -3 -2 -1 0....
Using both HSCR and VSCR you can get effects like rotating (title screen of Jungle of Book) and even more impressive (using of "Black Box" item in Shining in the Darkness).

stalepie · Post by **stalepie** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 1:37 pm

Thanks

stalepie · Post by **stalepie** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:36 pm

But Sega arcade hardware couldn't do that right? Could any arcade hardware? I don't remember seeing it in the arcades.

Shiru · Post by **Shiru** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:56 pm

Even NES can do it, though it requires very exact timing because lack of H-INT. Most of existing systems with HW horizontal scroll can do it too, and of course this includes Sega arcade hardware.

Actually, every old sprite-based racing game use raster effects to render the road.

stalepie · Post by **stalepie** » Fri Oct 30, 2009 1:06 am

What about the MZ-700 version of Space Harrier?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs-4Zu0DN2g

It says it's just text rather than graphics. Like that game Shoot'em by Tringi
http://www.mx-3.cz/tringi/www/langen.ph ... &submenu=1

but I don't get how text is different from graphics. Isn't text just another kind of graphic? like isn't an "A" or a "U" or any other letter a sprite or some kind of picture?

stalepie · Post by **stalepie** » Fri Oct 30, 2009 1:14 am

sorry. i'll shutup. I don't understand any of yalls technical talk anyway.

Shiru · Post by **Shiru** » Fri Oct 30, 2009 3:26 am

stalepie wrote:What about the MZ-700 version of Space Harrier?

This is pseudographics - whole characters in hardware text mode used as single pixels (colored space is character too).

Tilemaps, i.e. background layers on game consoles are actually evolution of the hardware text mode. The difference is that they have more colors per character, often has more than 256 characters per cell, palettes, hardware scrolling.

SMD background layers probably are evolution of the text mode on the TMS9918 video controller (MSX1, ColecoVision, and some other very old computers) from 1979.

Hardware text mode came from very old times, from early video terminals. At the time, RAM was very expensive, so it was not possible to have framebuffer with bit per every pixel of raster. Instead, ROM was used to store all needed characters, and RAM was used only to store number of the characters. So, if you need 80*25 screen of characters 8*8 pixels, you only need 2K of RAM and 2K of ROM (set of 256 characters), instead of 16K of RAM.

mic_ · Post by **mic_** » Fri Oct 30, 2009 8:07 am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs-4Zu0DN2g

what a gigantic mess.. I guess it's cool from a "Hey look what I can do on this crappy machine" point of view, but it looks unplayable. I hope noone ever payed money for that game.

stalepie · Post by **stalepie** » Fri Oct 30, 2009 10:57 am

mic_ wrote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs-4Zu0DN2g
what a gigantic mess.. I guess it's cool from a "Hey look what I can do on this crappy machine" point of view, but it looks unplayable. I hope noone ever payed money for that game.

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