Quote:
Originally Posted by dlfrsilver
the CPC has no custom hardware ? But the CRTC is a custom chip ! It's a sort of black box !
the CRTC on the CPC is the main key. This chip has more abilities than anyone thought back in the 80's. It can do line-per-line hardware scrolling !
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Perhaps you should re-read my post.
I did not say the Amstrad did not have custom hardware. I said it doesn't have custom hardware
that has the kind of features you really want for a game like this: no sprites/sprite scaling. No Blitter/hardware accelerated drawing. No multi layer display. No road drawing hardware. Not even per-line scrolling.
As it turns out, I
was wrong about one thing. It turns out it
is possible to trick the CRTC into scrolling the screen horizontally (doing so breaks the PAL/NTSC standard, however it still works on
most screens). That's a nice feature to have, though nothing particularly special - most 8 bit systems had smooth horizontal scrolling built into the hardware and most could do this on a line-by-line basis.
However, the big cost of a 'fake 3D' racer like this is not actually drawing the road (which can be done surprisingly cheaply -with or without line-based scrolling- if you know what you're doing). It's drawing the all the other objects. And it's there where the 'magic' happens in this game and there where the Batman Group shows their expertise.
And as I've said before, the result is pretty awesome
Quote:
Vesperino is impossible to make as good and as fast on C64. Nevermind the Spectrum since it has no CRTC 
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You will note that I've not made any claims about this game running on other systems.
I don't care much any more for the playground style machine wars. I used to a few years back, but now I see that for what it is: a pointless waste of time that will never convince anyone to change their mind.