3 playfield on game Fatal Noise

[gian2k]

Fatal Noise does not use sprite multiplexing but has three levels of parallax.
How did they do it?

[DanScott]

Not sure what the frame rate is (Youtube videos are old and not great quality), but could well just be blitting the layers ?

[jotd]

is it ECS? that's impressive

It could be AGA dual playfield otherwise, with the last plane in 2 colors and the rest of the planes wasting colors to hide the last plane when it moves differently from others...

That and heavy copper color change. At any rate this looks like Neo Geo... Is it downloadable somewhere?

Blitting the layers is always possible but that would be super-slow... of course if the demo runs on WinUAE with fast blitter it would be possible.

Most static screen looks AGA also.

edit: comments suggest that it's ECS EHB. But all this blitting looks just impossible for a A500 in that mode.

[gian2k]

The game is here:
http://archive.org/details/commodore...adf-f_20220210

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jotd

is it ECS? that's impressive

It could be AGA dual playfield otherwise, with the last plane in 2 colors and the rest of the planes wasting colors to hide the last plane when it moves differently from others...

That and heavy copper color change. At any rate this looks like Neo Geo... Is it downloadable somewhere?

Blitting the layers is always possible but that would be super-slow... of course if the demo runs on WinUAE with fast blitter it would be possible.

Most static screen looks AGA also.

edit: comments suggest that it's ECS EHB. But all this blitting looks just impossible for a A500 in that mode.

EHB 64 colors, like Fighting Spirit.

[jotd]

no whdload install either. Pity

[TCD]

Originally Posted by gian2k

The game is here:
http://archive.org/details/commodore...adf-f_20220210

Or here: https://ftp2.grandis.nu/turransearch...0&httplinks=on

@jotd
If only we would know somebody who could change that...

[jotd]

yeah, of course, probably not difficult either. I was surprised no-one ever did it, the game is nice enough. Maybe runs decently already with generic kick that's why

[roondar]

I took a look in the WinUAE debugger to see what's going on here. The results are as follows:

Requires 1MB Chip RAM to run, no AGA needed.

The game uses different numbers of bitplane depths across different parts of the screen (presumably to optimise performance). It runs in 5 bitplanes from line 0 to line 37. Runs in 6 bitplanes from line 38 to line 215, runs in 2 bitplanes from line 216 to end of screen, which occurs at line 237.

Note: I've converted all line numbers to make line 0 the top of the visible screen for clarity. DIWSTRT is $2c71, DIWSTOP is $19d1

Multiple colour reloads happen along the way, usually about 2-4 colours each, though several bigger ones. The game also uses several different bitplane buffers, probably to help with the layer effect. The game cleverly stops the player bobs from reaching into the 5 bitplane area.

No sprites are used for BG layers, Blitter goes crazy so it's almost certainly used instead.

Final note: bob movement is quite jerky horizontally, so perhaps not running at 50Hz.

[DanScott]

From the video (the best quality one i could find) on YouTube, I assumed it was probably not running at 50fps

[jotd]

had a quick look last night (to create the whdload slave). 3 disks & hardware banging trackloader. Damn guys it's 1996!

It will happen.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by jotd

It will happen.

You're the man

[Estrayk]

Originally Posted by jotd

had a quick look last night (to create the whdload slave). 3 disks & hardware banging trackloader. Damn guys it's 1996!

It will happen.

great !

[Photon]

I would be interested to know if this is OCS/ECS, like HOL says. I.e. feel free to share disk images in The Zone or anywhere.