Crappy C64 screen resolution

[Megalomaniac]

Hugely impressive demo suggestion from TCD there, but I'm much more interested in what can be done in games. Law of the West aside I'm not seeing too many suggestions for C64 games (from then or now) which make good use of the hi-res mode - or indeed any isometric games (a style which was almost designed to make use of the Spectrum's strengths and minimise its weaknesses, though the Amstrad was suited to it too) which manage to be colourful and fast (Spindizzy, while not exactly the same thing, is impressively fast on the C64, mind you). As well as being less versatile, the NES and Master System both suffered for sprite limitations resulting in flicker, too.

Ignoring the Amstrad for now as it came later, is it fair to suggest that the C64's graphics technology was designed with the US market in mind, and the Spectrum with the UK market in mind? The US was more willing to pay a higher price in favour of fast and colourful arcade style games, whereas in the UK home computers were primarily perceived as an affordable learning tool, but with a very strong ethos of one kid in his bedroom designing the next bestselling innovative game, an attitude that didn't linger for as long in the US. Clive Sinclair himself had no intererst in games and no particular desire for people to use his computers for them, indeed.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Ignoring the Amstrad for now as it came later, is it fair to suggest that the C64's graphics technology was designed with the US market in mind, and the Spectrum with the UK market in mind? The US was more willing to pay a higher price in favour of fast and colourful arcade style games, whereas in the UK home computers were primarily perceived as an affordable learning tool, but with a very strong ethos of one kid in his bedroom designing the next bestselling innovative game, an attitude that didn't linger for as long in the US. Clive Sinclair himself had no intererst in games and no particular desire for people to use his computers for them, indeed.

I think it's more that Commodore owned a FAB and could thus produce custom chips a lot cheaper than the competition. And so they did, putting as much functionality into their systems as they could to make them marketable at a reasonable cost.

Alas using their facilities in that way meant they did have the money to invest into modernization and eventually the advantage was lost.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Hugely impressive demo suggestion from TCD there, but I'm much more interested in what can be done in games.

Here's a thread on Lemon64 about games: https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42025

[saimo]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

The consoles achieved it mostly by rigourously dividing the usage of system memory, so the video hardware had exclusive access to most of the memory and the CPU was limited to updating it within specific windows of time (usually via DMA). It was very much a case of sacrificing flexibility for performance, which probably wouldn't have been ideal for home computers of the era (since the design relied a lot on having most data fixed in ROMs).

This.
Plus, it looks like the fact that the C64 offered natively also a colorful hires mode is still being ignored - it's called extended background color mode (EBCM) and allows 4 colors per 8x8 character, with 3 of the colors shared by all the characters and 1 color freely selectable for each character. The tradeoff, in this case, is that the number of different characters in the charset is 64 (instead of 256).
Side note: thanks to the flexibility of the C64 hardware, the limitations of this mode, like for the other 4 modes, can be easily broken.

[saimo]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Hugely impressive demo suggestion from TCD there, but I'm much more interested in what can be done in games. Law of the West aside I'm not seeing too many suggestions for C64 games (from then or now) which make good use of the hi-res mode - or indeed any isometric games (a style which was almost designed to make use of the Spectrum's strengths and minimise its weaknesses, though the Amstrad was suited to it too) which manage to be colourful and fast (Spindizzy, while not exactly the same thing, is impressively fast on the C64, mind you). As well as being less versatile, the NES and Master System both suffered for sprite limitations resulting in flicker, too.

In recent years Rod & Emu ported several ZX Spectrum isometric games (IIRC, by transcoding the code, for the maximum faithfullness). From what I've read, the results are excellent (I didn't try the games and I wouldn't be able to compare them with the originals as I don't know them). Check them out here.
As for other hires games, the fact that nobody is investing time to make a nice list doesn't mean that there are few games.
My own games are all hires:
* QUOD INIT EXIT mixes the hires bitmap mode and the extended background color mode at the same time;
* QUOD INIT EXIT IIo uses the extended background color mode;
* MAH uses the standard character mode.
They all sport hires and colorful sprites, too.
Other games that come to mind:
* https://www.lemon64.com/game/robot-jet-action
* https://www.lemon64.com/game/harharagon
* https://www.lemon64.com/game/rocky-m...nd-of-atlantis
* https://www.lemon64.com/game/planet-golf
* https://www.lemon64.com/game/slaine

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

I think it's more that Commodore owned a FAB and could thus produce custom chips a lot cheaper than the competition. And so they did, putting as much functionality into their systems as they could to make them marketable at a reasonable cost.

Remind me how much the 64 launched for in the UK? And then compare that to the Speccy

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Remind me how much the 64 launched for in the UK? And then compare that to the Speccy

It was silly expensive compared to the Speccy, but probably on par with a lot of other machines of the era. Sinclair deserves a lot of credit for forcing prices down in the UK, even if they accomplished it by delivering the most bare bones solutions possible. I certainly couldn't have started my journey with computers had they not been that affordable.

[NorthWay]

Isometric on the C= 64 is lagging both due to the 6502 architecture and the size of the screenmodes.

As usual, you can do trade-offs, but it was kind of like with the Amiga and "Doom" tech games; it was an agreed upon truth that it was too slow for this style of game.

For example, for the screenmode itself you can use IRQs to stich up a 256 pixel wide mode based on swapping character sets down the screen (simply 32 characters wide and using tiles 0-255, then increasing the font pointer after all 256 have been displayed). You're still not getting a linear pixel layout, but the addressing can at least get a lot more regular.
Having a full 64K of memory gives options like unrolling code, using scratch memory to dynamically build code, set up pre-shifted copies of your graphics, or store a pristine copy of the rear-most layer of the graphics.
You could even experiment with clipping and rectangles where parts of any non-changing background could be built up from a mesh of hw sprites (up to a total of 192 pixels in width - hm... getting ideas here, see next paragraph) and potentially cut down on a lot of grunt needed to make it move.

With all that said and done, I find that the great irony is that isometric graphics are typically laid out in a 2x1 pixel alignment for the most pleasing projection (the C= 64 has two versions of Crystal Castles, the one from US Gold irks me with its perspective)...