Crappy C64 screen resolution

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Zak

Obvioulsy, you did not know about computers games with better resolution or hardly ever experienced them in mid eighties.

Right. I did miss the part where I told you which computers I had access to in the 80s. Of course nobody can say the C64 resolution is not a problem after they saw a PC or a Spectrum in the 80s

[khph_re]

Anecdotal, but the argument at my school went something like this (UK Council estate comprehensive - No PC or Apple owners)

NOTE: for humour only. I love all the 8bits.

C64 Owner to Speccy: Your graphics look like cellophane stuck on the screen,
your colours are too bright, and your computer music sounds like farting.

Speccy to C64: Your graphics are blocky and your colours look like mud.
And the Spectrum 128k has great sound.

Amstrad Owner: My Amstrad has better colours than both your computers.
and I have a monitor.

Speccy and C64 Owners to Amstrad: Most of your games are Speccy ports, and I could read a book waiting for micro to scroll. Also you are a posh twat.
Also you have a green screen.

Acorn BBC owner: I have Elite.

Everyone at Acorn: You are a middle class swot (Teachers pet), and your dad is a teacher, so you got it on discount.

[Dunny]

I had a speccy. It was obvious that the C64 had half resolution chunky pixels in order to up the colour usage while keeping the display RAM requirements as low as possible.

I remember thinking "damn, wish the speccy had that".

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by khph_re

Anecdotal, but the argument at my school went something like this (UK Council estate comprehensive - No PC or Apple owners)

NOTE: for humour only. I love all the 8bits.

C64 Owner to Speccy: Your graphics look like cellophane stuck on the screen,
your colours are too bright, and your computer music sounds like farting.

Speccy to C64: Your graphics are blocky and your colours look like mud.
And the Spectrum 128k has great sound.

Amstrad Owner: My Amstrad has better colours than both your computers.
and I have a monitor.

Speccy and C64 Owners to Amstrad: Most of your games are Speccy ports, and I could read a book waiting for micro to scroll. Also you are a posh twat.
Also you have a green screen.

Acorn BBC owner: I have Elite.

Everyone at Acorn: You are a middle class swot (Teachers pet), and your dad is a teacher, so you got it on discount.

Yeah that resonates with the kind of playground arguments I remember too. And, of course, we all were envious of certain aspects of the other machines or of games they had. And we all knew that, in many ways, out own favourite system (which was usually a favourite because it was the ones out parents had bought) had some limitations.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

At the differential level we're talking about, the modern vs old TV doesn't make enough difference - which is why I said what I said and I stood by it. Of course, you can insist on a truism that on a 60" modern panel things are more visible than on a 14-20 inch tube TV, but for the sake of this discussion the difference between large jumps in resolution is as observable on the latter as it is on a former.

Perhaps it is because neither myself nor anyone I knew used their computers on something as large as a 20 inch tube TV. My monitor was 12" or 13" and that seemed to be a pretty normal size around here. No one around here was allowed their console or computer on the 'big' living room TV except as a treat a couple of times per year.

Nonetheless, I also stand by what I said - at the same time I had a C64, my dad had an Atari ST. I didn't notice the difference in resolution in games all that much, despite -at that age - having perfect eyesight (I did notice a large difference whenever he ran it connected to the 640x400 monochrome monitor, but that was boring as it was only useful for professional stuff - or so I thought at the time ). I also used a Sinclair QL before getting my C64 and again, I didn't notice the difference to any large degree.

To be clear, it's not that I saw zero difference, but I certainly did not see a difference to the degree where one looked blocky and the other looked hires.

In fact, my friend, who had a NES (with both better resolution in games and better colours than the C64), never even mentioned it - despite the two of us being at loggerheads over which system was better all the time. And perhaps most interestingly of all, the first time I heard anyone making this argument was when I first started visiting retro forums circa 2005. This is what I meant when I said I didn't think it wasn't a big deal in the 1980's and that the CRT's of the time diminished these differences.

Edit: I do want to add one thing to this. I'm truly not adding these examples to say that my personal experience is more valid than yours, simply to point out that your personal experience and mine differ - and that thus it's not as clear cut as either of us might think.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

Maybe you should checkout these:

[ Show youtube player ]

[ Show youtube player ]

[ Show youtube player ]

[ Show youtube player ]

There are many more and some even feature scrollng. Amazing really

Forgot to mention Old Tower and Gluf, shame on me!

Old Tower:
[ Show youtube player ]


However the scrolling problem persists horizontally - unless, i suppose, we do simple 8 pixel scroll+attributes and keep only the sprites multicolored, but is something that an advanced speccy coder can only check

[saimon69]

A quite OT remark - Old Tower is a port of Aztec Tomb the mobile game, and me, Sandruzzo and Zbigniew(ZB) were working on an amiga optimized version called Escape Velocity, but ZB - the graphic artist - had to abandon the project; any volunteers to do graphic?

[ Show youtube player ]

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Forgot to mention Old Tower and Gluf, shame on me!

Old Tower:
[ Show youtube player ]


However the scrolling problem persists horizontally - unless, i suppose, we do simple 8 pixel scroll+attributes and keep only the sprites multicolored, but is something that an advanced speccy coder can only check

You can do it in 8 directions, if you're prepared to keep objects largely made of of big chunks of static colour:

[ Show youtube player ]

[Megalomaniac]

Good point that the C64's blockiness is less apparent on a small TV, and few of us used our computers on even the 22" living room TVs of the 80s - far more often a 14" TV on which it was much less obvious, and how much colour there was on screen was a much bigger deal (unless it was a black-and-white TV, obviously). I still think the Spectrum would have done better if it had also had a 128x192 mode with no colour clash but otherwise equal performance, in addition to the 256x192 (provided it didn't significantly increase the machine's cost). You could design some impressive looking stuff around the Spectrum's higher-res-but-clashing graphics though.

As for the Spectrum stuff, I'm impressed. Gluf's basic scrolling is especially neat, Old Tower likewise though the graphics are relatively unspectacular. All the same, Gandalf aside the gameplay area is pretty small on most of them. Do these all work on any 128k Spectrum regardless of timing subtleties?

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

, obviously). I still think the Spectrum would have done better if it had also had a 128x192 mode with no colour clash but otherwise equal performance, in addition to the 256x192 (provided it didn't significantly increase the machine's cost). You could design some impressive looking stuff around the Spectrum's higher-res-but-clashing graphics though.

The tricky part with doing anything like that is changing the hardware without increasing the amount of memory bandwidth required (as well as keeping it within the limits of technology at the time).

The 128K machines really should have had the video hardware from the Timex machines though, which allowed for 8*1 attribute resolution.

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

,
As for the Spectrum stuff, I'm impressed. Gluf's basic scrolling is especially neat, Old Tower likewise though the graphics are relatively unspectacular. All the same, Gandalf aside the gameplay area is pretty small on most of them. Do these all work on any 128k Spectrum regardless of timing subtleties?

Yeah, pretty much all modern multicolour software is designed to tweak itself to adapt to the subtle timing differences between models

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

You can do it in 8 directions, if you're prepared to keep objects largely made of of big chunks of static colour:

[ Show youtube player ]

THAT was the "quarter character ultra low res" mentioned in the topic above, but no: let's try to have sprites in nirvana AND the usual attribute scroll together, maybe with triple buffering and sequential rendering

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by saimon69

THAT was the "quarter character ultra low res" mentioned in the topic above, but no: let's try to have sprites in nirvana AND the usual attribute scroll together, maybe with triple buffering and sequential rendering

Very tricky. Probably only possible on a 128K machine by using the second screen page. Wouldn't be surprised if someone manages it at some point though, the boundaries are constantly being pushed.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by khph_re

Anecdotal, but the argument at my school went something like this (UK Council estate comprehensive - No PC or Apple owners)

NOTE: for humour only. I love all the 8bits.

C64 Owner to Speccy: Your graphics look like cellophane stuck on the screen,
your colours are too bright, and your computer music sounds like farting.

Speccy to C64: Your graphics are blocky and your colours look like mud.
And the Spectrum 128k has great sound.

Amstrad Owner: My Amstrad has better colours than both your computers.
and I have a monitor.

Speccy and C64 Owners to Amstrad: Most of your games are Speccy ports, and I could read a book waiting for micro to scroll. Also you are a posh twat.
Also you have a green screen.

Acorn BBC owner: I have Elite.

Everyone at Acorn: You are a middle class swot (Teachers pet), and your dad is a teacher, so you got it on discount.

Lol, yeah, with slight variations (Atari 8 bit was big in my neck of the woods), that's pretty accurate. Well, maybe aside from Dunny's Mensa school, where kids would say things like "but! the C64 has half resolution chunky pixels in order to up the colour usage while keeping the display RAM requirements as low as possible, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, you pillock!"

The thing is, which is what was quite shocking to me when I joined the retro world some time ago, is that back then our arguments were much more mellow and less serious than they are these days. We could bicker in public but secretly would know and envy the other machine's strengths and top games, and in the end just be happy that we can play stuff at home. Later on, when the emulators became a thing and old hardware affordable, I learned to love all of them and be especially fascinated by some of my old frenemies (mostly A8 & ST lines).

But in the interent era it's normal to see people get really hostile and go toe to toe in 20+ page arguments about some unimportant factoid which has slighted their tribe. I'm not referring to this site, mind you, it's not too bad here, though the inability of some C64/CPC fans to ever admit that their beloved machine could possibly have a weak spot is definitely present.

[Megalomaniac]

This does probably get a bit too hostile at times. Chances are, an 8-bit computer was our first computer or console we had. Many of us probably didn't specifically choose it - maybe the computer shop convinced dad which one to get, or (at best) a friend showed you his computer so you chose it (perhaps for an easy supply of copies, dare I suggest?) without seeing the other contenders, maybe you got one before they'd all been launched, maybe you went from ZX81 or Vic-20 to Spectrum or C64 out of loyalty, or maybe (my case) your dad picked it second-hand out of a listings mag and you had little say. Are people who owned a Spectrum really that different from people who owned a C64 or CPC or BBC or 8-bit Atari? Whichever 8-bit you had, there are great games you missed out on.

It simply wasn't possible to make an 8-bit system that could do everything. They all had to compromise on something. Think about the Atari ST for a moment - launched in 1985, and even by 1988 it still cost £300 here, more than most 8-bits ever cost. It offered the 'holy grail' of a 320x200x16 colour mode with free colour placement - but couldn't scroll it smoothly, despite a processor that was easily 2-3 times faster than any 8-bit system. Even with VIC and SID, I'm sure the C64 could not have done any better. The Enterprise (4Mhz Z80) could display 320x256x16, but it didn't launch until 1985, it cost more than a CPC which included screen and tape deck, and none of the videos I've found of it show any smooth scrolling (though it was quite unexploited, lots of unofficial Spectrum ports as it used the Z80, so maybe it could do more than I've seen?). The Amiga was the first machine that could do all this and more - and the 512k version was still £400 as late as early 1991...

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Whichever 8-bit you had, there are great games you missed out on.

I sometimes wonder if other people never visited friends who had a different 8-bit (or 16-bit or...) system and tried games on those. I don't claim that I've seem all the games on all the 8-bits, but I wasn't limited to exposure of games on 'my' 8-bit(s).

[saimo]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

This does probably get a bit too hostile at times.

Especially when threads are titled like this one ("Crappy C64 screen resolution")

Think about the Atari ST for a moment - launched in 1985, and even by 1988 it still cost £300 here, more than most 8-bits ever cost. It offered the 'holy grail' of a 320x200x16 colour mode with free colour placement - but couldn't scroll it smoothly, despite a processor that was easily 2-3 times faster than any 8-bit system. Even with VIC and SID, I'm sure the C64 could not have done any better.

I'm not sure what you mean here: do you mean that the C64 with the same CPU power of the Atari ST couldn't have done better than the Atari ST itself? That's quite a what-if. Anyway, the C64 didn't have 320x200x16 with free colour placement, so pure CPU grunt couldn't have compensated for that (sure it would have made the various software-based modes more practical and possibly allowed also new modes, but it couldn't have achieved such restriction-less mode).
Still, when it comes to screen modes, the C64 is much more capable than what it is commonly thought of, as the OP shows. It looks like I need to post this video again (sorry for that, but it seems to have gone unnoticed and it's appropriate for putting much of the resolution discussion to rest):

[ Show youtube player ]

The video shows a stock C64 handling the following:
* 304x192 hires, colorful and color-clash-free graphics;
* unrestricted scrolling;
* pseudo-transparency effects;
* lighting effects;
* animated backgrounds;
* hires sprites made of up to 5 freely choosable colors.

What was the title of this thread again?!?

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by TCD

I sometimes wonder if other people never visited friends who had a different 8-bit (or 16-bit or...) system and tried games on those. I don't claim that I've seem all the games on all the 8-bits, but I wasn't limited to exposure of games on 'my' 8-bit(s).

I'm sure we all did, but there were games your "other system" owning mate wasn't interested in so didn't buy. Or would tantalisingly have sat on their shelf whenever you went round, but they never wanted to bother with.

And, in any case, a few hours on a game at your mates was never quite the same as being able to get engrossed in something on your own machine.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

And, in any case, a few hours on a game at your mates was never quite the same as being able to get engrossed in something on your own machine.

Sure. I was merely referring to the 'miss out' part. When somebody would talk about a game they found great I tried to play it for myself at least for some minutes. The same for games that gaming magazine were crazy about. That was one of the reasons why my brother and I got a lot of machines in the late 80s and then the 90s. Of course I missed out on some games, but overall I was able to try a lot games for myself bitd.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by Zak

Sorry for click-baity title and not questioning that the C64 was overall one of the best machines ever, but alas, I always thought that the 160x200 screen resolution looks atrocious in comparison to other systems, and I always wondered why they didn't produce the games in 320x200, which the machine is capable of? They always claimed the C64 CPU would be the best, there was plenty of memory in comparison to other systems, so why didn't it happen? And do you agree that the screen resolution looks horrible? Or do you even think it's cool?

Trouble is the VIC-II can just about do 50hz scrolling of character based screen RAM (1kb) and Color RAM (1kb and can't be moved/double buffered like screen RAM). C64 has 5 screen modes, 3 character based modes (hi-res,multicolor,extended background mode) and two 8kb bitmap mode (hi-res, multicolor),

Law of the West uses a bitmap 8kb hi-res screen mode which allows you to choose unique 2 colours every 8x8 pixel area. No other 8bit machine can produce anything as stunning as 64 Law of the West.

Most games use shitty char based hi-res (background color fixed for screen/scanline or multicolor which is even more borked in color change options and the most shit screenmode).

VIC-II pixel artists needed immense technical understanding of the unique advantages of the machine (hi-res and multicolour characters on the same row, 320 pixel accurate horizontal scrolling of 160x200 multicolor screens etc etc) hell you can even do a cool fake 3 layer parallax/playfield with sprite priorities and char based multicolor mode as shown here.

[ Show youtube player ]

Awkward but powerful chip, few companies had time/talent to make the most of it.

[saimon69]

If that WAS Chequered flag arcade (not speccy :P) the background would rotate on curves, and i very well know it cannot happen on a c64, not even on an amiga less than 030...