14 July 2021, 18:49 | #281 | ||
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I love that feature in my A3000. Last edited by Gorf; 14 July 2021 at 20:20. |
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14 July 2021, 19:00 | #282 | |
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Some system libraries were supported, but not in a generic way ... An of course some GUI builder would have been great. But I was talking more about the missing DOS integration ... (even AREXX is missing out on some things here) - BASIC in the CLI or in Shell-Scripts like you can do with AREXX would have been nice. And some way to do it the other way round: invoke some command-line programs within you BASIC script ... Or use PIPE to transfer output between the two realms. Also support for Amiga message ports. |
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15 July 2021, 13:52 | #283 | |
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In my eyes that palette is not very pleasant. Imho, not even most popular games looked good enough (Giana Sisters, for example), and could use a better palette. The only game I can think of, and looks astonishing is Creatures 2. And I owned C64 for many years, and played countless number of games. Now, don't get me wrong, C64 is very capable gaming machine, and it's place is at very top of 8-bits systems, it's just that I wish they made a little bit different palette. It seems to me that Nes have a better palette. and especially Amstrad CPC. Now imagine C64 games with Amstrad palette... you'l be half Amiga already |
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15 July 2021, 19:40 | #284 | |
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This is how the C64 looks on an NTSC display: Better than what we get in Europe, huh? |
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15 July 2021, 21:09 | #285 | |
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Not a different palette, but an adjustable palette. Just look at the competing Atari 8 bits: 9 color registers, but selectable from 128 colors. I wonder why the C64 had a fixed palette. |
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15 July 2021, 21:26 | #286 |
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15 July 2021, 21:35 | #287 |
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15 July 2021, 22:40 | #288 | |
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Compare it please, to ZX Spectrum. |
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15 July 2021, 22:53 | #289 |
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16 July 2021, 01:07 | #290 |
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I never thought the C= 64 palette was bad, and I never thought of the default display as anything but blue.
There are two different revisions of the VIC-II chip with different colours though: Turn down the colour gradient of your screen until everything is black and white and then one shows 5(IIRC) and the other 9(?) shades of gray if you look at all 16 colours. |
16 July 2021, 09:07 | #291 |
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I doubt anyone can tell. All I can say that its competitors had it, before the C64, so it was a step back and I find that a bit strange. Colors in GTIA (the Atari chip responsible for it) were created by a (configurable) phase delay in the chip, and the luminance levels by a 5-resistor ladder outside of it. Thus, not exactly high-tech or unknown terrain.
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16 July 2021, 16:05 | #292 |
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It's a bit of a hyberbole that the C64's competitors had selectable palettes before; afaik the only one were the Atari 8-bitters. Sinclair Spectrum, TI 99, Apple II, IBM CGA and a bunch of others had all fixed palettes (some could switch between a number of them), and most of them were much uglier than the C64's. So that feature was hardly standard at that time.
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16 July 2021, 17:51 | #293 |
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The Atari 8-Bits are seen as an early prototype of the Amiga computers, and it's true: the principles behind both are very similar in sprites, copper effects (VBIs on Atari) and of course, the palette.
However, the Atari 8-Bits never did very well compared to the other 8-bit machines available in the UK at the time, probably because while the Atari could choose up to 128 colours in most cases, the actual number of numbers on screen (sans any VBIs) was only five. Of course, some games would use the VBIs to create lots of "rainbow" colour effects on title screens, etc, and that made the Ataris look pretty, but I think the arcade conversion programmers of the British computer industry preferred machines that had fixed palettes, so they could reproduce the arcade games on the cheap. The Atari ruled this industry initially, but the C64 took over and fixed palettes became dominant... ...until the Amiga line came out with the same basic palette principle as the Atari 8-Bits and offered up to 32 colours out of a palette of 4096 at higher resolutions, wiping out any advantage that the 8-bits might've had. |
17 July 2021, 09:23 | #294 | |
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In some ways the CPC was more similar to the Amiga than most 8 bitters. It had a full function keyboard with cursor keys and numeric keypad, and stereo sound. Resolutions included 640x200, 320x200 and 160x200, but the CRTC could also be programmed to do non-standard sizes. Interrupts ran at 300Hz, so you could have a split screen with several different resolutions and colors with low CPU overhead. The color palette was loaded at the beginning of each frame just like the Copper does on the Amiga. It also had a proper OS with comprehensive documented system calls. The CPC Plus range added sprites (16 per line, each 16x16 pixels with 15 colors - more than the Amiga!), a 4096 color palette, and loading the sound synthesizer chip via DMA, but these machines were less popular because by this time (1990) the Amiga had taken the lead. The Amstrad's clean and reliable hardware design, built-in high performance (compared to the C64) 3" disk drive, high resolution display and RGB output made it much more attractive to me than the C64. Locomotive BASIC was a refreshing change from Microsoft variants, with its graphic functions and extendible commands that could be loaded from disk or added via 3rd party ROMs (up to 252 ROMs automatically logged on by the system). I used my CPC664 to cross-assemble code for the Sega SC3000 and custom-built commercial gambling machines, a role that typically required a PC. I also played a lot of games on it! When I got the A1000 in 1987 it wasn't hard to make the transition to programming the Amiga because I was familiar with some concepts such as programmable palettes and using system functions rather than poking the hardware. |
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17 July 2021, 09:43 | #295 |
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I wasn't sure about the Amstrad CPC and how the palette worked, but I knew it was 16 colours out of 27, spread evenly across an RGB colour space, but which meant ultimately black, grey and white out of even RGB amounts.
But the CPC audio sucked, it was the same as the Speccy. C64 blew the CPC out of the water because of SID. Give me an 8-bit computer with the colour capabilities of the CPC and the sound of the C64, and I'll- we'll all be happy! Oh wait, we did get it and more, in 16 bits at least: the Amiga! |
17 July 2021, 10:10 | #296 | |
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Creating a single 16 color palette that could fit so many different game types, must be a hell of a challenge. Yet, as mentioned, the C64 had some grayish purple brownish, palette that was never very pleasant to my eyes. I googled now quickly C64 palette: Then I googled something like "best universal 16 color palette". And I got this: Maybe, what I am trying to tell, that C64 had a correct palette in terms of hue's (colors itself), but I think they could do a better (de)saturation and lightness values of each of the color. I think in C64 palette is pretty difficult to achieve, what in theory is called "color harmony". Yet, in this second palette I googled, it seems that colors are way more "compatible" with each other combination, and would generally give better colors for that games. And yeah, I am aware that Commodore, back in the day, probably didn't had many months to research on that, or try various colors combinations. Good thig is, that in these retro days, C64 palette looks very unique, and you can tell it's C64 game, just by looking at colors. |
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17 July 2021, 10:28 | #297 | |
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The C64's video signal suffered from 'jail bars' caused by digital signals interfering with the sensitive analog video signals inside the VIC chip. There was no external fix for this, so they simply chose colors that minimized the visual effect. That turned out to be blue because the eye has lower resolution at this colour and the composite signal blurs blue more than other colours. Another problem with the VIC chip was variations in luminance output between individual chips. A trimmer was put on the board to adjust the level at the factory, but sometimes it wasn't set right. This could result in very low contrast which made it hard to read text on the screen. But low contrast also means... less obvious 'jail bars'! They may have fixed the interference in later chip revisions, but the blue on blue colour scheme remained and C64 users thought it was normal. For the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 they changed it to black on grey. The C64 had a lot of design flaws and quality control issues, as well as hardware limitations and compatibility issues that reduced performance. Much of this was due to the rush to market before fixing bugs, which then got 'baked into' the design. But getting to market quickly was what ensured the C64's success despite its flaws. In comparison the Amiga models were much less buggy when released, but took longer to develop. Should Commodore have just thrown a minimal OS into the A1000 in 1985 rather including the expensive WCS board? Would the A1200 have been more of a success if released in 1989 with a buggy and incomplete AA chipset? I for one am glad they spent the extra time and effort to produce reliable machines that weren't compromised by releasing them before ironing the bugs out. |
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17 July 2021, 10:38 | #298 | |||
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Here's an in-depth analysis of the C64 colour palette:
http://unusedino.de/ec64/technical/misc/vic656x/colors/ I'm particularly interested in Robert Yannes' email at the end: Quote:
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17 July 2021, 13:57 | #299 | |
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tbh i think having another shade of grey at the expense of a shade of green might have been a better choice, then again a lot of the early games were sports games so i guess they thought they'd need a lot of grass/outdoors colours. One of my favourite modern 16-colour palettes is DB16: It's got some in common with C64 i think, especially since it's all a little bit pastel. But i think that's not so bad, in fact. In reality most things are not bright primary colours, A lot of modern pixel artists use this palette to good effect, you can search for examples.. |
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17 July 2021, 14:01 | #300 |
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Incidentally, here is the palette from first levels of Mr Beanbag, for comparison:
(Note there are only 15 colours here because colour 0 is transparent) |
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