Amstrad CPC/CPC plus "fanboy" thread

[dlfrsilver]

no idea, the game won't be released until they seal the deal.

[roondar]

That Pinball Dreams trailer looks pretty cool!

As for Amstrad CPC YouTube channels, I personally really like Chinnyvision (he's not just Amstrad, but he does showcase a lot of Amstrad stuff and clearly loves the CPC).

https://www.youtube.com/user/chinnyhill10

[Neil79]

Originally Posted by Higgy

Any recommendations for Youtubers to review it? Currently I have thought of Nostalgia Nerd & RetroManCave. They are CPC fans.

We are 100% up for it, got a very good person in mind to do this

[dlfrsilver]

Rhino has posted about the frame rate :

The game is running at 50fps all the the time, in game and on fix screens.
Half frame means that the CPU is only used at 50%. Fully used, the game could have a 100fps frame rate !!!!

So this enforce the fact that the CPC has been totally underused during its commercial life !

[Neil79]

Pinball Dreams on the Amstrad CPC - An EXCLUSIVE First Look!



http://www.indieretronews.com/2019/0...exclusive.html

Enjoy!

[Neil79]

If you thought Super Mario Brothers on the C64 was going to be the only highlight this year, then prepare for a shock. As we've just been tweeted via @BATMAN_GROUP that they are working on a racing game called 'Vespertino'; a game they claim will crown the Amstrad CPC as the best 8-bit platform!

http://www.indieretronews.com/2019/0...that-will.html

[dlfrsilver]

Yes, this game will crown the CPC as the best 8 bits machine. Pinball Dreams was the first butt plug, now it's time to even bonk the miggy's ass a bit with no lub ahaha

[Retro-Nerd]

I don't believe for a second that this game runs in 25fps overscan after the complete game logic is implemented.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

I don't believe for a second that this game runs in 25fps overscan after the complete game logic is implemented.

I have no problems believing it. The people behind this production (the Batman Group) tend to be quite honest about the abilities of their demo's/game engines. They're also extremely good at hiding limitations of the platforms they're working on. As such, I see no reason for this to fail.

Granted, they are rather over the top in that they do like to pretend what they do is tantamount to magic (and it really isn't), but that apparently is just their thing. Look past the silly fake tech terms ('3DFX-CRTC' indeed ) and just enjoy their work.

It's all pretty awesome.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

I don't believe for a second that this game runs in 25fps overscan after the complete game logic is implemented.

It does Retro-Nerd. This is another game using the CPC potential.

You can wipe your "the CPC can't do hardware scroll" (that's false) opinion.

Many people like you think that the commercial games released on CPC in the 80's just stuck the CPC as the worse 8 bits. It's not

Pinball Dreams use already awesome mathematics, and the z80 never slow down, and it uses only 40% of the CPC potential. 60% remains untouched until now

[Retro-Nerd]

We'll see when it's done. And this kind of game is not comparable with Pinball Dreams.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

You can wipe your "the CPC can't do hardware scroll" (that's false) opinion.

The CPC can only do smooth vertical scrolling in hardware. The CRTC can only do 8 pixel increments horizontally (which is hardly 'smooth'). Honestly, this is not rocket science. It's all in the hardware documentation.

Edit: I'm not convinced this game would benefit from horizontal scrolling anyway. The CPC only has one screen layer, so shifting the screen to make drawing the road easier would make all other things (cars, stuff on the side, etc) much harder.

I also just noticed they used a screen split - the top of the screen clearly runs in a higher resolution than the bottom. Clever stuff!

Pinball Dreams use already awesome mathematics, and the z80 never slow down, and it uses only 40% of the CPC potential. 60% remains untouched until now

Potential is a tricky thing to judge. Adding 60% 'potential' to Pinball Dreams would mean err, slightly more than two balls on screen!?

Don't take me wrong, I do love to see new tricks & stuff on the CPC. I think this is a pretty amazing demo, if a bit on the "let's hype people by showing only three seconds" side of things.

But all this 'potential' business does is make simple mathematics into 'magic space dust' and I just don't like that - regardless of which system it's used on. The CPC is just a computer. You can calculate what it can do* ahead of time (barring hardware trickery, but even that can be calculated once you know about it). No magic needed.

I do this for Amiga stuff all the time: think up something, calculate if it can be done and only then build it.

*) for instance, how many 16x16 blocks it can change in a frame, how many vertices it can draw, how many samples it can mix, etc.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by roondar

The CPC can only do smooth vertical scrolling in hardware. The CRTC can only do 8 pixel increments horizontally (which is hardly 'smooth'). Honestly, this is not rocket science. It's all in the hardware documentation.

Edit: I'm not convinced this game would benefit from horizontal scrolling anyway. The CPC only has one screen layer, so shifting the screen to make drawing the road easier would make all other things (cars, stuff on the side, etc) much harder.

I also just noticed they used a screen split - the top of the screen clearly runs in a higher resolution than the bottom. Clever stuff!

Potential is a tricky thing to judge. Adding 60% 'potential' to Pinball Dreams would mean err, slightly more than two balls on screen!?

Don't take me wrong, I do love to see new tricks & stuff on the CPC. I think this is a pretty amazing demo, if a bit on the "let's hype people by showing only three seconds" side of things.

But all this 'potential' business does is make simple mathematics into 'magic space dust' and I just don't like that - regardless of which system it's used on. The CPC is just a computer. You can calculate what it can do* ahead of time (barring hardware trickery, but even that can be calculated once you know about it). No magic needed.

I do this for Amiga stuff all the time: think up something, calculate if it can be done and only then build it.

*) for instance, how many 16x16 blocks it can change in a frame, how many vertices it can draw, how many samples it can mix, etc.

Well the big problem is that the cpc can do many tricks, including some kind of amiga copper trick with the crtc.
You can also do line per line change with the crtc, et c.
Rhino use to the max demo tricks but in games.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Well the big problem is that the cpc can do many tricks, including some kind of amiga copper trick with the crtc.
You can also do line per line change with the crtc, et c.
Rhino use to the max demo tricks but in games.

This is not such a big problem, really. Most of tricks on retro systems are well documented, or if Rhino made them himself he surely knows how they work. And thus they can be predicted and hence you can calculate/determine ahead of time if your method will work. Besides, it's not like raster based tricks such as line per line changes are unique to the Amstrad - almost all 8 bit systems had similar or better abilities in that regard and most had easier access to it.

Look, I don't mean to make it sound like this is not an achievement. Far from it, I think it's pretty amazing.

But it's amazing precisely because the Amstrad lacks custom hardware to do most of the things you'd want for games like this* and so people like the Batman Group have to spend years (perhaps even more) to figure out how to do this stuff on such limited hardware. And I'm really happy they do so - the results look stunning.

*) No sprite scaling (well, no sprites period). No hardware road drawing. No dual layer displays, no hardware assisted drawing/blitting, no fine (pixel position) horizontal scrolling, etc.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by roondar

This is not such a big problem, really. Most of tricks on retro systems are well documented, or if Rhino made them himself he surely knows how they work. And thus they can be predicted and hence you can calculate/determine ahead of time if your method will work. Besides, it's not like raster based tricks such as line per line changes are unique to the Amstrad - almost all 8 bit systems had similar or better abilities in that regard and most had easier access to it.

Look, I don't mean to make it sound like this is not an achievement. Far from it, I think it's pretty amazing.

But it's amazing precisely because the Amstrad lacks custom hardware to do most of the things you'd want for games like this* and so people like the Batman Group have to spend years (perhaps even more) to figure out how to do this stuff on such limited hardware. And I'm really happy they do so - the results look stunning.

*) No sprite scaling (well, no sprites period). No hardware road drawing. No dual layer displays, no hardware assisted drawing/blitting, no fine (pixel position) horizontal scrolling, etc.

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 !

Vesperino is impossible to make as good and as fast on C64. Nevermind the Spectrum since it has no CRTC

[roondar]

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 !

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

Vesperino is impossible to make as good and as fast on C64. Nevermind the Spectrum since it has no CRTC

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.

[dlfrsilver]

Of course the CPC has no chip for sprite scaling, blitter. We all agree with this

However, about the multi layer, the CPC has a strength over his contenders (even the amiga!), it has a chunky display.

Doing multi-layer scrolling of graphics bands can be done as you see it with the CRTC. It's a very common trick used in many CPC demos.



Same for the road. Even the coin-op of enduro racer and Out run manage the road with a 68000 for it alone !

[roondar]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Of course the CPC has no chip for sprite scaling, blitter. We all agree with this

However, about the multi layer, the CPC has a strength over his contenders (even the amiga!), it has a chunky display.

Here's a bit of trivia for you: all the major 8-bit home computers use a chunky display for bitmapped graphics

Doing multi-layer scrolling of graphics bands can be done as you see it with the CRTC. It's a very common trick used in many CPC demos.

Of course. But my point here is that these tricks are not really going to help that much for a game like this. It'll be limited almost entirely by the speed you can draw other objects.

Same for the road. Even the coin-op of enduro racer and Out run manage the road with a 68000 for it alone !

Again, drawing the road is not what's expensive here. It can be done very cheaply. Games such as Pitstop show this on a variety of early systems.

Honestly I don't really get the discussion we're having. Essentially I'm saying this is an amazing thing to be done on an 8-bit system and somehow you won't accept that as good enough and instead want to argue

[NorthWay]

There was like 3 seconds or so of the actual game. If that is representative then I saw a game that was redrawing 1/3rd of the screen and making perfect use of the screenmode that has "any colour any place".

In other words, very aptly picked by BG. Not updating 50fps is also not felt as much for an into-the-screen game like a racer (my guess).
Making games to a platform's strengths is how it should be done!

[mcgeezer]

I have to say it looks very good and it tremendous for the retro scene, I've never programmed an Amstrad before but it seems this group are able to push it beyond what it was meant to do by far.

To say that it will crown the Amstrad as the best 8 bit...? nahhh I doubt it as it has stiff competition from the C64 (think Sam's Journey & Super Mario Bros) and all the other great games the machine has seen.

Technically the C64 is the best all rounder (and I'm a bloody Atari 800XL fan boy!).