Old Tower Preview

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AndyC
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by AndyC »

Much better cross development and debugging tools help enormously too. Plus vastly superior documentation about all the subtle timing variations that have come about from getting emulators to run every demo, on every hardware configuration, to a cycle accurate behaviour. That kind of thing just wasn't around back in the day and so each developer (or at best development company) would have needed to discover it all for themselves.
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R-Tape
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by R-Tape »

5MinuteRetro wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 2:41 pm All of this was possible during the Spectrum's heydey so... why didn't it happen? I guess that the platform petered out/died before this stuff could be incorporated into commercial titles?
Joefish wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 4:02 pm Commercial titles were all chasing the latest arcade game, which were all about scrolling and huge sprites.
That, and it takes far too long to perfect a multicolour graphics game engine. No-one would have paid a games programmer to spend that long on one game.
AndyC wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 8:00 pm Much better cross development and debugging tools help enormously too. Plus vastly superior documentation about all the subtle timing variations that have come about from getting emulators to run every demo, on every hardware configuration, to a cycle accurate behaviour. That kind of thing just wasn't around back in the day and so each developer (or at best development company) would have needed to discover it all for themselves.
I'm not so sure. I'm surprised that multicolour games didn't gain traction BITD. In 1987 we had this Rainbow Engine (a YS Star Tip), and it's a complete multicolour engine for 16 columns, so most of the hard work had been done; I wonder why no-one made the leap of imagination to use it with sprites etc (or did but never created it). For starters, it seems obvious—now—to use it for static multicolour blocks and have a monochrome background in which you move the pixels.

Even though the trend was towards the latest arcade/film conversion, surely a multicolour game would still have been popular in '87 or even '88?

I keep meaning to put together a thread about the history of multicolour. I'll try and do that tomorrow.

Denis's next step is to invent a time machine and take this game with him...
AndyC
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by AndyC »

Unless I'm entirely mis-reading the documentation, that only allows one colour across each row - which is interesting as a kind of "raster bar" effect, but not necessarily for a game. I think it would be quite difficult to use that in a practical sense (though I'd be interested if somebody wanted to try). It's quite a long way off from allowing close to arbitrary colour changes at horizontal points (as per modern engines), even for a small area of the screen and being able to do that effectively is what unlocks much of the benefits of such an engine.
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R-Tape
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by R-Tape »

AndyC wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 9:29 pm Unless I'm entirely mis-reading the documentation, that only allows one colour across each row - which is interesting as a kind of "raster bar" effect, but not necessarily for a game. I think it would be quite difficult to use that in a practical sense (though I'd be interested if somebody wanted to try). It's quite a long way off from allowing close to arbitrary colour changes at horizontal points (as per modern engines), even for a small area of the screen and being able to do that effectively is what unlocks much of the benefits of such an engine.
No you're right—it's one colour per line, but there's still loads you can do around that. Denis's game is working around limitations in a similar way.

I had a very quick play and manage this mockup (just a static screen):

Image

You could even have coloured sprites—just design the game around it, as Denis has done with Old Tower.
(though I'd be interested if somebody wanted to try)
Doing a 'what if' is tempting!

[mention]DenisGrachev[/mention], apologies, I'm taking this off topic. When I start a general multicolour thread tomorrow, I'll move some posts to it, if needed.
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MatGubbins
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by MatGubbins »

SuperColour - a type-in from Your Sinclair, June 86 (Ghost n Goblins cover) is the one that you're after.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek ... id=0008809
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R-Tape
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by R-Tape »

MatGubbins wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 10:12 pm SuperColour - a type-in from Your Sinclair, June 86 (Ghost n Goblins cover) is the one that you're after.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek ... id=0008809
Yep, that's the earliest multicoloured entry in the archive, but it's only a small logo at the bottom. Even if the technique is the same, Star Tip takes us into a realm where one could have imagined basing a game on it IMO.

(It's here too btw: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 96&id=8809)
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DenisGrachev
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by DenisGrachev »

R-Tape wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 9:57 pm apologies, I'm taking this off topic. When I start a general multicolour thread tomorrow, I'll move some posts to it, if needed.
No problem Dave, don't see any offtopic btw :)
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