Why not make a VERTICAL game? = Sideways colour scrolling!

[Lee Bee]

Let's not forget this experiment from a couple of years ago that looks promising, but never got implemented into a real game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE1KylKQDrQ

That is great, but it's not true horizontal colour scrolling. All the colours are in horizontal bands, with black gaps between them. There can be no coloured tiles directly next to each other, horizontally. But if this were a "vertical" game, that limitation would go away

As for a scrolling shoot-em-up, I think I'd rather have the multicolour horizontal anyway

Yeah, in many cases, it is easier to design sprites with horizontal colour bands. For example: a character has a yellow head, below that, a cyan body, below that, green legs. So horizontal colour bands are useful. But vertical bands could be useful for some games too Vertical bands would allow you to have tall, thin sprites (like people) that can move left and right, without clashing with the background or each other

Adding music to an existing game may be in many cases harder than altering the graphics.

Yeah, I know it's a lot to ask. I appreciate you having a try.

Also game may not use music but use AY effects and adding the music will mess with the effects and the effects will mess with the music. And so on.

Actually, I think I've solved the problem of music and sound effects clashing. The system I'm using (Arkos Tracker) is a complete audio system which handles both music and sound effects and automatically deals with sound channel priority info here. So I figure that the best option is for me to create all the audio, including sound effects. (This also lets me improve the sound effects too! )

So what you'd have to do is find and remove all the existing in-game sound effects triggers and replace them with triggers to the Arkos player. This may be too much work, I don't know? Or perhaps once you get it working, it could be relatively easy and fun? LOL I guess we'll see.

[djnzx48]

Sounds like a good idea - I made the same suggestion previously in the Old Tower thread. If you're using an emulator, most graphics cards support rotating the display 90 degrees (mainly used for pranks), so physically rotating the monitor wouldn't be necessary. Or the functionality could even be built into the emulator itself.

I wonder what kind of games would be suitable for a vertical setup. Even for a non-scrolling game, there would be interesting opportunities for multicolour tile graphics that you don't get with the standard display orientation.

[stupidget]

Daft question, but why is it easier to have a vertical multicolour game than a horizontal one?

[djnzx48]

Multicolour allows attributes to be set for individual lines of pixels, but only in the vertical direction. You're still stuck with two colours for each 8x1 cell (ULA bugs notwithstanding). So vertical scrolling works in colour, but horizontal scrolling isn't possible without colour clash or restricting what colours are used.

It's also due to the way the display is laid out in memory, with 8 horizontal pixels to a byte. With horizontal scrolling, all the bits have to be shifted over, which can slow things down. Vertical scrolling only requires copying bytes.

[Lee Bee]

Sounds like a good idea - I made the same suggestion previously in the Old Tower thread.

Great minds think alike! By the way I love your music mate!

[ixn]

I have an idea: make only one of the two screens on the 128 rotated, so you can flip between them every frame.

But if you combine that with gigascreen, what do you get?

Gigarotatescreen?
Gigascrorate?
Gigatatescreening?

[4thRock]

About vertical vs horizontal gaming, the only practical difference is text orientation and obvious control remapping

Imagine this with the font characters rotated 90º left


V
e
r
t
i
c
a
l

t
e
x
t

might not be that readable but should work here. No need to physically rotate your monitor

[Lee Bee]

OK, I don't think I've made my idea very clear and people be missing the point of what djnzx48 and I are proposing.

Let me try an illustration instead…



(The Mario game image is just something I made for fun )

[R-Tape]

I knew what you meant, but I wasn't very clear with my reply. I think it'd be a cool thing to do, but I'd rather see a multicolour game that features vertical scrolling more prominently than Old Tower does. Granted, the scrolling is important in Old Tower, but to me it seems like a bonus extra. That's why I'd like to see a vertically scrolling multicolour shooter first.

On topic though: I would like to see your rotated screen idea done. This 'cheat' method would make a horizontal multicolour scroller possible, and also normal colour horizontal shooters would find it much easier to be 25 or 50 fps.

Maybe it's not even that much of a cheat. A rotating CRT telly would have been very do-able back in the day wouldn't it? I'm trying to imagine what the hell one would look like!

[Ast A. Moore]

A rotating CRT telly would have been very do-able back in the day wouldn't it? I'm trying to imagine what the hell one would look like!

For years my Speccy was hooked up to the only color TV in the family. Rotating that behemoth would have required the muscle power of me and my older brother. Also, we’d have been grounded for several days and gotten a few good smacks in the back of the head for good measure.

Oh, and the TV wouldn’t have faired too well either.

[Lee Bee]

I agree Dave, this is perhaps jumping the gun a little. We haven't even had a vertical shooter like this yet - there's so much amazing, untapped potential to this incredible new phase of the Spectrum! The Bifrost engine (and derivatives) is just amazing!

[djnzx48]

Apparently there are games designed to be played on a TV turned on its side, for a more authentic arcade experience. For example, the Namco Museum series:

Some of the games, such as Galaga and Pac-Man, allow for an alternative screen mode to compensate for the lack of a vertical monitor, whereby the scoreboard is located on the left of the screen, or rotates the image 90 degrees if the user possesses a vertical monitor or is willing to risk placing the television/monitor on its side.

[R-Tape]

For years my Speccy was hooked up to the only color TV in the family. Rotating that behemoth would have required the muscle power of me and my older brother. Also, we’d have been grounded for several days and gotten a few good smacks in the back of the head for good measure.

Oh, and the TV wouldn’t have faired too well either.

I was thinking of a 'made for purpose TV'. Maybe even on a stand. By DKTronics! I know it would be niche, but there are plenty of weird peripherals out there!

Having said that, and I might be wrong, but I guess that most CRTs owned by real hardware fans these days are pretty small and square (mine is, and ditto in many videos I see).

I agree Dave, this is perhaps jumping the gun a little.

There's no rule to say we should have one before the other though. Each case is a vertical multicolour shooter—whether the TV is rotated or not is just a detail. I guess it's down to the usual constraints of desire, energy and free time. It'd be fantastic to see any kind of multicolour scroller next year or sooner.

Apparently there are games designed to be played on a TV turned on its side, for a more authentic arcade experience. For example, the Namco Museum series:

Case closed! It's not a cheat

[Kweepa]

Don't forget to degauss your tv!

[Ast A. Moore]

For years my Speccy was hooked up to the only color TV in the family. Rotating that behemoth would have required the muscle power of me and my older brother. Also, we’d have been grounded for several days and gotten a few good smacks in the back of the head for good measure.

Oh, and the TV wouldn’t have faired too well either.

I was thinking of a 'made for purpose TV'. Maybe even on a stand. By DKTronics! I know it would be niche, but there are plenty of weird peripherals out there!

Having said that, and I might be wrong, but I guess that most CRTs owned by real hardware fans these days are pretty small and square (mine is, and ditto in many videos I see).

Yes, mine’s a 14-inch jobby and very lightweight. However, there are things to consider when rotating a CRT TV, including cooling and . . .

Don't forget to degauss your tv!

[Joefish]

It'd be a bad idea to turn a CRT telly on its side. The case would sag and put pressure on bits that weren't meant to take the weight. And those tubes are heavy. Arcade monitor CRTs were specially mounted when used vertically, and were mostly facing upwards anyway rather than forwards.
LCD screens are much lighter and easier to rotate. Again, it may not be ideal in a home TV, but several computer monitors come on stands that can be rotated to the vertical. You'd need one of those VGA or HDMI display replicator interfaces.

Come to think of it, can't you do this in windows running an emulator anyway? Set up two monitors and define one as vertical, then run an emulator on that screen.

[Alone Coder]

Have anyone tried to use a test combination (!IORQ & !MREQ) on the original ULA where all the counters work 64x speed? This might help to scroll in both directions. As I see (I may be wrong), you only need a resistor between ULA MREQ and A6 (for example), so OUT to 0xDF (for example) will emit several 64x speed cycles.
NB: I never touched an original machine, so I don't even know if there is a smaller resistor between ULA MREQ and CPU MREQ, it's needed!

[Alone Coder]

I mean, port 0xBF (A6=0).