Popeye: Early High Res Games
Added 2019-03-21 11:06:54 +0000 UTCScralings, one of the director patrons, asked me to look at 1982 Nintendo's Popeye arcade. It looked like an easy game to port. So I accepted... only to find out that this game has the oddest graphics system.
The character layer is pretty much standard, but the background is drawn by the CPU on a RAM chip, pretty much like any 8-bit computer would do. But then, sprites are the most obscure thing I have seen. They use a special clock, at twice the rate of the character layer and the output seems to be interlaced. This means that sprites are actually drawn using a high resolution screen, whereas characters and background are drawn in low resolution. The full effect of this will only be appreciated on a CRT monitor. I still have to think about how to convert this video to a VGA output.
This approach to video didn't actually catch up. Soon after video games stopped using interlaced video with a single base clock for all elements. Popeye shows how engineers were experimenting with different options to create graphic hardware and is a very interesting game from that point of view. But I wonder: are these early games of interest to my patrons?
Comments
Yes they are, one of the main reasons I got the MiSTer
John Silva
2019-04-05 05:55:19 +0000 UTCwell this was the game i played in the coffee near my house when i was a child :) but i think the best effort is to make system that has some games and that could be easy to change the machines to play those games :)
Bruno Silva
2019-03-21 21:05:43 +0000 UTC
