🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug6.110009.57912@cc.usu.edu> sl8nl@cc.usu.edu writes:
>> Smooth scrolling was very easy to do on the C64 because its redefinable
>> multi-colour character set meant you can get fancy graphics while staying
>> in text mode.  Each time you move a byte into video memory, you are
>> essentially drawing a 4x8 tile of 4 colours.  To scroll the screen only
>> required a block move of 1000 bytes, which can be done within one retrace.
>
>It may have been a redefined character set (I couldn't image doing it at
>the speeds it was going, though.)  It looks like to me that the screen was 
>split.  Times of Lore looked more hires than a typical character set.
>

Very, very, few, if any, smooth-scrolling games on the C64 used its bitmap
mode.  The redefinition of the character set is a one-time-only overhead,
and didn't impact on speed during the game.  Split-screens were also
amazingly easy to accomplish on the 64 with its raster interrupts.

>>>Hey, I can see going all 386 based.  That ought to give more than enough
>>>power for applications today, and ideas of what we want for better machines.
>>>But Ultima VII felt like more of an abuse to the 386 than an encouragement.
>>>I'm not knocking U7.  It's a great game.  Can someone offer an explanation,
>>>though?  (I want an explanation, not a flame on what I just said)
>> 
>> I've never played the game, nor have I even seen it running, but I have
>> seen screen snapshots of it and I think I can see why it may be slow.
>> I appears that U7's world is a multi-layered slab of voxels (volume
>> elements).  To draw each screen would require the laying down of several
>> layers of full-screen bitmaps, so I think it's the ISA bus that's the
>> bottleneck here, not to mention that each NPC leads a pretty hectic life.  
>
>That's probably a lot of it.  Richard did say that U7 is no longer tiled.
>He never mentioned layered...but...
>

I don't know what RG means by "not tiled".  Voxels are just tiles in the
third dimension.

Phat.