As the author, i vote against, of course :) .
If you have problems in running this on your ST hardware, try the 1 byte updated version, you can find at Atari-Legend. This is caused by the different ST MMUs that control the top border openning. Both versions work fine on my 1985 ST.
Now some details about this screen.
First of all, this is a technical screen and not a nicely designed demo so it does not surprise me that you don't like the design, the colors, the "old-school" look ...
It was build in response to a challenge from Leonard (read more at Atari-Forum).
But, Keops, as this is piss easy to do, i will expect to see your next total fullscreen, featuring a 3 minute MOD with 8 voices at 15.6KHz with full frequency and volume control with a 1Meg STF (without ripping my code), that will blow up this screen to the garbadge can ... It can be a 4 voices 31.2KHz if you prefer ...
Now for those who don't know:
- the background is achieved by changing 8 colors at every scan line, that allows to move/dist any 8 pixel wide bitmap of any size: this was used a lot by ULM under the name of "playfield technique". It takes a minimum of 80 cycles per scan line + some small control code that leads to 15% of the CPU
- so in fact the background consists of 40 groups of 8 monochrome vertical lines
- any fullscreen needs sync switches at every scan line and forces the remaing code to fit between those sync switches => 9% of the CPU is used for this
- the sprite(s) follow(s) a predefined wave of 4096 positions (80 seconds of movement at 50Hz). There is no trick with the wave, it can be any one. At every frame, one sprite is drawn with mask and one sprite is cleared with mask and background. The sprite is NOT pre-shifted due to the 1MB constraint. This takes about 6% of the CPU
- the 8 voices 15.6 KHz mixer with full frequency and volume control takes the remaining 70% of the CPU
As final words, it is ok that you don't like this screen, as for me the important thing was the pleasure it gave me in building it, but try to do it first before you say it is not that impressive technically ... |
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