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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2825 |
Holy Grails
I've been wondering about them, with some having been finally discovered, others not yet, and some probably going to remain in the realm of the impossible forever.
I'm speaking of things like:
- 320x200x16 graphics without restrictions
- Crash-free all-direction hardware scrolling
- Digi replay of 8-bit samples at one register write per sample and without requiring cycle accuracy
on standard vanilla hardware, of course.
Some examples of discovered grails are:
- Cube rotating at 50 fps about 3 axes
- The 9th sprite (with some restrictions)
- On-the-fly standard GCR block read+decode+checksumming
As for definition, they all satisfy some measure of being perfect or optimal or being possible after all, with no further improvements required, possible or necessary. But i'm not so sure if that definition holds water with regard to some of the examples i listed. :D
The question is, what other Holy Grails are there, already discovered or still elusive?
What are your pet grails you've been chasing after for decades or have found eventually? :) |
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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5017 |
the font in that diskmag cleverly avoids bad lines.
Roman, splitting d016 is as hard as d021, with which even scrollers has been done.
Kudos for Wotnau for incorporating this into a diskmag, not easy feat at all, but its not a holy grail :) |
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Peacemaker
Registered: Sep 2004
Posts: 243 |
indeed. oswald ist right.
a 7 pixel high char = no badline problem. |
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ChristopherJam
Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1370 |
Not stock hardware, but I was quite pleased to implement a completely unrestricted 36x200 multicolour resolution mode for c64+REU in 2015
I'm reasonably confident that 36 pixels is the maximum width attainable, but would be fascinated if anyone managed to either beat that or provide a formal proof that I'm correct. |
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ptoing
Registered: Sep 2005
Posts: 271 |
What was the setup for that, Christopher? |
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ChristopherJam
Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1370 |
Seven sprites over a ten character wide FLI area.
One multicolour sprite covers character columns 1-3, another covers character columns 6-8.
The other five sprites are hires and x-expanded, three covering character columns 1-6 and the remaining two covering columns 3-8.
d021 and d800 are constant for the entire screen, but each line an REU transfer sets nine new sprite colours, and a VIC DMA fetches two colours per 4x1 pixel area. Characters 0 and 9 only use two pixels each, so those are covered by the VIC DMA.
An offline image converter finds the optimal colour register allocation for each line using a recursive search algorithm. Hasn't failed yetÂ… |
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ptoing
Registered: Sep 2005
Posts: 271 |
That's pretty clever. Good stuff. |
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ChristopherJam
Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1370 |
Thanks :) |
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ptoing
Registered: Sep 2005
Posts: 271 |
I take it that the 2 mcol sprites of course use the same 2 fixed colours per line? So they would provide 4 colours total, to each line at most. |
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ChristopherJam
Registered: Aug 2004
Posts: 1370 |
Correct. Each column has access to between five and eight sprite colours; here's a chart:
+----------+---------------+
| |1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8|
+----------+---------------+
| $d025 |X X X X X X|
| $d026 |X X X X X X|
| $d027 |X X X X X X |
| $d028 |X X X X X X |
| $d029 |X X X X X X |
| $d02a | X X X X X X|
| $d02b | X X X X X X|
| $d02c |X X X |
| $d02d | X X X|
+----------+---------------+
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2825 |
*** ChristopherJam invokes Godwin's Law
*** Topic closed |
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