| |
carlsson
Registered: Nov 2002
Posts: 41 |
SID out of tune?
Recently a Speccy person elsewhere posted that:
Quote:The SID .. tended to be out of tune at extreme frequencies (the Speccy's beeper also suffers this problem). Where as the AY is much closer to perfect pitch.
Apart from being typical C64/SID-bashing (most Speccy people despise the SID for muddy sound blah blah blah), does the poster have a point? I can't recall I ever heard a SID tune that suffers from lack of frequency resolution so it sounds out of tune, except from when it was done on purpose or the musician didn't bother to get a good frequency table.
I know from personal experience that the VIC-20 has a very limited frequency resolution, but it is a completely different chip and supposedly nobody mixes up the two. Maybe if one uses very high frequencies (several thousand Hz?) on the SID, these notes will not be in tune, but few people can hear the difference, and it depends on monitor or other speakers if they can reproduce the notes faithfully. |
|
... 67 posts hidden. Click here to view all posts....
|
| |
Laxity
Registered: Aug 2005
Posts: 459 |
Hmm.. It is slow, indeed.
I did some coding on the Game Boy / Game Boy Color, and I remember those being significantly faster than the 64. The Game boy is clocked slightly higher than the Spectrum(4.1MHz), and has a custom Sharp variant of the Z80 processor which makes my point referance in this matter rather bad, I guess. On top of that all I coded was audio related, which makes it even worse. ;)
|
| |
Graham
Account closed
Registered: Dec 2002
Posts: 990 |
Quote:I still believe that a z80 variant clocked at 3.5MHz is relatively faster than a 6510 clocked at 0.985MHz/1.023MHz. Might just be me, unless ofcourse most instructions take 10+ cycles on the z80 ;)
Like groepaz said: Yeps, the Z80 has much much more cycles per opcode than a 6502 cpu. Typically the cycles are in the range of 8 to 14 there. So in practice you need atleast 2 to 3 times the MHz to have the same speed as a 6502. The exact value is depending on the job though, for example on 16 bit math the Z80 is slightly better than on simple bit fiddling jobs. And the Z80 completely lacks indexed adressing modes. You can only index to a fixed number but not a register. |
| |
Frantic
Registered: Mar 2003
Posts: 1648 |
[edit] |
| |
CreaMD
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 3057 |
I played Elite (aaaahhh hyperspeed looked really cute...) and many other math-3D games on speccy. Also a lot of isometric games. It had faster screen redraw most of the time and not so frequent "slowdowns". What speccy lacks in sound & gfx, it gains in the areas of speed and playability of such types of games. (even speccy R-Type has bigger sprites which looks really *ahem* cool ;-))). Also as far as demos are concerned.. most of the math effects on speccy run smoother. Even the primitive "attribute-like-screen" rotozoomer in Echologia seems undoable at the same speed on C64 (coded by Busy in '95 and still one of my favourite effects in that demo (which is otherwise full of boring but smooth vectors ;-)). Blame the 3,5 Mhz and 16 bit registers... |
| |
Graham
Account closed
Registered: Dec 2002
Posts: 990 |
Well, Elite doesn't run smoother on ZX but it has double buffering because it has more memory available. The game does not run on the original Spectrum but only on the later 128K versions. Considering release date and memory size, those 128K Speccys rather should be compared to the C128 and not the C64.
Here's a video of Elite on Spectrum:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4891718763452781967
Oh and a video of R-Type on Spectrum aswell:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7524833891772403341&q=.. |
| |
chatGPZ
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 11386 |
one thing people always love to forget - the speccy has a smaller screen! so doh-it can update a smaller area faster - surprise!
and that r-type thing looks horrid :=D |
| |
cadaver
Registered: Feb 2002
Posts: 1160 |
It looks very goatse when the background scrolls and stationary enemies are quantized to char position. |
| |
CreaMD
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 3057 |
Quote: Well, Elite doesn't run smoother on ZX but it has double buffering because it has more memory available. The game does not run on the original Spectrum but only on the later 128K versions. Considering release date and memory size, those 128K Speccys rather should be compared to the C128 and not the C64.
Here's a video of Elite on Spectrum:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4891718763452781967
Oh and a video of R-Type on Spectrum aswell:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7524833891772403341&q=..
I played that game on real Machine and I don't say about visible redraws but about "FPS" ;-). Have you ever played anything 3d on speccy? That would very probably change your belief.
|
| |
CreaMD
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 3057 |
Quote: one thing people always love to forget - the speccy has a smaller screen! so doh-it can update a smaller area faster - surprise!
and that r-type thing looks horrid :=D
Yeah smaller screen. ;-) But did you measure the "redraw areas"? I suppose they are the same on both machines most of the time (and if there would be difference that would probably be on C64 (smaller screens) because of speed limitations ;-)))
Yeah R-Type looks horrrid and plays *MUCH* better than C64 version (I know about how C64 version came out so I don't say that it couldn't be done better ;-) |
| |
CreaMD
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 3057 |
Quote: It looks very goatse when the background scrolls and stationary enemies are quantized to char position.
Yeah ;-) and still it played like hell. |
| Previous - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 - Next |
