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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2980 |
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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Peiselulli
Registered: Oct 2006
Posts: 81 |
Double buffered color ram was something I missed back in the days I was programming games. But already solved : Double buffering color ram in half of the screen? |
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Peacemaker
Registered: Sep 2004
Posts: 275 |
self writing code pieces (1/7 of 1) every frame into final result for speedcode (lda #01 ; sta $d800 etc) for next "move". could be even improved, as cruzer suggested, to only change (store) colors that change.
the half page fld trick would make a nice raytrace part with .. hmm. 10+ frames in bitmap mutlticolor with screen and colorram too (copy). was thinking about such a part for years, but its rather lame anyhow. |
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Rastah Bar
Account closed
Registered: Oct 2012
Posts: 336 |
How about things like executable gfx/music? Or self-modifying self-modifying ... code? |
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Copyfault
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 478 |
Quoting PeiselulliDouble buffered color ram was something I missed back in the days I was programming games. [...] Was this really never done "back in teh days" for games? I remember us (TOM) being proud of adding it to the ILM gfx mode (around 1995??); after all, it's just
40 chars * 25 charlines * 4 cycles | for STA/SAX/S??
+ 16 cycles | for LDX/INX/LDwhatever
= 4016 cycles | for the whole screen
=>
4016 / 63 ~= 64 rasterlines, preferably in lowerborder
Guess you neither have the memory nor the amount of cycles in the lower border part (approx. 58% of the upper/lower-border) if you want to do some serious game engine. Just wondering.. |
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Peiselulli
Registered: Oct 2006
Posts: 81 |
This approach is a little bit too static. What do you do if the color configuration changes (e.g char animation with partial color replacements) ? Then you have in bad circumstances to recalculate your complete speed code. For simple tasks like fading it is OK, but not for more complex situations. |
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TheRyk
Registered: Mar 2009
Posts: 2244 |
Quote: How about things like executable gfx/music? Or self-modifying self-modifying ... code?
self-modifying self-modifying shouldn't be very rare, just thinkj of EORing something like DEC to INC and back
executable music: certain rips in HVSC, especially the digi/sample files that come with their own IRQ build inside the init, do weird stuff if you launch them, e.g. if you load this SID-File
Aurora Remix
(without header of course) to $1400 and enter SYS5376, the timerIRQ also opens top/bottom borders :) |
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enthusi
Registered: May 2004
Posts: 677 |
Smbfhb by Robert & Lotsch
Check out what this actually does! |
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Rastah Bar
Account closed
Registered: Oct 2012
Posts: 336 |
Cool stuff. But what I was thinking of: suppose you have some runnable code in memory and you point screen memory, character memory, or sprite pointers to it, that it then actually shows a nice pattern or image instead of something unrecognizable. In other words: the numbers in memory are code and graphics at the same time. |
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Peacemaker
Registered: Sep 2004
Posts: 275 |
Quote: Cool stuff. But what I was thinking of: suppose you have some runnable code in memory and you point screen memory, character memory, or sprite pointers to it, that it then actually shows a nice pattern or image instead of something unrecognizable. In other words: the numbers in memory are code and graphics at the same time.
and why would someone do that? to save memory? :) |
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Rastah Bar
Account closed
Registered: Oct 2012
Posts: 336 |
Yes, or for the fun of it. |
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