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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. |
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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... |
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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=.. |
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chatGPZ
Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 11387 |
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 |
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cadaver
Registered: Feb 2002
Posts: 1160 |
It looks very goatse when the background scrolls and stationary enemies are quantized to char position. |
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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.
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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 ;-) |
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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. |
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Manex
Registered: Mar 2004
Posts: 4 |
Quote: Nopes, the real Sinclair Spectrums have 3.5 MHz clock. Only the Amstrad Spectrum clones have 3.55 MHz clock which is also the reason for some incompabilities with the original Speccys.
And to the "SID out of tune" crap: That's total bullshit. The SID has 16 bit frequency registers which not only allow to hit a frequency exactly (so no "out of tune") but even allows for smooth frequency slides. And additional to that the frequency is inverse linear which allows the same accuracy at ALL frequencies. (Unlike the Atari POKEY which is least accurate at high frequencies and more accurate at lower freqs)
Sinclair Spectrum´s had 3.5 Mhz with models 48k and 16k. Next version - 128k was still done by Sinclair, and it has 3.5469 Mhz, like clones done later by Amstrad(+2,+2a,+3). Amstrad incompatibilities are mostly in different memory management. |
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Oswald
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5095 |
Quote: 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 ;)
its like that actually... in average you need about 4 times the clockfrequency for z80 as you need for 6502 to achive the same execution speed. (ofcourse, depending on the actual code, the one or the other will have an advantage).
you all miss some really important issues when comparing 6510 and z80 speed. Its true that you need the z80 running about 4 times to match the instruction execution speed with the 6510. But thinking that intstructions executed at the same speed means overall speed is the same is incorrect. The z80 has a much more powerful instruction set than the 6510, more registers, it can even swap between two register sets, one being used, the other stored in some temp silicon space. Z80 code at roughly the same instruction execution speed doing the same job as a 6510 can be 2-3 time faster IMHO. On z80 you can move the whole bitmap with copying each byte by "hand" at roughly 15fps and besides doing the software sprites aswell. Try that on c64...
Speccy monocolor dithered 4x4 means they plot the 4x4 pixels byte by byte into the bitmap, I've seen 4x4 toruses (realtime like in relightening) done roughly 3-4 times faster as on the c64.
that demo rocks hard indeed, instead of trying to hide the limitations they simply exposed them, and the outcome is wonderful. |
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Style
Registered: Jun 2004
Posts: 498 |
I dunno - looking at speccy rtype and elite, Im still laughing hard.....
Im sure there's a lot that the speccy can do that the c64 cant, but the c64 has more finesse....... |
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