Atari's Quadrascan Explained
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- How did Atari utilize vector monitors in their vector-drawn arcade games? It's all explained right here.
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Your procedurally generated videos are a piece of art. I'm really curious what tools you are using to achieve such fantastic results.
Mainly just After Effects! I do some preprocessing of data before importing it through various scripts, but most of it is just done within AE using its expression engine.
@@RGMechEx Pretty cool
@@RGMechEx I think I remember you made a video on this, how you actually do the data processing for the scripts. Pretty interesting stuff!
@@RGMechEx Yes, but how did you obtain the arcade game data for this video? Is there an emulator with this kind of observability?
@@JimLeonard Many emulators (including MAME) give you the ability to introspect into the memory of the system, and many of its parts. And there are a number of tools out there that can help. Digging into the MAME source code can also reveal a lot about how memory is mapped in the virtual machine. :)
A couple years ago I went to an arcade with my family, and after drifting a bit I found myself oddly attracted to asteroids and tempest. The perfectly straight, piercing white lines of asteroids are almost unreal in person. It was honestly pretty moving.
agreed. I had no idea video games were ever that sharp in the arcades, especially when you consider the age. it is truly something you have to see to appreciate.
Vector displays were something of a dead end--they couldn't fill in a solid area with color, and were limited to drawing lines--but I love that look. For a little while, they seemed impossibly advanced compared to raster games, and they could easily display rotating objects and perspective 3D graphics. Modern emulations of them don't quite capture the dynamic brightness range they were capable of, either--those vectors could be intensely bright and made glowing halations on the screen just as a physical byproduct. Atari also discovered that you could make the screen flash just by drawing an intense white line off screen, so the electrons got scattered all over. It was an odd physical hack.
Ah. Tempest. One of the games that made me a retro gamer.
I remember playing it with no idea of what was going on.
Tempest 2000 got me into video game soundtracks
Was just about to mention Tempest 2000, but he beat me to it. Yeah that game is just Tempest but better in every way
@@mechanismeight9565 I personally disagree on that. I never actually liked Tempest 2000 all that much - it just didn't feel the same.
@@KieferSkunk I can see where you're coming from, the two games definitely have a different feel.... I just like 2000 more, it's got style.
@@mechanismeight9565 Fair enough. :)
TIL that pixel is short for "picture element"
I learned something new today.
And voxel is Volume + Pixel
@@internetuser8922 You sure it's not Volume Element?
@@nezatrebovan Actually yeah, that makes more sense.
Also "bit" is short for "binary digit".
Vector graphics always seemed to be the result of some strange voodoo to me. Nice to have gained some understanding of the incantations , thx.
I've always explained it in an oversimplified way as an electronic equivalent of an Etch-A-Sketch(because the electron "pen" directly traces the image out on the screen).
its weird to think abt some games are too pixelated and some arent at all, even down to the code
I tell you what. Back when I was a kid, and even today, I much prefer the look of vector graphic games, when compared to ones that used raster. The vector graphic games just look.. more "video game" to me than raster graphic games. I just.. like the look of them.
Gaming visuals had essentially evolved from vector graphics to sprite-based raster graphics to 3D objects represented by vectors rendered to a raster display, all while at the same time the previous rendering styles became an art form for many contemporary games.
This is among the reasons I'm looking for a way to express these styles in a series of videos I've been planning, and this video (the entire channel, even) is one of the core insights I've been looking for.
I spent as much time as I could (which at 3 credits per play, wasn't very long) in a Star Trek II sit-down cabinet at the local arcade. It was more futuristic than actual Star Trek.
i like some of the games more, but the lack of shading and color kills it off for me.
Hi I'm just here to feel inferior
Hey there! I figured you would watch this kind of video. I enjoy his videos and yours as well!
A great man in here. I'll be watching your new video as soon as you upload it.
LUL you guys are both heroes
No way. Two cakes
Where were you when I saw a girl standing next to an icicle! Really could have used you banana. For scale.
2:00 is genuinely the first time I've seen NTSC or PAL waveforms in motion like that. I love your visualizations and explanations of these topics so much.
Can you do a video about yoshis island advanced effects? Like the bosses and the nep-enuts ?
Ooh, yes! That sounds like it would be really interesting!
Was it just sprite scaling or something more complicated?
@@williamdrum9899 it had a lot more complex effects since it had the super fx 2 chip. Some bosses like the sluggy have some crazy sprite deformation that i have yet to see in any other super Nintendo game
I'd be curious about how the layer 3 objects work in that game. They're almost 3D at times but yet seem to just be distorted tiles...
What about Knuckles' Chaotix?
I'm surprised how close this is to the line drawing methods in modern graphics libraries as far as the position, draw, brightness and color calls go.
I wonder how hard it was for them to do fast rotation math on sets of points since all that floating point math would be really slow. Maybe hard coded lookup tables or some clever integer-only math.
Your videos are super awesome man. Same level as something like 3Blue1Brown. It is very difficult to make good videos on CS topics specifically, your channel is one of the very few that do a really good job explaining topics that are super interesting and visually appealing. I've learned more about ASM from this channel than anything else. I'm a software engineer, but I've never needed to use low-level languages, everything I use is memory managed with auto garbage collection.
Most modern graphics libraries are based on research and precedents with roots in this era.
I was wondering whether some of the other machines' vector processors had more features. In Asteroids Deluxe, almost everything on the screen simultaneously rotates, so without rotation support you couldn't just render them directly out of ROM. And Star Wars is doing perspective projections on 3D wireframes!
They didn't do the rotation math, at least for asteroids. Haven't checked the other games.
In Asteroids, the ship can face one of 64 directions, some of which are hardcoded into VROM, but some can be flipped from the hardcoded examples so don't need to be stored. The ship's thrust fire works a similar way.
for some things, fixed-point math (where each number is pre-multiplied by some constant, usually a power of 2) is adequate
addition and subtraction in this format are the same as integer math
with multiplication you multiply the numbers together and then divide by the constant
with division you first multiply by the constant, and then divide the numbers together
with complex math like atan2 or trigonometry you either use CORDIC or data tables as suggested.
It's surprising how much this old tech has in common with modern versions. 3D graphics are all vectors, drawn by display lists (which have subroutines, but no conditional logic) that use commands like "move to X,Y,Z, draw to X,Y,Z".
In more modern systems there's a lot of indirection, but the concept is still the same. (Eg a command might be "using items 3-27 of the index buffer, draw triangles; each item gives the index of a coordinate in the vertex buffer" - that way you avoid specifying the same coordinates multiple times.)
Goes to show that, like many other things in computer science, many of these problems were already tackled (and solved in most cases) many, many years ago. :) Most of what we have today is just the same stuff at far greater scale.
mathematically, is the same concept, vectors in memory to form a polygon in 3D space, but the draw part is classic raster
I was thinking the exact same thing. Even in software drawing libraries, the methods to draw lines are very similar as well as far as position, line, brightness and color go.
reminds me of writing/generating SVG. :)
The whole idea of a display list definitely goes back to this time. Even the Atari home computers had the concept, though instead of drawing primitives the display list controlled how video memory was mapped to different zones of the screen, as rasters or characters.
I used a different version of them in the early days of laser printers, when you wanted to implement a page description language but didn't have enough RAM on board to represent the whole page as a bitmap. The trick was to divide the page into horizontal bands and have the interpreter parcel appropriately clipped graphics primitives (geometric shapes, font characters, scaled image patches) out between the bands. A second thread would run the display list renderer that would try to race the page through the printer, rasterizing the bands just in time to get them to the laser. (If it wasn't fast enough, the printer would have to pause and you couldn't print at speed.)
When the world needed him most, he returned
Don’t mind me, just trying to pay attention to what’s going on on-screen while trying to ignore how impossibly beautiful everything looks.
It is very impressive how you used vector graphics for your entire presentation. Keep up the quality work!
This is amazing, essentially a GPU with late 1970s technology! Great video, by the way, especially showing the Tempest scene being drawn while the drawing code scrolled by.
This brings back memories. I actually played Asteroids, Battle Zone, Star Wars, and Tempest. At college, they had a monitor that drew in line graphics, and programmed it in FORTRAN. I programmed it to draw a scene from.Battle Zone.
I feel freakin’ old now.
So cool.. It would be really fun to play around with one of these old "color" vector displays.
The font you use fits so well! It looks so good when alongside the vector graphics.
Excellent Video. Back when asteroids was popular I ( along with others) could play forever on a single quarter. One problem that the game designers did not anticipate was that with each bonus ship it added more and more objects on screen. The bonus ships would line up across the top until they were off the screen. It was my impression at the time that the game logic was still trying to draw bonus ships even off the screen. The game became slower and slower, thus easier and easier to play. If a person kept winning bonus ships at some point (a few hours) a integer overflow would happen (256 bonus ships?) and the game would crash with a hard reset and the game would reboot.
your videos are super informative and carries a lot of effort, they look like they're from a masterclass or something.
That Tempest slow motion blew my mind. Thank you.
How in the world you managed to figure out the inner workings of those components and how they communicate with each other is absolutely amazing. All that engineering technology could be accessed for a quarter! Sure was a lot of fun that's for sure. Thanks for the video my friend, excellent job!
I'm not a gamer, but I've been hooked on the creation and manipulation of computer-based vectors in one form or another since the 80's, and this was thoroughly enjoyable and brilliantly done. I know this has been up for a couple of years now, but I just came across it and as a dork that incorporates "vector" into his email addy, I had to stop and look. I loved this to no end, and even learned a number of things! Cheers from Louisiana!
The level of detail in your animations is truly unbelievable
Vector drawn graphics are beautyful, thank you for explaining this well, giving the Quadrascan an spotlight and congrats on the great effects achieved in this video... that final part, really nice.
Please do a video on the Vectrex! It's a super interesting console from the 80's that only uses vector based graphics. Would love to watch a detailed breakdown of how it works
The video's visual representation made everything clear, as always. Great job!
Oh and uh... at 5:06 the subtitles say "absoslute" instead of "absolute".
fixed
The brightness value gives you 15 shades of gray. hot
Watching the frame being drawn at the end ( 18:45 ) was fascinating.
In particular, watching it scroll through the lines of code...feels like CPUs were a lot faster back then than I thought they' be! haha
What an absolutely fantastic video! The final segment with the frame being drawn blew me away!
What a superb quality video. I played plenty of Asteroids and Tempest in the 80s.. and programmed the 6510 in my C64, so this video really took me back in time! Thx!
You deserve some kind of youtube creator's award for that animation at the end. Amazing work.
So over my head, but when I was a kid, Tempest was my favorite game :) Thanks for a look behind the scenes
this is the best channel on youtube i love how technical yhou go there, and it makes me want learn more and more, and even try to see if can debug the games on my own after.
18:48
I think this might become among my favorite of art forms: converting game instructions into a step-by-step visual rendering! Better yet, there is much more information in the animation than one would normally expect: by slowing down the video, one can more distinctly see an additional detail about the relationship between the instruction set and the drawing cursor's behavior, in which certain groups of lines are drawn as though they were a single object... wait...
As I was writing this comment, I've just realized It's all literally just a computerized Etch-a-Sketch! Consider my mind thoroughly blown!
Would consider making a similar video describing how the Cinematronics hardware draws vectors on their Vectorbeam XY black and white monitors? I know the CCPU board supplies digital data to the video board’s DAC-80 chips which then translate that data to analog voltages. These voltages causing the yoke to deflect the cathode beam in the monitor. The Cinematronics system always generated smooth vector lines with no aliasing, unlike Atari’s first games (Lunar Lander and Asteroids).
Amazingly well presented video and I'm stunned and awed by the visuals. You have some of the best production craft!
this channel is yet another reason why i dont bother with actual telly. well done. i played these games new and had a zx81 with a ram pack and did machine code on it.
trust me - im old - to experience the old games you just need a modernish pc with mame. in the late 1990s (just when the internet started) i was in dublin as a techy in an office. i used mame to play these sorts of games on pentium 133s .
soooo weird - its 2021 - your talking about old games - that i played on emulators in the late 1990s - on pcs - that i had played on the original hardware when it came out in 1979,1980,1981. the best thing about mame is the bugs carry through - for instance on original missile command if you clocked it to 800,000 points it gave you about 150 bonus cities. and pacman can be played all day on mame just like the old days on the original arcade hardware - if you know the tricks.
the noises on williams robotron (and joust and defender), watching someone who knew a game well and the smells of the old arcades - all magical times.
if you wanna watch repair of the original hardware "joe's classic video games" on youtube. the guy is a legend. genius.
best wishes from whalley range manchester uk
yes 810,000 - not 800,000 :-)
Seeing the difference between drawing instruction sets in Asteroids and Tempest makes me wonder how much per-game optimization went into each vector display processor.
Center is a VERY useful command in Tempest, but much less useful in Asteroids. I can't help but wonder if the position command was changed to a center command because it was more useful in general, or because it was more useful for Tempest.
I'm guessing because of the perspective of the game (Tempest) and a precursor for the 3D titles to follow. Also allows for monitor resolution independence.
Incredibly clear, detailed, and well presented. Fantastic work
0:17 the lines are vertical bcus the crt is sideways
I mean yeah the CRTs are sideways (they're just off-the-shelf TV CRTs repurposed for arcade chassis, anything else is preposterous), *BUT* the scanning direction is completely arbitrary and controlled by the arcade electronics.
That's the whole point of these vector games, they take advantage of that.
@@kargaroc386 i know, they use the magnets directly, controlling the beam in lines creating vector graphics (in short)
they basically turn crts into XY oscilloscopes
I am surprised by the level of detail your videos have. I was always curios about retro tech. Sadly, so much of the terms and concepts are on a high level and are unknown to me.
But, they have sparked an inspiration for me to learn more.
The graphics for your videos are outstanding man! I love every upload so much.
The amount of work that those cabinets had to put into drawing a single frame, as illustrated by your demonstration at the end, is nothing short of insane! To think that all of those individual shapes and lines are drawn in 1/60 or 1/50 of a second. Definitely more technically demanding than just drawing a bunch of horizontal lines in different color intensities.
It's actually probably less technically demanding than tile-based graphics, at least if there's a decent number of layers in the latter.
New rgmex vid is always welcome. Keep it up!
According to Marble Madness' developer, Mark Cerny, every single Atari arcade machine from a certain period before the crash had custom hardware.
Your video editing skills are monstrous. Keep up the good work.
Being a Vectrex owner, it's interesting to see how Atari did it!
Makes me wonder just how the heck the programmers figured all this out and actually wrote the games to the hardware.
Definitely helped to see the code actually running to build the frame, puts all the abstract world of memory locations, opperands, etc. into focus.
Wow, what a fabulous explanation of Atari's vector graphics! Instant subscribe.
The hardware they used is fascinating, too... The vector generator is essentially a 7-instruction CPU (complete with registers, a stack, and micro-instructions) built entirely out of rudimentary 74-series logic chips, plus a PROM to guide it from one state to the next. If anyone is interested in the gory details, search for "The Secret Life of Vector Generators" by Jed Margolin, an Atari engineer from back in the day.
Good presentation. The problem with it is that it somewhat mixes up vector and raster displays with vector and raster graphics, which are completely different. For example, it is very common to use SVG nowadays which use vector graphics, but our monitors are far from being vector displays. Even raster displays didn't need to lign-up each display element with a pixel in the image and the beam could light parts of an element in the grid without issue, having effectively more resolution than the CRT grid actually had, many grids in professional monitors weren't even rectangular at all. So both are completely different things.
I don't even know why I'm here but your voice is just *great*
Fantastic vid.
The script for the end animation was very impressive.
Have you considered writing FPGA cores for stuff like this yet? I think you'd be great at it.
this has a fantastic level of detail, and I apricate the effort put in. I do wish for a little more discussion of how the scaling worked, and perhaps a little less on how the opcodes were formed. either way, it's great work though.
Very good video. Just a note though, arcade machines typically did not use an NTSC or PAL, though NTSC sync rate was not uncommon. Most arcade machines use digital or analogue RGB plus separate digital H and V sync signals.
does that mean you can't replace the CRT inside an arcade cabinet with a normal one? or does the signal sent to it just not conform to the NTSC or PAL standards?
@@internetuser8922 The CRT and the driver electronics are two different things. Sometimes the CRT was the same as those from a TV, though more often it was the same as those used in computer monitors. The electronics that drive the CRT where made for the arcade machines, they where rated to run long hours and get hot, this made them expensive compared to a TV.
"@@internetuser8922 "NTSC and PAL standards"... I see your confusion. Divide the standard into two parts, the "timing" and the "video". In a TV video is encoded (into NTSC or PAL), the colour information is combined with the sync and sent to the TV. The TV strips the SYNC and decodes NTSC/PAL into Red, green and blue signals to drive the CRT itself. In arcade monitors the SYNC is sent as a digital square wave, the video is sent as three varying voltages (red, green and blue). The monitor has the signals it needs to directly drive the CRT. It is almost identical to the way analogue VGA monitors work, though the sync rates are often not VGA timings but are instead NTSC timings. Like I say try to think of "encoding" (PAL NTSC) and "timing" as two separate things, as outside of TV sets they mostly are treated as independent entities. In a nutshell arcade machines had no NTSC/PAL encoders or decoders as this would be a pointless extra step and would make the video look worse.
CRT: *just chilling*
LCD: “If god had wanted you to live, he wouldn’t have created ME!”
CRT: *deadpan stare*
LCD: *kicks the CRT, then keels over in pain: had hit the CRT in a spot labeled “vector graphics”*
A very cool video, thanks! Your graphics are amazing... but the audio could be better. Have you considered using a wind screen for your microphone?
Thank you for making such amazing content, I'm always waiting eagerly for your vids! Really cool stuff.
That was very deep hahaha, I feel like I just read the reference manual for drawing vector on this device :-) excellent video!
Amazing video, wonderfully produced! Subscribed.
Man that ending is *awesome*, that is such a neat way to draw graphics on a CRT. Your visualizations are always excellent, but that was really cool, one of my favorites yet.
If I may ask, what font did you use on this video for the code? Is it Terminus blown up to a large size, or something else?
Wonderfully explained.
Thanks for sharing
Cheers ✨✌
Okay, I made it to 11:48. My brain cannot handle any more at this time.
Great video, thank you for making this. Much appreciated!
Vector graphics on Retro Game Mechanics Explained? That's a first!
Nicely explained. Thanks.
Excellent video. Your nomenclature is a bit confused though. Vectors are pairs of numbers (in this case since we're talking 2D, n-tuples in general), which can be used to represent positions, or directions. So in this case, the "vectors" are the X,Y points used to locate the line start/end, or the dX,dY displacement for each position instruction. The thing you draw between them are just "line segments".
N64 3D explained
I think modern vintage gamer made a video about that
The raster scan was horizontal, not vertical. Enjoyed your presentation.
I think some games turned the monitor sideways.
Would love to see Moon Patrol analysis and how it sends programs to its sound chip!
Do you use 3blue1brown’s animation software? It looks incredible, every single video!
Nah, just expressions within After Effects. And thanks!
Glad to see I wasn't the only one to think that very thing.
That's really fascinating.
Reminds me of a Science Elf video
TEMPEST TEMPEST TEMPEST TEMPEST
So sad it's not 2000 with it's badass soundtrack
my brain is expanding.
reading comments like these is so much more wholesome than those annoying "durr hurr, this is too complicated for me, why am i watching it??!" comments.
i just felt like saying that. have an nice day. :)
Love this video. Please would you tell me what you are using to build these animations? I repair these old boards and had a vision in my head of how the state machine worked. I have a project i need to do a scripted animation with and I can only think to do it in something like HTML with JavaScript and cancas?
Remember LUNAR LANDER ?? A game looking so simple, guess contains a hell of a lot of math and programming tricks to do collision detection , byte saving graphics, and all. would love to see under the hood of that one day! to me its a video game classic, beside pong and breakout/arkanoid,
Surprisingly, Lunar Lander is actually one of the simplest simulation games ever made. The calculations are really simple - both because the simulated environment is a vacuum (no air resistance or currents), and because it's 2D. Simple thrust and gravity mechanics, and line-based collision detection is also fairly simple.
And also because the collision physics are extremely simplistic: You either land successfully on a flat surface, or you explode. No need to worry about reflection angles, conservation of momentum, etc.
Wow you have an amazingly awesome channel, thank you for the content!
whoo! Retrosmartguy has returned!
damn i would love to see this thing on an FPGA and used in a "modern" retro system with like a 20MHz 65C02 or something...
that would be awesome.
The question is, can you find a vector CRT?
@@mrmimeisfunny easy. Any Oscilloscope with an XY mode.
Plus if it's on an FPGA anyways than you could easily convert it to a raster image and display it at some relatively high resolution. obviously that will kinda go agaist the whole point of vector graphics, but it would still be a pretty good approximation and allows for much larger, and cheaper screens than an Oscilloscope or real CRT.
@@proxy1035 I think people misunderstand the purpose of vector graphics. The memory implications and visual style of vector games aren't as closely tied to the physical display tech (CRT with arbitrary deflection, vs. raster, flat-panel, etc.) as people think. As RGME explained here, one of the most significant implications of vector tech is that there isn't any need for video memory, frame buffers, tile maps, etc. - those just physically don't exist. But the act of drawing a line from A to B is really just the same regardless of the tech - instead of deflecting an electron beam, you just paint a bunch of pixels into a frame buffer. Getting the same smoothness and resolution is just a function of anti-aliasing and the dot-pitch of the screen - modern hardware is more than capable of handling all of that with ease.
And in fact, drawing vectors onto a raster screen is in fact a whole lot faster and more consistent than using a physical CRT deflector simply because you don't have the moving parts. You would have absolutely no flickering and no warping of the image, unless you specifically simulated it.
It's worth noting that most color vector displays are actually pretty low-resolution (you can see the individual pixels on the screen if you look closely enough), but the fact that the line is drawn through this screen of pixels such that some of them are dimmer than others is simply an artifact of the electron beam moving across them unevenly, which is simulated in raster displays by a process known as "anti-aliasing". You can in fact get the exact same look in both vector and raster if the image generator for the raster display is doing enough to reproduce it accurately. But that is all independent of the hardware that actually does the computations and generates the instructions to do the drawing.
I wonder if there is any kind of a homebrew/demo scene for quadrascan.
How did the color Quadrascan monitors actually produce color?
In case anyone hasn’t played astroids, the max brightness isn’t just white, it’s bright enough to produce a little bit of glare in your vision and on the screen. It’s used for the bullets so they look like they’re glowing, and is honestly pretty cool the first time you see it
HDR bloom effect before modern GPUs.
So at the example at the beginning for raster...
I just realized it's a vertical scan. Is this an arcade convention or something? Or is the monitor just flipped 90° as suggested by this video and looking up some things.
Both possibilities would be interesting since even if you're using a standard video format that has "horizontal" lines being scanned, you still have to either compensate for how the graphics are stored or have the ppu do it for you maybe with how bytes are read?
Hm...raster on arcade could be it's own video. And it kinda makes me wonder more about the weird vram addressing in your Pac-Man kill screen video.
Giving Tempest only a center instruction was a cheeky optimization. From there they'd only need to modify the scale parameter to move the graphics toward the player and away from it.
It worked well for Tempest because of the fact that the game is drawn in perspective from the center of the screen. Its utility in other color games like Space Duel and Black Widow is questionable, but it does at least ensure that there is a single definite point of reference for all vectors that is absolute on the physical screen and not just in some memory space.
Raster 's scan from left to right. not from bottom to top. The pixels are dot clocks as the raster moves from left to right.
Not in Q*Bert. The screens were amounted in a portrait rather than landscape orientation.
Great video, the animations are amazing, second to none.
Dude, i love your vids so much but i always feel kinda awkward because of the lack of music. Lol
RETRO GAME MECHANICS, can you make a video explaining what the vector games bitslicer IC chips are doing and the Vector Shift Register IC chips? Another video lesson about bitmapping arcade games because they used 256 horizontal resolution by 240 vertical Resolution. I don't know where they come up with 256H by 240V because the Horizontal counters IC chips are 1H to 128H and the vertical counters are from 1V to 128V. The calculation formula is 128H + 128V = 256 bit resolution total. So I don't know how they get 256 by 240Vertical resolution in arcade games.
Waitaminute... how is COLOR achieved? I get the opcode(s) part, but are we talking about screen phosphors (i.e. scanning offsets)? Or are there multiple electron beams (i.e. color wheel/filters)?
Fantastic videos as always
The vector generator is a lot more like a modern GPU than other systems of the time (just much more primitive of course).
There's a RUclips channel that someone who had a professional laser light system that's used in concerts or dance clubs.
And program that system to play asteroids..
So really it's look like inside vector graphic picture tube what's it doing drawing the rocks space ship and UFO's..
It's pretty nice to check it out.
I can't remember the name of the channel or the guy name..
But do google search for
Laser light system plays asteroids.
You'll find it.
So much nostalgia, so much badassery!
Incredible. Thank you.
If you promise not to ask anything, yes, I understood everything
Top stuff here, subscribed.
reminds me of Display Lists on the CTIA/GTIA.
Yeah, me too, though it was ANTIC that had that feature.
@@xotmatrix Been a long time since I had my Atari 800 xl. antic rings a bell but I can't recall the details. All I recall now was the GTIA equipped 800s could do more colors.
@@xotmatrix just googled it. You are correct. Does run on the antic.
i miss being able to go to this barcade i like. asteroids is such a beautifully smooth game. i suck at it, but god is it pretty
So basically the game logic running on the CPU is just a VecGen compiler.
Are vector monitors still being manufactured for any purpose (like industrial applications)?