Hey there gals and guys,
I wondering if there is a list of CPC games made using Ascii art? Also - how fast is Ascii art to render in games compared to pixelart?
IIRC the adventure Subsunk had ASCII art room imagery.
As far as I remember some games written in basic and others ported to cp/m.
Nothing else comes to mind.
I should probably state the reason for my question :D
The reason why I'm asking is because I would like to know if the CPC is fast enough to render a video that has been converted to ascii art.
As ascii art is just text, it would be interesting to use mode 1 Black, White and Grey, to see how fast it could shift and change the colour of the letters in order to give a smooth moving image. If it's fast enough, then it could be possible to create a full cutscene animation with a lot of frames in 128KB inside a game?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGTCqFcLp60&t=1s
Maybe with a custom ASM routine it would be possible, but I am not sure :) The firmware printing routine is super slow, that is for sure, but I now that there are some others much faster...
I was remembering this thread and I finally found it. It hope it helps :)
http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/fast-mode-2-text-printing-routines/
Quote from: ||C|-|E|| on 18:07, 04 September 17
Maybe with a custom ASM routine it would be possible, but I am not sure :) The firmware printing routine is super slow, that is for sure, but I now that there are some others much faster...
I was remembering this thread and I finally found it. It hope it helps :)
http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/fast-mode-2-text-printing-routines/ (http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/fast-mode-2-text-printing-routines/)
The video posted by TFM was very speedy indeed. How many frames per second where the characters changing?
Ha, I was wondering the same thing last night, though for a different reason: I was reading the Enciclopedia Homebrew (vol 2) and I was looking at all those awesome ZX80/81 games made out of characters but still managing to give off a great atmosphere...
The problem is that the CPC display is always a bitmap, so you don't really get any advantage using ASCII characters over just rendering frames out of any other sort of tile. Indeed you may get a much better framerate out of it by using larger, but more optimised coloured tiles as you'd potentially reduce the lookup overhead (I'm wondering if you get it down to something you could basically draw with a sequence of PUSHes) and not need to constantly convert character bitmaps into display encodings.
Quote from: andycadley on 19:11, 05 September 17
The problem is that the CPC display is always a bitmap, so you don't really get any advantage using ASCII characters over just rendering frames out of any other sort of tile. Indeed you may get a much better framerate out of it by using larger, but more optimised coloured tiles as you'd potentially reduce the lookup overhead (I'm wondering if you get it down to something you could basically draw with a sequence of PUSHes) and not need to constantly convert character bitmaps into display encodings.
Ahh. So as it's always a bitmap, then I guess there isn't any advantages in saving memory either?