The Future IS 8-bit

[nico24]

Hi y'all,

New to the forum. Looking forward to trawling through it.

WARNING - this may be a long and boring post.

A little bit on my journey so far:

Had a Spectrum+ as a kid, and my older brother got the green screen Amstrad CPC464. My bro wasn't particularly interested so I had free rein for both of them. Played mostly the Speccy. That machine was definitely MY machine and bought all the magazines etc. Looking back I guess the 'arnold' had the issue of the green screen. If my dad had plumped for the colour monitor I guess it may have been a different story. I suppose also you add to the fact that the Amstrad had the lesser role in the playground arguments and it had diminished profile (undeservedly as I find out).

So over the years I jumped from Speccy to Megadrive and then to PCs since my dad worked in computers and always had a 'retired' machine from work for us to use. The PC marked the end of proper fun. I never really got into PC gaming and shifted to more serious use of them. So it was Megadrive and Gameboy for the next few years. Then Playstation, Gamecube, WII and Xbox 360 - I played the last 2 a handful of times - AND I have played the XBOX 360 about 5 times in total and now is it dead due to some reason.

SO - I moved to Texas in the US (originally from Southwest UK) for work and was watching YOUTUBE. There was in instructional video about the Commodore 64 by Jim Butterfield. It finally hit me that I missed so many 8 bits. I had the idea to get the full Commodore 64 system with disk etc. I could do that pretty easily over here in the US since there were loads of those. I got one and it was dead! Mint condition though. So I got another one (ebay) and that worked well.

And so started the journey of picking up old computers. Next was Amiga - I went with a UK Amiga 600 that was brought out by family. I have an MSX - Casio one with no memory - so need to get an MSX 2. I picked up 2 Atari STs - US versions. An Atari 130XE a US Sinclair ZX81 (rare?) not a Timex, and I have just bought an Acorn Electron from the UK to ship here soon.

This is awesome.

Alot of the point of this was to understand how these machines worked, from the bare metal point of view, and I've learned a great deal about how to machine code program them all - and that's what I want to do, delve deeper and deeper into programming these beasts.

You've probably noticed the Amstrad is missing eh? (PS my parents go rid of it because the power supply in the monitor went poof. Wish we'd have kept it!!!). Yep, but unfortunately since a couple of years ago when I started out on this journey the prices of Retro have gone high up. So I wait. A 6128 is probably what I'll eventually get - although a plus would be very good (I prefer the look of the standard model though).

So I have been working out which was the true King of 8 bit in terms of power. A bit irrelevant really, but still. I think the Sam Coupe was up there, BUT then I find the Amstrad 6128 has HARDWARE sprites and scrolling. Surely the best now. The MSX 2+R probably the best, but so obscure that not worth the bother.

So I'm all in to get some assembly language going on the Amstrad, and did my first hardward sprite on emulator yesterday.

On that subject - I know its heresy but - Retropie on the Raspberry Pie is sooo good. My Amiga 600 is so temperamental, whereas UAE4ARM pretty much works like a charm.

Sorry for the rambling post.

[EgoTrip]

Only the newer Plus models have hardware sprites, the original models do not.

As for the best 8-bit computer. There's the SAM Coupe and the Enterprise which are both technically better than the CPC. The CPC has its limitations, such as only 4 colours in normal resolution mode, lack of hardware sprites on the original models (which are the most widespread and developed for) and the sound chip while decent enough, is not as good as the SID found in the C64 (although its technically better, a lot of music on the SID sounds like a wet fart to me). But it's still my favourite machine.

Also, you should get a BBC Master. This is a very good machine, although it wasn't really used much at home, it was more a business/educational computer and didn't get as many games. But there are still a lot of good BBC games. An Electron is a very watered-down version of the BBC Model B. Then the Acorn Archimedes is the next step up and was the origin of the ARM CPU. A very good and capable system, which didn't do as well as it should have done thanks to the Amiga and Atari ST being cheaper.

[arnoldemu]

Welcome nico24.

I look forward to seeing what you make for the Plus.

Yes the CPC has hardware scrolling, and it's done by changing crtc register 12 and 13 to change the start address of the screen.

There are some coding examples here:
www.cpctech.org.uk/source.html

Or, look at the programming sticky topic which has some examples in it.

[andycadley]

The Coupe is nice, but a little bit underpowered for the most part. I'd definitely class the 6128+ as a better machine overall - the hardware sprites, scrolling and DMA capabilities just give it more grunt where it counts. SAM Basic was pretty nice though, with some really cool little features like the ability to configure raster palette changes from BASIC.

[nico24]

Out of interest - what is the comparison between the Enterprise 128 and the CPC6128? They both looked pretty similar to me. Be interested to hear what the difference (apart from the price to buy one).

On the BBC master- yes I know the Electron is way watered down. I reckon shipping a BBC mater out to Texas from UK would be pricey. They were like solid metal casing weren't they. Also it might give me shivers remembering using it at school....

[keith56]

Hello there! Sounds like you've come across a lot of systems over the years, and have come to the amstrad. I'm kind of the opposite, I had an amstrad when I was young, have bought a bunch of other systems, and then picked amstrad Dev back up - I was a basic programmer back in my youth, but am hitting the Assembly language now - the "Bare Metal" programing is a refreshingly uncomplex compared to the modern languages.

As a previous post said, the Hardware splrites are Plus only, and somwhat limited (as you will probably know)... I think most people consider the non plus 6128 to be the "Baseline" for the CPCs spec, but even without hardware sprites, I think its display capabilities (palette) were the best of the era, even if the C64 may have won in pure speed and sound.

Anyways, As a fellow learner, I look forward to seeing anything you do in assembly!

[ukmarkh]

The original stock Amstrad CPC had hardware scrolling support, Killer Cobra and a few other games used it.

[nico24]

I checked out Killer Cobra - and it looks fast. So why wasn't it used more? I guess maybe only horizontal scrolling was good but not vertical?

[andycadley]

The hardware scrolling on the original CPCs is limited to Mode 1 character sized increments at a time, which is generally a bit too much for a playable game. There are additional hardware tricks that can smooth things out, but they require more effort to implement and some companies were concerned about whether they might cause issues for people using TV modulators (Savage, for example, apparently had a hardware scroll routine originally). Some games did use them though, Mission Genocide is probably one of the favourite examples for just how smooth CPC scrolling can be with pixel perfect 50fps vertical movement.

[arnoldemu]

@nico24 :

enterprise has a custom sound chip which has filters and ring modulation effects, but with a different sound compared to sid.

The video chip is custom and can do attribute modes like spectrum and bitmap modes like cpc, you can define the attributes for each scanline if you want because of it's programmable display list.

Like the cpc the ram and rom can be extended and like the cpc the video chip can only see 64kb.

[arnoldemu]

@keith56

I think may games could have benefitted from hardware scroll and they didn't especially smoother hardware vertical scroll.

There are code examples in the sticky topic in the programming section AND at www.cpctech.org.uk

I also did a incomplete analysis of hardware scrolling which gave some scenarios and insights into ways to draw sprites easily with hardware scrolling.

I'll locate the topic and ask for it to be sticky.