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ChinnyVision - Feud

Started by chinnyhill10, 10:07, 26 June 14

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chinnyhill10

For the second in the series I decided to look at a game that is available across a large number of formats, Feud.


Lots of CPC footage and also the only footage of the rare IBM PC version. One Commodore website gave Feud 7/10. Let's see if I agree with them.....



www.youtube.com/watch?v=I19QiN8PJZs


As usual, all captured off of the original hardware (except for the PC version which was a Dosbox capture as it was a last minute find).
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ChinnyVision - Reviews Of Classic Games Using Original Hardware
chinnyhill10 - YouTube

Bryce

You didn't include the Atari XL/XE version, but that's probably just as well, as it was browner than a C64 game about brown things! :D

Bryce.

chinnyhill10

#2
I did include the Atari 8 bit version. It's very brown and grey + Leonaric can kill you with one touch which changes the entire game


It was actually a pain to include as my XE's video output flashes to white every 10 seconds when running through the capture hardware. So to get any sequences I had to pause every 10 seconds and then edit it out!


If anyone knows why a composite output would do that (it's fine on everything else) please let me know!


The only versions not included are the ST and MSX as I don't own the machines to capture from. I did emulate the PC version however as I only found it at the last minute and technically speaking it was still running on a PC (well VMware on a Mac anyway).
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ChinnyVision - Reviews Of Classic Games Using Original Hardware
chinnyhill10 - YouTube

Bryce

Ah, I skipped ahead and probably thought I was still on the C64 version :)

Is your XE really connected using Composite? Or do you mean S-Video?

Bryce. 

chinnyhill10

I only have a composite lead for my XE at the moment.
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ChinnyVision - Reviews Of Classic Games Using Original Hardware
chinnyhill10 - YouTube

Bryce

Make an S-video cable, it will give you a much better picture.

Bryce.

chinnyhill10

It's on my to do list, but other things to do first.
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ChinnyVision - Reviews Of Classic Games Using Original Hardware
chinnyhill10 - YouTube

Gryzor

Never really played the game, so I enjoyed your vid quite a bit more :) I also caught your discussion with Ste on Twitter, interesting stuff.

The 16 bit version looks gorgeous! Really nice...

As for DOSbox, the filter option is one of the very first in the config file... very easy to fix, just choose normal2x or normal3x as your scaler. Your picture looks like 2xsai... (also don't forget to set "aspect" to "true").

TMR

Enjoyed watching the video, although i felt 14 minutes was a little long perhaps...?

Quote from: chinnyhill10 on 10:37, 26 June 14
I did include the Atari 8 bit version. It's very brown and grey + Leonaric can kill you with one touch which changes the entire game

You were wondering in the video if the Atari 8-bit version needed to be so limited as far as colour goes. The Atari code runs at 160x192 pixels with four colours (two bits per pixel compared to the 4BPP the CPC uses in mode 0 or the 2BPP with attribute RAM on the C64) where it also renderers anything that moves as software sprites. That means everything is bound together, so splitting the dark brown for dark blue halfway down the play area will also alter the player or Leonaric as they move vertically across that colour split. The hardware sprites wouldn't have helped much because a ten pixel wide object (all of the moving objects are a bit wider but could be tweaked) takes 50% of the available resources and, although they can be recycled vertically, only two can exist on the same scanline in practical terms.

There are more common techniques like hardware sprite underlay that could've increased the colour count a little, but in this case those would probably have created almost as many problems as they fixed, particularly when it came to working out object priority.

chinnyhill10

Yes, 14 minutes was too long from a production point of view as well. It was also difficult because of the sheer amount of time I had to play it. I have about 3 hours of capture from various versions as I played all of them a couple of times (I have 3 complete CPC versions each around 20 minutes).


What happened was that I ended up spending more time on the C64 version than I intended because I kept finding problems, and then I turned up the PC version which I felt needed a decent amount of time due to there being few screenshots online and no video at all of it on Youtube.


Future editions will be shorter. And to be fair Feud is a bit of an oddity just because of the differences between the systems that you need to show. I wanted to to it justice. But never again will I go quite that far!
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ChinnyVision - Reviews Of Classic Games Using Original Hardware
chinnyhill10 - YouTube

chinnyhill10

Quote from: Gryzor on 18:15, 26 June 14
Never really played the game, so I enjoyed your vid quite a bit more :) I also caught your discussion with Ste on Twitter, interesting stuff.

The 16 bit version looks gorgeous! Really nice...

As for DOSbox, the filter option is one of the very first in the config file... very easy to fix, just choose normal2x or normal3x as your scaler. Your picture looks like 2xsai... (also don't forget to set "aspect" to "true").


Cheers. I've found that now. The DOS version was a last minute addition. I'd been looking and had one last attempt to find a copy and turned one up.
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ChinnyVision - Reviews Of Classic Games Using Original Hardware
chinnyhill10 - YouTube

chinnyhill10

Quote from: TMR on 19:24, 26 June 14

There are more common techniques like hardware sprite underlay that could've increased the colour count a little, but in this case those would probably have created almost as many problems as they fixed, particularly when it came to working out object priority.


Cheers. that's very interesting. The Atari is a bit of an odd beast. Sometimes stuff looks great and is fast, other times it's a kind of slow monochrome hell.
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ChinnyVision - Reviews Of Classic Games Using Original Hardware
chinnyhill10 - YouTube

Axelay

Quote from: chinnyhill10 on 20:01, 26 June 14

Sometimes stuff looks great and is fast, other times it's a kind of slow monochrome hell.


Strange, that sounds familiar!  ;)

MacDeath

#13
QuoteThe Atari is a bit of an odd beast.
are you talking about the Atari 8bit range ?
Those machines were quite strange...
first you need to account the diffferent generations, a bit like MSX...
Also it seems the coders always fail to know how to code it well...
You can have a Mode0 in 4 colours that sucks, or Hardwire sprites, shittons of raster hence a true beast well coded.

as per CPC, they quite managed to know how to code it properly a bit late in the machines commercial life.

The video is very complicated though, this machine has huge potential but really annoying to use those possibilities and the whole system may be drag down due to the lower specs models from the range.

And really, look at the graphic modes lookup table : it's a real mess where Amstrad was simple and powerfull.

Most times you can see Atari 8 bit looking like a CPC in dualplayfield Mode0 (4 colours + 3 colours+transparency) with addition of a lot of rasters... a bit like Mission genocide perhaps.


Still Pokey sounds great when well used and those sprites can pack nice playability.

Oh and actually big big colour palette as well.

TMR

#14
Quote from: MacDeath on 10:50, 27 June 14
are you talking about the Atari 8bit range ?
Those machines were quite strange...
first you need to account the diffferent generations, a bit like MSX...

Not really, after RAM sizes there are only two real variations; the 400 and 800 originally shipped with a CTIA video chip, the later models and everything after that were GTIA. Since there were at best a handful of games using GTIA-specific graphics modes for the actual play area, as long as the memory requirement was met the program would run.

Quote from: MacDeath on 10:50, 27 June 14Also it seems the coders always fail to know how to code it well...

It's not an easy machine to coax things out of really and Atari didn't exactly help at the start; for the first couple of years there was no decent documentation because they wanted to keep all the best toys for themselves to stay at the top of the games totem pole so third party developers had to either be adept at reverse engineering to yank apart Atari's code and figure out how things like display list interrupts and the hardware sprites, know someone who'd done the donkey work to get their notes or try to blag a copy of the hard to read "escaped" internal documents from Atari.

That lack of help at the beginning seems to have stopped a lot of would be programmers from picking the machine up and the software side of things never really recovered even when the good books started showing up.

Quote from: MacDeath on 10:50, 27 June 14You can have a Mode0 in 4 colours that sucks, or Hardwire sprites, shittons of raster hence a true beast well coded.

We-eell... i'm not sure i'd call lots of raster splits "well coded", that's the "dirty" way to use colour on the machine, is ridiculously easy to do[1] and only works if you design the game around the splits. It isn't really an option for ported games like Feud because they don't stay within the boundaries that these techniques require; in that particular case, the only way to get the same number of moving objects with arbitrary movement was either software sprites or having each object ten pixels wide and a single colour (using one player and one missle per object) and wedging a few carefully placed colour splits into the playfield.

[1] How easy? The regular Atari rainbow can be done from a display list interrupt like this...

        ldx #$00
split   stx wsync
        stx [colour register]
        inx
        cpx #$c0
        bne split


...and is usually an earlier example in the programming books.

MacDeath

still could be well used and gives some ideas on how to do nice things with an Amstrad PLUS... I guess...


Gryzor

I like how a comparison vid yielded such a nice discussion... :)

Carnivius

yay!  CPC version is best!
Favorite CPC games: Count Duckula 3, Oh Mummy Returns, RoboCop Resurrection, Tankbusters Afterlife

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