Looks amazing!
I have absolutely no idea how he's doing that title screen, where there definitely seem to be 5 colours on a line (dark red, orange, black, cyan, medium blue) with MODE 1 resolution pixels. I can't even really see how mid-scanline palette changes would help (if that's something you can reasonably do on a CPC).
Here's the thread on the CPC Forums. Here's something from the author:
I have absolutely no idea how he's doing that title screen, where there definitely seem to be 5 colours on a line (dark red, orange, black, cyan, medium blue) with MODE 1 resolution pixels. I can't even really see how mid-scanline palette changes would help (if that's something you can reasonably do on a CPC).
Here's the thread on the CPC Forums. Here's something from the author:
Not really clear how interlace can help here, as it doesn't really look as if the palette is being switched each field. Who can work out the secret?That's a broad question, but there's quite a few interesting little touches in there I could talk about. Problems that I found fun ways to solve.
There are more than 4 colours per line in quite a few places (vertical colour splits). In several places I'm also using dithered colours but inverting the dither pattern at 50hz which disguises the dither. For example the rainbow colours at the top of the screen, and the entire background of the bonus screen. The flashing GAME OVER letters do this too.
The title page is quite complicated and ruptured in a couple of places; the top part of the screen is double-buffered, the bottom part of the screen is single buffered, and the title part itself is a six-buffered animation (animated in hardware). The colours on the title are interlaced, and the interlacing pattern also alternates at 50hz so you get the impression of more than 4 colours per line. I was quite curious as to how this was going to look and it turned out to be one of the more successful special effects I think.
For speed, I use two screen buffers and a third "clean" buffer to clear the sprites away. Many of the sprites are "compiled", ie hard-coded, and some like the P ball use self-modifying code on a hard-coded sprite to get all the different colours. Updates to the score panel are buffered and prioritised, so it doesn't try to update your score and increase your power meter on the same frame as you collect a bomb for instance, but does them one after another. It helps.
One effect which I was quite pleased with which is fairly subtle is the effect on the player when you are powered up; the arcade game cycles the player's colour palette and I can't do that so I wasn't sure what to do. In the end the player's sprite is ORed against an animated mask pattern and that did the trick nicely.
Statistics: Posted by Rich Talbot-Watkins — Wed Mar 12, 2025 11:40 am