VDU23 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 23, 2022 5:50 pm
Hello!
Most of great users here have some kind of second generation arcade reference. That's nice, but since then many other sources came out.
I'll pick just two examples.
The first is the lil ARDUBOY.
There are plenty of handhelds and even TV-based consoles that have been based on microcontrollers, sometimes with FPGA sprite engines (like
Gameduino), and I'm sure some of us are aware of at least some of them, although it is hard to keep track of them all. Indeed, some of us have even experimented with
video signal generation from microcontrollers, inspired by a number of impressive projects (mentioned
in another article).
Of course, there are "virtual consoles" like
PICO-8, which arguably aim for the retro aesthetic, being supported by "real consoles" with limited graphical capabilities such as the
Pocket CHIP. Perhaps that is going along the same path of simplification as Arduboy and various small-screen handhelds.
VDU23 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 23, 2022 5:50 pm
The second can be... GameBoy.
I know that GameBoy hardware didn'ìt share a lot in common with the Beeb, but what I want for you to notice is how such device can be used to learn something about pixel art in 4 colors.
This is an example of TripWorld graphics using some Beeb palette. Judge for yourself how nice games can look by moving from "Atari arcades" to something different...
I don't know how familiar you are with late stage Acorn 8-bit games, but certainly various Tynesoft games did move into digitised graphics territory, or at least they used graphics that probably originated on computers where the artistic tools were much more capable than on the Beeb. My own modern experiments have used digital pictures as the basis of sprites and backgrounds because this is now arguably easier than drawing graphical content, although I'm not beyond doing that, either: it is, after all, a question of time and effort.
You might want to take a look at the
Enhanced mode 1 pictures thread where some techniques are demonstrated, as well as
8 colour mode 1 screens for games. Even though those threads discuss palette switching for images, they also cover things like dithering techniques that would apply to limited colour and/or low-resolution artwork and perhaps also remind us of the possibilities we have now compared to what we had back in the day.
However, one of the more memorable games from the 32-bit era was Ballarena which used digitised graphics effectively. Personally, I think that there have always been opportunities to introduce aesthetic and technical improvements to platforms from outside, particularly from more capable platforms where the tools and facilities are superior. Of course, such opportunities often required the financial resources to invest in those more capable platforms or to find other ways of getting access to them, perhaps making the most of an academic or institutional environment.
