Could the 8-Bit Guy's new RTS game work on a BBC Micro?

[gfoot]

The 8-Bit Guy and others have written an RTS on the Commander X16, but have discounted it from being possible to port it to vintage 8-bit hardware, including explicitly the BBC Micro. I wonder how close we could come though to making it work. His video is here: https://youtu.be/HP4ObKlCe6w?si=Uz9COyHvvcWRT5Im

He claimed it was the most complex game written for a 6502, but I don't think he's really aware just how complex some Beeb games were. Most of this game doesn't look very complex in comparison, but the 8-colour graphics with a limited palette and resolution would be challenging, and moving a lot of units on-screen at the same time would be hard. Does the X16 have sprite hardware to do this? I assume so because the C64 did.

I'm sure Tricky could make it work well!

[tricky]

I did start one in the 90s, but didn't get very far as I was being too optimistic.
The master turbo fits/exceeded his spec, but you would need to choose between mode 1 and mode 2+nula.

[paulb]

He claimed it was the most complex game written for a 6502, but I don't think he's really aware just how complex some Beeb games were. Most of this game doesn't look very complex in comparison, but the 8-colour graphics with a limited palette and resolution would be challenging, and moving a lot of units on-screen at the same time would be hard. Does the X16 have sprite hardware to do this? I assume so because the C64 did.

Yes, the X16 has tile and sprite hardware, so it effectively gets the bulk of the work that a Beeb (or Electron) would be saddled with done for comparatively little effort. However, that leads to the observation that a second processor system could just delegate sprite and display operations to the host processor, with the second processor issuing VDU-like sequences across the Tube (or equivalent) when it wants the screen to be updated or sprites to be replotted.

(I suppose that Acorn's Hi-BASIC permitted graphics primitives to be used, and I imagine that either the Graphics Extension ROM will have supported more exotic functionality including sprites, or the Master's OS added such support, or someone else managed to add such capabilities. Otherwise, people missed a trick back in the day.)

Obviously, the quality of the graphics would be constrained on the Acorn 8-bit machines, but I wouldn't be too concerned with things like fancy palettes. In such matters, games always adapted to the machines to which they were ported. The performance of the second processor to run the supposedly fancy game engine might be more critical. Acorn's 6502 second processor for the Beeb ran at 3MHz, PMS's ran at 2MHz, and the Master's Turbo card ran at 4MHz.

It would surprise me if Planet X16 were completely unamenable to scaling down to run within such constraints. After all, games like Sim City were ported to the vanilla Beeb and Electron, and I doubt that they were uncomplicated, exactly.

[Cybershark]

...a second processor system could just delegate sprite and display operations to the host processor, with the second processor issuing VDU-like sequences across the Tube (or equivalent) when it wants the screen to be updated or sprites to be replotted.

I was thinking the same thing, having recently seen what SamSkivington accomplished with Chuckie Egg 2023. However, as the original assertion was that this game wouldn't be possible on a 6502 system, it'd really be cheating to claim to get around that by using two processors.

After all, games like Sim City were ported to the vanilla Beeb and Electron, and I doubt that they were uncomplicated, exactly.

This was my other thought on the matter, and SIm City was also precisely what my mind went to If that was possible on a plain model B then I believe that a B (or perhaps a Master) could take a fair stab at this kind of game.

[tricky]

50fps is asking a lot of a plain beeb, but on the other hand, I haven't seen an RTS that had to run at that!
When we did Total War for the beeb, starting I think with the first Medieval, we made game logic run at 10fps and interpolated the gfx at whatever frame rate the PC could manage. This also made network play less demanding which was good, seeing as we were still using modems!

[bob147]

For a split second there I was thinking "hang on, you ported Medieval Total War to the beeb!? that's a step up from pacman" then I had a quick look and you are literally credited for Total War on the PC.

[gfoot]

Yes, when he turned his clock speed down to 2MHz and said, it's not really playable now, I thought maybe not by today's standards, but in the 80s a lot of games had worse frame rates and people were more tolerant of games slowing down when there was too much going on at once.

[tricky]

I assumed he was talking about the game slowing down, but it could just move double the distance and display at 25.
Total war, I did some art tools, a bit of debugging and made some optimisation suggestions on Shogun: Total War and did bits, mostly tools, core tech and engine but no game play on everything up to Rome 2: Total War along with a bunch of console and sorts game stuff in the nearly 15 years that I was there.