On Tue, 24 Apr 2012, BLuRry wrote:
On Tuesday, April 24, 2012 11:48:19 AM UTC-5, Steve Nickolas wrote:Prolly. Though the Atari ST and Macintosh ports have even better graphics, and it would be nice to see just how far the GS can be pushed.Jordan Mechner once said that the IBM VGA version was one of the most definitive versions. Though the sprites are more colorful, they look rather cartoonish and lose some of the realism. For example, the kid doesn't wear a turban in the original sprites or the ones he remade for the IBM version.http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1990/01/january-26-1990/ Maybe a hybrid or a skinnable theme-pack would be a good compromise?
Possible. Porting over the IBM graphics would prolly be a good place to start, but keep in mind that the GS graphics have a 12-bit palette, not the 18-bit palette of MCGA, and that there is a limit of 16 colors per scanline, where MCGA can use all 256 colors on every scanline. The resolution is the same, 320x200.
The complexity is probably not significantly higher graphically speaking than the C64 port, I suppose?
I would think the title sequence could stand to push the hardware a bit more. There's more detail, say, in the Atari ST port. If one really wanted to push the hell out of the system, there is as I mentioned the Super Famicom cinematic (with the prince being hauled off, whipped to unconsciousness and dragged across the dungeon floor), but I dunno how well that would come off on a system without the help of hardware sprites.
Yeah. Was thinking more ProDOS-8 but GS/OS would work too.P8 would probably work, use less RAM... and importantly get the job done. So all the memory relocation would need to be rewritten to use a different bank, not hard.
Yeah. P8 itself only needs for its code 12K, plus however much of the 4K area (this varies from version to version, pre-1.9 versions use 768 bytes but 1.9 and 2.x use more) it uses for the Selector (quit code), and 256 bytes in main memory. I don't know how much P16 or GS/OS takes. If you want to run on a Woz, memory will still be of the essence as 256K isn't that much more than the 128K the original version absolutely requires and uses to the hilt. (I myself have never seen a 256K GS.)
-uso.