Commander X16

Big Commander butterfly logo splash screen. Easy enough to do, doesn't take much memory.

How much space would it take to have a 16x16 sprite animated butterfly flying around a splash screen? If that can fit into a single HighRAM 8K bank, it can be loaded up and used as a throwaway routine.

On 9/16/2022 at 4:23 AM, Johan Kårlin said:

An idea is to have some official quality mark that can be given to software that meet certain demands. Those games/programs that are acknowledged can then have a certain title screen or badge in common. Compare for example how all Apple Arcade games start with a very short animated logotype intro. After that they all look very different. This could also be very motivating for developers in our community to make finished and stable products. ?

Not completely unlike how Commodore used to do it...

 

On 9/16/2022 at 6:39 PM, BruceMcF said:

How much space would it take to have a 16x16 sprite animated butterfly flying around a splash screen? If that can fit into a single HighRAM 8K bank, it can be loaded up and used as a throwaway routine.

A16x16 sprite with 16 colors requires 128 bytes. Let say it is animated with 8 frames, that is just 1 KB. Code for displaying it and move it around will be less than 1 KB even if you include maybe a sine table for help when trying to imitate how a butterfly flies. In other words this can fit easily in a RAM bank and also in golden RAM (4 KB).

On 9/16/2022 at 7:36 PM, Johan Kårlin said:

also in golden RAM (4 KB)

I thought that Golden RAM was only 1K ? ($0400 - $0800)

On 9/16/2022 at 1:36 PM, Johan Kårlin said:

A16x16 sprite with 16 colors requires 128 bytes. Let say it is animated with 8 frames, that is just 1 KB. Code for displaying it and move it around will be less than 1 KB even if you include maybe a sine table for help when trying to imitate how a butterfly flies. In other words this can fit easily in a RAM bank and also in golden RAM (4 KB).

Ooh, a sine wave table ... have it start at a random location at a fixed distance away from its "settle" point, and fly on a straight line path to the settle point except cycling through a sine wave offsets, with the X/Y offsets translated based on where the starting location was ... that would be really striking, and the random location is starts from every time would make it feel even more "alive".

And regarding the other reply, that is exactly correct, CX16 Golden RAM is indeed 1KB, $0400-$07FF. C64 Golden RAM is 4K, $C000-$CFFF.

 

At last, I can use an English phrase I learned here on the forums some time ago: I stand corrected : ). 

Gplden ram. Seems like a fine spot to manage and store hash tables of 512 bytes each !

I don't really see how proposed "standard" would be possible with a variety hobbyst developers we have.

But let's try to view the topic form the other side. Let's take NES examples from first topic of this thread. Anybody know how they turned out to be similar in the old days? Did they just not have time and imagination to make their own splash screen designs and decided to safely copy one from another?

Same question also bothers me with NES character fonts. It looks very similar in different games, but NES itself does not have a default font. So how it turned out that way? Also different NES games use pseudographics similar to PETSCII lines and rounded corner lines. When I was a kid I thought that these fonts and pseudographics were built into console itself. It was a logical guess. Later I was very surprised to know that every cartridge had its own character ROM, but for some wierd reason it was very similar on different cartridges.

I would assume there were style guides all developers had to adhere to. Otherwise they didn't get official approval. And then I'm not sure who actually produced the cartridges? Only Nintendo? Or if others, then they only got a license if the software on them complied with the style guides etc. Nintendo wanted to ensure a certain level of quality.

But that's guesswork from my side - does anybody here know?