Commander X16

There are a few spare bits in VERA’s sprite registers.

VERA itself might be “full”; however, I was thinking about the C64 and its chunky sprites, and its double-size mode.  You know, it could be twice high, or twice wide.

Those extra large sprites were 80’s jaggy, remember?  

Ok so maybe VERA is not designed to be so retro.  It’s about clean graphics.  I get that.

But a chunky mode would work for games that aren’t as picky about graphics, but do want to use all available space.  It would for example allow the programmer to design 32 x 32 sprites but display them as 64 x 64.  You get the wall of graphics at a quarter the memory cost.

Obviously it's not important, or else VERA would have this mode.  And of course I can just switch to 40 column mode, so perhaps I am barking up the wrong tree.

* * *

Those 3 unused bits do call to me, though.  I wonder why.

But now we have a clue why they said "stop asking for more Vera features" ... the X8 also implements all of the Vera features, except only accessing 64K ... and also a 65C02 soft core, and also I/O ... so there may well not be any more logic resources available without forking the Vera features on the X8 and X16.

Feeping Creaturitis is nothing new, eh?

I know where you are coming from: I intentionally used the 320x240 pixel mode in my games - in order to get the chunky look. Brixx for example would have been easy to do in 640x480, but I didn't want to...

If you want it even chunkier: design your sprites by using 2 pixels at a time... Yes, this will waste VRAM, but as you would also probably not use 256, but 4 colours instead, that should not be an issue...

4 hours ago, AndyMt said:

I know where you are coming from: I intentionally used the 320x240 pixel mode in my games - in order to get the chunky look. Brixx for example would have been easy to do in 640x480, but I didn't want to...



If you want it even chunkier: design your sprites by using 2 pixels at a time... Yes, this will waste VRAM, but as you would also probably not use 256, but 4 colours instead, that should not be an issue...

Ha!  Hey I like your impudent waste of resources for the sake of a retro look!  

But yeah, low-res mode is a good solution here.  Thank you.

13 hours ago, AndyMt said:

If you want it even chunkier: design your sprites by using 2 pixels at a time... Yes, this will waste VRAM, but as you would also probably not use 256, but 4 colours instead, that should not be an issue...

I believe you could also set the resolution to 160x120 to achieve the same effect while using less VRAM.