Well, that was akward. Silly me clicking the screenshot thumbnails expecting a higher resolution picture to pop up.
New 3D FPS released for 1979 Atari 800
71–78 of 78 posts
Re: New 3D FPS released for 1979 Atari 800
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I was curious about how the Atari 800 handled floating point calculations. As it turns out, Steve Wozniak helped develop the FP routines for the 6502. http://archive.6502.org/publications/dr_dobbs_journal_select...
I doubt there are any floating point numbers because FP is very slow to emulate (for example, just to add two numbers you have to shift mantissas and 6502 has no fast way to do it). If I was writing a game for an 8-bit CPU, I would use fixed point numbers (for example, 8.8 numbers which use 8 bits for integral part and 8 bits for the fractional part, or maybe 10.6, or 12.4 numbers). 6502 cannot multiply or divide (di…
8kb table for logs would consider 16% of 64kb that you have for engine, game, intro and end sequence.
Re: New 3D FPS released for 1979 Atari 800
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Covington Celerons had an L1 cache but no L2 cache. The Pentium II of the era had an off-die L2 cache. So the accelerometer was a binned Pentium II without any L2 cache. A later model of the Celeron was released with a 128k L2 off-die L2 cache. At its base clock speeds the Celerons were middling chips. But since they readily overclocked you could get them up to 450-466MHz. They wouldn't be equivalent to the same…
The Celeron-A's had on-die cache, making them pretty much a match for a regular P2 of the same clock/bus speed. There was also a mobile P2 with 256K of on-die L2, predating Coppermine P3's.
I must have misremembered, it's been a long time. I swore there were Celeron 300As that were Covington cores with the external L2 cache but it makes sense they were the Mendocino cores with the on-die L2.
I really wanted an overclocked Celeron set up but for the year or so they were hot shit my upgrade money went to storage. That was more pressing for me at the time. By the time I was due for (and could afford) a system upgrade I was able to go directly to a Pentium III.
Re: New 3D FPS released for 1979 Atari 800
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I was curious about how the Atari 800 handled floating point calculations. As it turns out, Steve Wozniak helped develop the FP routines for the 6502. http://archive.6502.org/publications/dr_dobbs_journal_select...
I doubt there are any floating point numbers because FP is very slow to emulate (for example, just to add two numbers you have to shift mantissas and 6502 has no fast way to do it). If I was writing a game for an 8-bit CPU, I would use fixed point numbers (for example, 8.8 numbers which use 8 bits for integral part and 8 bits for the fractional part, or maybe 10.6, or 12.4 numbers). 6502 cannot multiply or divide (di…
> for example, just to add two numbers you have to shift mantissas and 6502 has no fast way to do it
How much work is there to do beside shifting mantissa? (A shift is also necessary for many fixed point calculations).
Re: New 3D FPS released for 1979 Atari 800
#75Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92K9wnk_4Cw Pretty interesting but it's a little hard to make out what's going on sometimes.
The gameplay is quite interesting; I noticed the upgrade on the game. I hope I have enough time to try the game out.
Re: New 3D FPS released for 1979 Atari 800
#76Having written realtime ray tracers in the classic demoscene style on e.g. 300 MHz Pentium 2 Celeron (the original one with no cache, that overclocked to 450-550 MHz), I sometimes wonder about how cool it would be to open source a modern rendering engine around the time of the first Pentium 3 with SSE, in 1999. You could completely revolutionise computer graphics on that era of hardware, with the view to increasing v…
Is there somewhere I can read more about the history of these different techniques?
Re: New 3D FPS released for 1979 Atari 800
#77Re: New 3D FPS released for 1979 Atari 800
#781982 is calling but expects to be connected to some HN pedant "helpfully" pointing out that you can't actually shoot stuff. https://youtu.be/j4OLnrwLcJA
That's incredible. Was this the earliest instance of raycasting in the wild? Good intro to raycasting for those interested: https://lodev.org/cgtutor/raycasting.html
Neither Wayout nor Capture the flag, it's older prettier brother uses raycasting.
Sources are out and there's some more info in AtariAge forums where some maniacs ripped it apart and even made it faster using more current tricks.
https://atariage.com/forums/topic/320414-smooth-3d-movement-...