How "oldschool" graphics worked Part 1 - Commodore and Nintendo 

@IHateCheese what drawing software are you talking about? edit: seems like the comment I was replying to was deleted

@@Kensuke0987 wdym

@@juliana.b-clashroyale1125 if you mean my comment under my comment, it was meant as a reply to another comment that seems to be deleted now.

Whoever deleted the comment should smell a fart

Except for gbc artists

iDubbbzTV nice seeing you here :D

iDubbbzTV Time to update think or swim?

iDubbbzTV idu big booty bitcheztv!

+Nerd Massa Drop the bass

+iDubbbzTV i dubbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz 4 preziddents > kayne+trump

Fucking cool! Very interesting!

Lazy Game Reviews Hey Clint! It's a small world, huh? :D

Hey Clint, huge fan.

Connor Murphy Wicked Mouse Small world indeed. Thanks, glad to hear it :)

Is it weird that I'm 13 and I watch your videos?

So, can I blame you for my misspent youth? ( A rockstar ate my hamster )

As a hobby programmer I was pretty screwed, since I only had the C64 basic at hand. The possibilities were sooo little... Just last weekend, my son used Scratch to programm "Space Invaders". Within one weekend he got way further than what was ever possible for me on the C64. I was clearly born too early :-)

@@FetterCheckerchef You just had to learn 6502 assembly back in the day. It might not be for everyone, though. A contemporary vintage alternative was _Garry Kitchen's GameMaker_ .

Thank you! I wish I knew that 25 years ago... You made my day!

Maniac Mansion used this trick to have more characters on screen (with some limitations).

Booring

@@radicalthunder5740 did you have to say that you chould have just ignored tthe comment Also you should have got yourself a pfp before saying "Booorring"

@@radicalthunder5740 loser

Retro computing is actuall art.

You do computer science or something?

Loilo92 I did them on a TI-99/4a as a kid.

I did them on the MSX. I was wondering how many people coming here already new this stuff but clicked on it anyway for nostalgic reasons, you confirmed my suspicions :). Now i'm building a synthesizer that runs on webgl2 in the videocard to make sound for fun, guess i haven't changed.

Can you shutup about yourself?

@@Salty5ailor you forgot to add boomer and please

the sinclair spectrum did not natively support spites, although it did have UDG user defined graphics, but no sprite control at all that would associate with real sprites.

if we limited computers I bet we could get more out of the graphics cards we have now-a-days

It's all about optimization, but I guess it's better to work on improving the hardware and making things easier instead. It's power and comfort vs. efficiency, and efficiency can't win that battle since we are humans.

Yeah the old starwars movies were better off because of the limitations they had. I have many mental limitations as in im stupid so maybe im actually really awesome.

Alen Mustlovski That's not how it works, sorry. If you are stupid, then you are just stupid. It's just that when you are limited, you need to figure out and find new ways of doing things, and this effort is what raises ingenuity.

haha thanks for the tip.

❤️

This mind blown watching this 5 years after I first saw it

inceptional you don't fully understand something until you can explain it to someone else

Jesse Miller Exactly.

I took a class that touched on BASIC back in 1987 I was instantly hooked. "I have to tell it everything-?" But having some idea of what's happening behind the scenes, subroutines, calls to resources- does empower one.

inceptional Programming in assembler language was good fun, but the concept of shadow RAM was a brain killer. When I think of the fun of trying to lever every available byte out of the C64, it was truly satisfying when you managed it. Redirecting the display list on the fly with self-modifying code, oh the fun we had. :DI still have the greatest respect for the guys (and girls) that were the true gurus of that time... they managed to make the seemingly impossible, very possible on a regular occasion. I remember the first time we saw Hawkeye's static background behind a smooth scrolling platform layer on the C64... pure genius. Borderless displays on the C64, remarkable. Multiplexed sprites = mind blowing and when you had multiplexed overlaid hi-res/multi-colour sprites, things got truly spectacular.

YouTougle Yeah, I can see how that Hawkweye game was really impressive for its time and the hardware it was running on.

just that you can't do anything with 'modern gaming pcs and smartphones' due to them keeping everything secret, and it's not worth trying all too hard because that hardware will all be broken 2-5 years from now due to bad quality production anyway. by the time you have reverse engineered let's say a samsung-S8 to the point that your code can actually DO stuff on it they already have the next model which is completely incompatible. :P so that's pretty much a dead end street. something much like a nintendo however, you can just build in your garage. out of transistors if need be. and therefore is not an ending path.

Sven Olaf Kamphuis Uhhh you have any understanding of how Consoles and Gaming PCs are made?

unfortunately, more than enough :P and it's time to take it back to the physical quality standards it all had before. rather than just 'speed' and flimsy disposable crap all over the place.

hardware should always be easily repairable, built to last, multivendor, fully documented, and provide software compatibility on the hardware level without 'drivers'. only then can one archieve sales numbers that surpass the atari 2600 and c64. (although for the first, it wasn't on purpose that everyone started making them lolol ;)

time to stop trying to make a buck on selling the games and start making a buck on selling the computers again. for periods of oh eh 40 years in a row. while deliberatley encouraging competitors to make the exact same thing to grow the platform. long term planning. lets others write the games.

* the raise of c64 - 2019 *

get 4 colors in a cell with half the horizontal resolution while using the same amount of memory

Praise the 8-bit God.

@@Wooksley 😂

Anders Kaare - I am actually hoping to cover that when I get to CPU driven graphics modes at the end of part II.

Anders Kaare being an old(er) guy - : ) - i remember writing raster interrupt routines on the c64. it really opened my eyes to how fast electronics worked. it was really amazing, at the time.... : ) thanks for the video!

bill rowland , actually its rather fantastic to think that the 6502 processor was "good enough" for many systems for almost 15 years or so. A 1 MHz processor coupled with some decent display and sound hardware worked brilliantly. How long does a generation of processors last today in comparison? :)

bill rowland Were you one of those that literally spent hours padding the H-blank with NOPs to make sure that it happened in the border? Only to have it ruined when a hardware sprite crossed over it, and pushed it over into the next line... at which point you'd cry. :D I really miss being able to switch border colours to see how much raster time your routines took up, it was mesmerising watching all the pretty colours go up and down and up and down. :)

YouTougle , I still do that when I develop C64 games. :) - A good sprite raster routine will be able to keep track of which raster lines are touched by the sprites and hence you can adjust timings accordingly. - Although not covered in this video, the fact that the VIC-II graphics chip and CPU shared the same bus required them to share it and esssentially having less cycles available per raster line. Which is why its best to turn off the display completely in the VIC-II before doing something computationally heavy to have more cycles available.

Graph paper? You lucky b*****d! I had to draw my own grid on blank paper!

+komodosp Yea, my parents were too cheap to buy me that expensive graph paper just to draw on. They'd give me a stack of thin dollar store printer paper and say, "Use this instead."

+komodosp blank paper?? ha! I had to cut my own tree and make paper out of the pulp! lol

Dragon10101011 Was that before or after you had to walk uphill both ways in 6 foot snow to get to the tree? lol!

He had to grow it first...

Yep.... Same thing just happened to me!

MaxOfS2D (Maxime Lebled) IKR i think i saw myself but pixel!

Same here !

Does no one use a proper desktop computer anymore? Is this a millennial thing, to use a tiny pocket computer, even when you're home?

JanetFunkYeah It’s because when your laying in bed. Here’s my times 11:25 AM (11:25) wake up 12:00 PM (12:00) go on computer 10:50 PM (22:50) get off computer 11:00 PM (23:00) pee on my kid 11:10 PM (23:10) go on iphone xi 3:30 AM (3:30) Go to sleep REPEAT

@lego craft probally some secret that we dont know.

The Commodore logo is frequently written in text as "C=". Look it up and you'll see it's a close resemblance :)

+GVGINU The house at 3:24 is actual art for me now

Didn't know he still made vids- I've always was a fan of his older stuff. Good find, GVGINU!!

@LeoDaBoss - El youtuber no tan -animado- . true, some cartridges do also add their own processor and/or ram to allow additional functionality.

@@nugget6635 The Famicom version of Castlevania III is a good example of this. The cartridge actually had a specialized chip that allowed it to make use of the greater number of sound channels offered by the Famicom

When I hear people complaining how modern consoles don't have very long life spans I like to bring this up. The NES basically got to cheat fate, due to the nature of cartridge based hardware and the growth potential of technology in the 80s. It couldn't be reproduced today even with cartridges, being the quality of difference you could cram onto cartridge chips wouldn't be nearly as noticeable on modern hardware. Vanilla NES hardware hit its wall with SMB1 in 1985, yet mapper chips effectively doubled the console's lifespan.

@@mresturk9336 Hardware in cartridge is totally cheating. It's like selling a screen and then selling "games" as individual computers to connect to it lol

@@jatoxoyeah i do agree with that,just imagine you came up with a console wich is not all that much powerful then your competitor’s console systems,BUT you wanna convince your costumers that your console is waaay more capable then that of the rest so what you gonna do,you sneakingly gonna add extra chips in the cartride for extra ram and rom,better graphics and sounds,and you will trick those pepless that way, The nes tricked us because for what we didn’t know for years that the stock nes couldn’t handle games such as mario 3 or zelda oh no,as it turns out,our beloved nes became much weaker then we ever tout it was,hack we didn’t know that some previous generation systems were in some cases more powerful then the nes,for instance the atari 5200 did had a 256 colorpallet and it had more ram then the nes,the intelevision did had a 16bit cpu, So the stock nes was not halve that powerful as those commercials did make you believe, Same thing with the snes,nintendo did sneakingly used chips inside many of their games,so we didn’t know that the stock snes couldn’t handle mario kart on it’s own,it couldn’t handle supermario rpg on it’s own etc,,,, Same thing with the gameboy,for years we didn’t know that the stock gameboy couldn’t handle supermarioland 2 and wario land etc, Because the gameboy also needed an extra chip for it, So into conclusion those terms from their commercials like ‘now you playing with,super,portiblor (normal) power were just BULLSHIT. eventrough it did work despite games with those enhancement chips inside them did became more expensive,it just didn’t hold back and stop people just buying it,they just bought thrm anyway,,,but still,,

***** I noticed you guys have over 2 million subscribers. I'm actually homeless and have a heroin addiction. Can you give me some words of encouragement?

he's not in for the dolla dolla cazh gold

***** Jeez. Are comment replies when you two post on other people's videos always like these? The internet constantly astounds me.

+Fredrick Fedory™. 139 IQ. :D sir i am truly sorry to break it to you but no troll has an IQ of 139 so neither have you :)

+AkibaMV .. That's the troll, genius.

Doesn't it just use rasterisation like OpenGL and DirectX?

also used to reduce the staircase effect of certain textures.

said 3 point filter also makes it an utter pain to code an emulator for...

Polys, Hell of a ton of Polys

U should ask the 64-bit guy to do that

Super! :3 how are you everywhere?

well, they actually do by playing contemporary games of the companies those pioneers founded.

Like Atari.

I do I'm 9

+julie924888 same

I'm only 1 and a half and i do!

same

Yea, I have no inner geek either because I wear my geek on my sleeve. No, really, I have a velcro patch that says "Geek" that I wear on my sleeve. ... No I don't, but now that I've thought of it, I really want one.

And i m all Greek.

There is an old saying Every Geek is 3 Geeks 1. The Geek he thinks he is 2. The Geek that people see him as 3. The Geek that he actually is Actually the original proverb is Every Man is 3 men and YES this actually has a point THE POINT OF THE PROVERB IS................. MAKE IT SO THAT THE 3 MEN (or Geeks) are the same man.......THINK ABOUT IT hehe

@@martinkuliza STFU (x3)

You learned how binary worked at 10 decimal or 10 binary (2 years)????

It kinda almost make sense to learn a two-number system as a toddler before you can even handle a decimal system... Doesn't it? :D

I'll leave that open to your imagination :P - I had to know decimal numbers, though. Those numers had to be entered as decimals in BASIC source code... 5000 DATA 1,252,0,6,3,0,8,112,128,16,112,64,16,48,64,32,240,32,33,48,32,127,255,240,63,255,224,31,255,192,4,1,0,8,0,128

101001010101010110001010110101011001010101001010101010101 100101011110010100101010101010101

Base 2 is actually pretty easy to learn. I've learned it myself when I was in 5th grade. My 6th grade math teacher also happened to teach us about binary, but only how to count it.

Well you're right that there is mirroring used so that the same tile index in the character rom chip can be used for both sides of the mushroom. But each is going to take up a sprite slot in object attribute memory (i.e. what sprites currently exist on screen and where) regardless.

+Randomroutine nobody actually cares but you're right it's kinda funny

Suleyman Smits you obviously cared enough to comment

*nintento

nintento mayro

Corristo89 nor do they have to worry about programming the movement of every Individual pixel

+MixJunkie360 cringe

+Fredrick Fedory™. 139 IQ. why the cringe?

Fredrick Fedory™. 139 IQ. Fedora, IQ in YT name. Ultra-cringe.

ACoolStupidDog Trademarked their _name_. *shudders*

+ACoolStupidDog its satire/circlejerk

The shirt? I want such a wall with tech stuff attached to it ^.^

+Dayjaby that's nice too haha

surfitlive shut the fuck up

+Jan Hasebos Yeah. I am really curious about it as well.

As am I.

+Jan Hasebos Modern computers don't have hardware sprite support, so no. Even if the did, the operating system is in the way from making it like he did in the video. You could always just make program that renders it in software or hardware if you have 2 flat polygons to make a square or whatever.

I'm sure I could just code something in Scratch using basic math to generate sprites on a grid array. I might do that one day

theblueyoshi33866 I have no experience dealing with any sort of operating system because I've never programmed for anything that wasn't the SNES, but would it have to be in a window or full screen, or could it just be it's own thing floating out in space? I guess it also depends on the operating system. Actually, there's a clock thing you can add on the desktop, so I guess you could do whatever you wanted to.

_Never_ misuse the words "use to".

+TheVox I know this is a few weeks old but I'll answer your question. The resolution is 320x200 pixels and you need one bit to represent each pixel. So 320x200 = 64,000 bits. When we are dealing with computers we usually refer to memory in bytes. Eight bits equals one byte so we take 64,0000 and divide it by 8. 64,000/8 = 8,000 or 8k Hope that helps.

*OttoMoBiehl* _Eight bits equals one byte so we take _*_64,0000_*_ and divide it by 8. 64,000/8 = 8,000 or 8k._ Oops, one extra zero

8KBytes

Here’s what everything stands for. (Short) (Long) 1b - 1 Bit 1N - 1 Nibble 1B - 1 Byte 1KB - 1 Kilobyte 1MB - 1 Megabyte 1GB - 1 Gigabyte 1TB - 1 Terabyte 1PB - 1 Petabyte 1EB - 1 Exabyte 1ZB - 1 Zettabyte 1YB - 1 Yottabyte 1GB - 1 Googolbyte A Googolbyte is the biggest type of byte.

NO ONE DOES ( O.O)

dpcnull I couldn't find it either

***** Mmhmm.

dpcnull His soundcloud soundcloud.com/8-bitkeys/pss470-project4-8-bit-keys-theme-music

WorldsFirstFuckTard The song isn't on there.

No joke, even the simplest applications these days are bloated as hell.

Totally agree. Sometimes I wonder how some modern games manage to take up sooooooo much space, considering the amount of stuff that are in them. I'm a VR developer myself, and it still puzzles me how some modern game developers are so incredibly inefficient.

Lol true. 20 years later, we'll be wondering how the f*** did they manage to make complex simulations of things like lighting or fluids on just 3GHz and 8GB of RAM. But not 100% of the time, there are certain things that still need heavy optimization to run feasibly, for example the simulations still don't run smoothly unless you sacrifice something (like sacrificing color placement freedom on the Commodore 64 in the 80s), but it's more or less the same thing. Also, there will never be enough speed/performance to the point we don't have to care. If you brought someone from the 2000's and shown them some crappy (for modern standards) 2Mb per second internet, they would be absolutely blown away, and think that there's zero need for faster internet anyway. Then you show them how we stream video in realtime and that 2Mb is in fact painfully slow, and they would probably understand, because streaming realtime 1080p or sometimes even 4K video is as otherwordly for them as 2Mb internet. But back then, 50Kb/s dial-up wasn't all that terrible, and you could use it reasonably, because websites and stuff were designed for it, just like the current-day internet is made so it runs reasonably well on today's speeds. Likewise, if you took a time machine to 2030, you'd be blown away by their 2Tb/s internet, only to realize that they stream accurate volumentric representations of entire rooms so they can be projected as a colorful hologram for the viewers. Then 2Tb/s would turn out to be just another crappy cheap home connection, not really fit for streaming volumetric rooms, and proper internet is at something like 8Tb/s. People would show you how they have molecular-level water simulations, accurate ray-tracing, and sometimes even direct computer-brain interfaces for games and NPCs with AI so advanced you can play multiplayer with them almost as if they were humans, and you would be just as blown away as a 80s-90s person would be by current-day games. And the people of 2030 will be remembering how much limitations we had in 2018, and how much optimizations and weird stuff we had to do to get something that they just waste 17GHz of their 2.1THz CPU for, and don't even care, just like we do with things that were serious programming challendges in the 80s-90s, but trivial things today. Just like we compare how rich games were back then with just 2MHz, compared to the crap you can make today and use up 2GHz, they will look at how we managed to do all the things we have today with such limited computers, and how we care so much about using something better than Bubble sort for sorting (the bubble sort thing might be a bit of an exaggeration, but people like the kids learning to program using things like Scratch won't be advised against it as much as they are today). And they will compare it to the quite empty stuff some of their devs can make while using up 122GB of RAM, compared to our stuff we can cram into our current computers with limited performance. They'll also be running Windows 10 on emulators, just like we do with NES, Nintendo64, etc. today. But there will be things that are challenging for them, for example their games designed for computer-brain interfaces that use all the 5 senses will take huge amounts of processing power, and they will have to do weird stuff like we did with color in the 80s just to make it work feasibly. Fast-forward a few decades, and they'll be laughing at how they barely managed to simulate all 5 senses, and so inaccurately, but at that point they will be struggling with thought-reading as an alternative to using controllers, and once they figure that out, they look forward to even more ridiculous stuff which would have been unthinkable in the past. Oh and they won't just render graphics into pixels, that would be old-school. Instead, they just use their computer-brain stuff to do something like computer-controlled dreams, and let the brain "render" the details, and the computer won't have to care that much about graphics, only about the physics and stuff that isn't intuitive for the brain. In the 80s, nobody would see fluid simulations or AI coming. ...And the loop goes on, until we hit the hard limits imposed by physics (unless we somehow modify physics, but even that must have it's limits, and if we'd ever get to such a level of technology, it would just be easier to upload our consciousnesses into computers, and program them to feel good 24/7). Note that the futuristic cases are just examples, I don't have a working crystal ball, the future might be very different from what i used as an example. Some people like Ray Kurtzweil (hope i spelled that correctly) extrapolate current technological advancement rates (idk how accurately though, some of his predictions have already sorta failed, we don't have mouse brain simulations yet, and probably won't for at least 5 years. He predicted them for around 2020, which is not that far into the future, but some of his predictions came kinda true ~5 years later, so i'd give him a chance) and say that by 2100, we will almost surely have an artificial superintelligence that does everything for us, so... Wait, how did this become such a wall of text?

Dave Mire you sound like an old man "in my times we didnt had that fancy 16 GB ram and 1 terabyte of space to work with, instead we had to work hard" thats basically all the coments in this video

NintenTo

Maybe it was nintentional.

@@rbrtck how?

@@Persvicx I was just making a dumb joke.

@@rbrtck oh I'm so dumb I didn't even notice the joke, I'm so stupid lmao

Small typo in the word "type", awful comment though.

Lol