Mega Man 1 & Mega Man III (IBM PC)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by evildragon

Tandy 1000 was nothing more than a modified PCjr.

But it did have the same TI chip the Master System used. (sorta)

---

To be fair, they did the PCJr should have been in the first place and also probably offered the first really consumer-accessible PC clone range on the market. (and arguably the best price-performance of any PC compatible at the time)

Same sound chip as the TI99/4 and Colecovision too. :) (and a number of arcade games, etc) Plus PC speaker on top of that. (ie, interval timer driven beeper) They added an 8-bit DMA sound channel later on too, but it didn't get that much support. (by the time Soundblaster really started attracting that in software, the Tandy 1000 line was dying off in general)

Also, the full desktop models used standard 8/16-bit ISA expansion slots iirc, only the compact keyboard-console models used proprietary cards. (and only out of necessity -since normal ISA cards couldn't fit in the cases without modification . . . though there were some 3rd party adapters to do just that)
The onboard graphics (like PCJr) were also non-standard, though most EGA games had Tandy versions/support too (others dropped to CGA) . . . technically the Plantronics Colorplus offered nearly identical video hardware on an ISA card, but few/no software supported it as such. (Tandy video was actually better for games than EGA too since it used chunky pixels rather than planar -albeit still 4-bits, so not as convenient as 8-bit chunky VGA graphics and limited to the basic CGA 16 color palette)

It also had TV out (and a monochome composite mode -like CGA- that allowed clean high-res text on composite monitors -due to lack of colorburst artifacts).

So it was sort of the PC counterpart to the ST/Amiga (though it predated both) . . . and would have been interesting if it had been released in Europe. (the closest counterpart was Amstrad's crappy low-end CGA+speaker PC-20/Sinclair PC-200 -albeit they did look nice)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by kool kitty89

The graphics are also limited in some areas . . . animation and sprite interaction is pretty sloppy at times. (the bizarre "enemies fall off screen" death animations come to mind)

---

Well, I'm obviously referring to the deep parallax. Of course, such parallax also had drawbacks and issues to work around, but back upon release, it was gorgeous to look at.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by TheSonicRetard

Well, I'm obviously referring to the deep parallax. Of course, such parallax also had drawbacks and issues to work around, but back upon release, it was gorgeous to look at.

---

Well, SoTB uses dual playfield mode for its parallax, and the main disadvantage there is limited color for the graphics (7/8 colors per playfield) . . . which they managed to optimize for quite well.

Another disadvantage that should be noted is that with 6-bitplane modes (ie EHB or dual 3-bit playfields) or even 5 bitplane modes, you use more memory for the framebuffers as well as significantly eat into CPU time while scanning the framebuffer(s) (worse with 6 bitplanes). That also means any cases of CPU time stealing for added blitter bandwidth would be more limited than on plain 4-bitplane (15/16 color playfield) games. (fastRAM would largely avoid that problem -CPU only taking hits while accessing chipRAM, but few to no games supported use of fastRAM -exploiting fastRAM could potentially allow the chipset to virtually saturate chipRAM bandwidth without crippling the CPU -especially for blitter bandwidth)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by TheSonicRetard

Well, I'm obviously referring to the deep parallax. Of course, such parallax also had drawbacks and issues to work around, but back upon release, it was gorgeous to look at.

---

It has good parallax only on the forest, which only scrolls in 1 direction, and the enemy sprites are mostly 3 color.
The trick is amazingly cheap and yet looks really good with some of the better colors in any amiga game. It actually says a lot more about the designer of that area than the programmers ;).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by kool kitty89

Another disadvantage that should be noted is that with 6-bitplane modes (ie EHB or dual 3-bit playfields) or even 5 bitplane modes, you use more memory for the framebuffers as well as significantly eat into CPU time while scanning the framebuffer(s) (worse with 6 bitplanes).

---

When in dual playfield mode you only need to worry about blitting to 3 bitplanes (the foreground), so the performance issue is nullified.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kamahl

When in dual playfield mode you only need to worry about blitting to 3 bitplanes (the foreground), so the performance issue is nullified.

---

I wasn't talking about that, I was talking about Denise eating into CPU time (forcing wait states/halts) when using 5 or (especially) 6 bitplane modes. (4 bitplanes saturates the available interleaved bandwidth of 3.58 MB/s, so you start stealing CPU time in chipRAM to go beyond that)
Thus, games using 5/6 bitplane modes will automatically have less max CPU time available (assuming no fastRAM).

Also, with less CPU time available, it becomes even less attractive to allow the blitter to steal added CPU time to increase its bandwidth. (and the default interleaved bandwidth would be limited to vblank time -also giving an advantage to PAL games ;))
By extension, that also means that, if games had supported fastRAM, there could be far more blitter bandwidth available without massive CPU performance loss. (CPU would only slow down when accessing chipRAM while working mostly in fastRAM)

It would have been interesting if a low-end Amiga model had been introduced with fastRAM as standard (like if the A500+ had used 512k fastRAM plus 512k chipRAM) . . . then again, the 500+ (and 600) had 1 MB chipRAM standard and few games even took advantage of that. (on the note of fastRAM, it's also interesting that the same old RAM used from 1985 should have allowed a 14.3 MHz 68000 to run at full speed in fastRAM -for the same reason a 7.16 MHz 68k only needs 1/2 the bus time to run at full speed in chipRAM: the 68k takes 4 cycles per memory access and and the use of a 16-bit latch allows memory to be configured around that speed -DRAM in OCS takes 280 ns for read/write cycle times and a 68k access takes twice that long, so the chipset fits one "extra" access within a 68k slot without slowing the 68k down)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Thunderblaze16

OMG, you actually bought this!?

---

This mega man seen to be getting RAPED by a big cat...

I know what you were talking about, you have less CPU but you also don't need to use the blitter as much due to only having to work with 3 bitplanes, nullifying that disadvantage (the blitter won't have to steal from the CPU as it would have to do with 4 bitplanes for a certain number of objects).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by kool kitty89

To be fair, they did the PCJr should have been in the first place and also probably offered the first really consumer-accessible PC clone range on the market. (and arguably the best price-performance of any PC compatible at the time)

Same sound chip as the TI99/4 and Colecovision too. :) (and a number of arcade games, etc) Plus PC speaker on top of that. (ie, interval timer driven beeper) They added an 8-bit DMA sound channel later on too, but it didn't get that much support. (by the time Soundblaster really started attracting that in software, the Tandy 1000 line was dying off in general)

Also, the full desktop models used standard 8/16-bit ISA expansion slots iirc, only the compact keyboard-console models used proprietary cards. (and only out of necessity -since normal ISA cards couldn't fit in the cases without modification . . . though there were some 3rd party adapters to do just that)
The onboard graphics (like PCJr) were also non-standard, though most EGA games had Tandy versions/support too (others dropped to CGA) . . . technically the Plantronics Colorplus offered nearly identical video hardware on an ISA card, but few/no software supported it as such. (Tandy video was actually better for games than EGA too since it used chunky pixels rather than planar -albeit still 4-bits, so not as convenient as 8-bit chunky VGA graphics and limited to the basic CGA 16 color palette)

It also had TV out (and a monochome composite mode -like CGA- that allowed clean high-res text on composite monitors -due to lack of colorburst artifacts).

So it was sort of the PC counterpart to the ST/Amiga (though it predated both) . . . and would have been interesting if it had been released in Europe. (the closest counterpart was Amstrad's crappy low-end CGA+speaker PC-20/Sinclair PC-200 -albeit they did look nice)

---

Tandy graphics WAS PCjr graphics. They were the same modes. Also, Tandy sound WAS PCjr sound, same TI sound chip and same way of using it.

That's why I say the Tandy was more of a modified PCjr. It just had the same modes mostly, but the PCjr did lack ISA, and had sidecars instead, which sucked hardcore.. But RAM amount, the PCjr could be made to have the same amount of RAM as the Tandy, I believe 768KB, which is above conventional RAM of 640KB.

I don't remember if it had more memory. I just remember gaming on it to be very robust.