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# Yes.
The BLiTTER moved the sprite and the animation was done using Palette cycling.

Atari cloned that demo to show off the same effect on the STE in 1988 (which also had a BLiTTER chip). Of course, on the Amiga, you could drag the demo's public screen down and see Workbench underneath with virtually no slowdown. It took Atari until 1992 with MultiTOS to implement MultiTasking and exactly three people used it.

And I was two of them.
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 14:25, archived)
# I understand about one word in 4 of this subthread :o)
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 14:29, archived)
# Welcome to my world!
;)
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 14:35, archived)
# Maybe you don't need to...
...if you aren't / weren't into the sixteen-bit demo scene, it would be a waste of a perfectly cromulent explanation.
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 14:48, archived)
# Absolutely :D
it would be very difficult to explain in layman's terms you really had to grow up with coding from magazines, push and pop etc.
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 14:52, archived)
# I just wrote a demo that does full-screen 50fps parallax scrolling on a Speccy.
Only to find everyone on b3ta is talking 16-bit and blitters.
Way to make me feel late to the party... ;(
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 15:11, archived)
# 16 bit is the new thing in computing
just wait until eggbox 360 and sony trainstation starts launching titles Crysis2 16bit can't wait
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 15:18, archived)
# There's...
...a work in progress version of Wolfenstein 3D for the Atari ST right now, it's very playable.

It cheats a bit, all the graphics are stored Planar, rather than using Chunky-to-planar conversion, and there's a lot of pre-calc tables, but it runs full screen at about 15FPS on a stock 8MHz ST, without a BLiTTER, with the same speed and detail you'd see on a 486.

I used to be a tiny bit involved with it (I contributes a few routines that I can't remember now). Just goes to show what you can do when you've got a few decades to think about solving a problem!
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 15:27, archived)
# Linkage?
Go to 1:48 on this Speccy demo. This is in 48K and pretty good:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MchzKT_oufE
But demo coders are all up there own arses. All these '8-bit Wolfenstein' demos go nowhere as they get the scenery engine going and then fail doing objects.
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 15:45, archived)
# Here:
www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=17247

Works fine on emulators. Grab a copy of STEeM and a TOS ROM and have fun.
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 17:11, archived)
# Nonsense.
I'm all about the eight bits. My ST and Falcon may have been my main 'production' computers for a long time (and in some ways, still are) but I'm so eight-bit, I shit SID chips!

I love seeing how far people can push older machines. Seeing an eight-bit Atari 800 doing textured tunnels, or plasma, or texture-mapped objects, on a stock machine with standard RAM and CPU, even though lower-resolution, is far more exciting than seeing say, an amig adoing the same.

People are more cretive when there are more limits. sixteen-bit machines have fewer limitations (unless you're using an Atari ST - a co-processor free design until 1987) so the eight bit demos and recent games are far more exciting and interesting. I once wrote an implementation of Pac-Man on a 1K ZX-81, in BASIC, with basic AI and everything. Astonishingly, WiL wrote almost the same version, about twenty years before we mwt (and eight years before I wrote my version). I squeezed every spare byte out of that machine, even reduced the screen size a couple of line to give me back about twenty bytes for the keyboard routines.

LET X=X+(INKEY$="8")-(INKEY$="5")

...wile stay with me forever.
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 15:24, archived)
# Quite.
I was quite good at 68K Assembly back in the day. We did half a semester on Computer Organisation on my degree course (we're back in 1999 now) and they picked a simple 68K based machine to teach us the basics (fetch-execute cycle, register design, binary math etc) because it was a mature, well-understood and relatively straightforward CISC machine to study. Of course I'd been coding for my Atari ST for years so I knew it already.

One assignment was to assemble three statements into machine code by hand, using only the manual to decode the statements. I remember doign this, showing all my working (addressing modes, etc) and when I put my three statements into DevPAC, and it assembled into EXACTLY the hex code I'd already written down, I was dead chuffed!
(, Wed 17 Aug 2011, 15:15, archived)