Re: Sega Multigame and Vector Generator Card...

> G'day folks,
>
> Well, if the ships on Space Wars aren't animated well on a 19" screen,
> then that explains why only Barrier had a 25" screen. There's no
> animation in Barrier, and anytime someone brought up a 25" screen for
> one of the later games this issue probably came up.
>
> I still like Paul's idea of having intensity differ within any given
> vector, even if we can't make vectors fade to black (due to speed
> constraints of the monitor). If I may speculate for a moment, wouldn't
> it be difficult to specify via software how you wanted the intensity for
> a vector to change? Let's say I wanted the intensity to increase slowly
> for the first third of a vector, stay at the highest level for the
> middle of the vector and finally return to the original intensity in the
> last third of the vector.

  I don't think it'd be possible to have a single line get brighter in the
middle and then dimmer using a 2nd order system (a 3rd order would work).
but you could draw it in 2 parts, one brightening and one dimming. The nice
thing is that you can derive a few equations to do different things and then
just plug numbers in. I haven't derived it yet, but there are equations that
take X1,Y1,X2,Y2,X3,Y3 and give the parameters to make a curve go from X1,Y1
to X3,Y3 while hitting X2,Y2 on the way. You can also derive stuff to work
with the velocity (inverse of intensity) instead of using 3 points. I'm not
sure if there are other significant options right now, but I know those 2
are easy - I'll do the general equations IF there is ever hardware to use it.

X(t) = X0 + (dX)t + (ddx)(t)(t-1)/2
Y(t) = Y0 + (dY)t + (ddy)(t)(t-1)/2

or some such, where t is the "pixel" number starting at zero. This is the
starting point for deriving something useful.

-- 
 ___   __   _   _  _
|   \ /  \ | | | || |       phkahler@oakland.edu     Engineer/Programmer
|  _/| || || |_| || |__     " What makes someone care so much?
|_|  |_||_| \___/ |____)      for things another man can just ignore. " -S.H.