Re: Empire Strikes Back

Clay,

I didn't see this when I had my Star Wars connected to my o'scope. One would
think I wouls have seen it there since I had adjusted the display so that all
traces fit inside the display.

Never saw it on Tempest or Battlezone, either.

It seems that some amount of effort was put into this and it raises some
interesting questions:

    1) Would this behavior show up in some form in an Emulator? (MAME, etc.)
    2) Why was it put there? Troubleshooting?
    3) Were there further plans to use this "feature" in future vector games
never made?

Probably 2 and 3 we won't know, but #1 would be interesting to find out.

Since processing load is relative, what would be the standard for the load
measurement? Is it a hardware calculation or software based?

Here's another thought - was the number used externally (software or hardware
engineer used these numbers for design), or internally? If internally, what
would happen if it reached a specific number?

Very interesting observation Clay..... I've always wondered what the processing
load is on games like Star Wars or Tempest, where it would seem that the game
could take a good amount of (1980's) processing horsepower to operate.

    - Matt

Clay Cowgill wrote:

> > Clay,
> >
> > Could this be an "object" counter? I.E. - the number of objects the game
> > is
> > keeping track of at one time?
> >
> > Food for thought.
> >
> > - Matt
> >
> I don't *think* so, but it's possible. One point that was noticeable was in
> drawing the ESB logo on the screen and then "zooming" it off into the
> distance. The counter zipped up to about 22 drawing that, and stayed
> pretty constant as the first letters of the scrolling text started up the
> screen. Then when the logo finally disappeared the counter suddenly dropped
> to 12-ish even though many more letters were coming on to the screen from
> the text-scroller.
>
> This seems to be indicative of AVG draw-time-- the entire ESB logo is being
> drawn even when it's zooming out, so it takes a lot of vector time. When
> you take it away the scene complexitysuddenly has a huge change (down).
> (That's a peculiarity of the AVG drawing scaled objects-- it takes just as
> long to draw the ESB logo "big" on the screen as it does to draw it "small"
> since it's just a matter of scaling set by the voltage reference on the
> DACs...)
>
> -Clay

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