Re: Vector resolution

Yeah, "resolution" is a tricky term for those.

For Battlezone and on the Atari stuff was more-or-less analog in nature. On
a monochrome monitor (no shadow mask or aperature grill) you wouldn't be far
off to say the resolution is "infinite". ;-)

Positional accuracy is something else, but also not "black and white" so to
speak. (Har-har. Punny!) Atari AVG's have positional accuracy of
1024x1024, but depending on scaling a lot of that can be off the actual
screen when it's drawn. (That's how they can easily "scroll" things like
the mountains in BZ-- it also saves them CPU time in games like Star Wars
since they don't do any real clipping to the display.)

So, for an AVG based game you could describe it as being able to start or
end lines anywhere on a 1024x1024 grid, but with infinite resolution between
the dots. Similarly, you can scale down drawing size of vectors by at least
50% (maybe more depending on the hardware) which "doubles" the resolution on
each axis (since you can now start and stop and positions twice as fine as
before, but in a limited range).

Add into the mix the fact that the monochrome displays don't have a
mask/grill to drop the dot resolution, and much more energy output per sq/mm
on the CRT and you wind up with an amazingly "high res" and good-looking
display. (Which is why even the coolest 10GHz PC with 4096x4096 resolution
and hardware anti-aliased lines running MAME still won't look as good as a
20 year old Battlezone on the original monitor. ;-)

-Clay
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Received on Fri Oct 20 13:13:08 2000