General > General Technical Chat
How a color picture tube (CRT) is manufactured.
james_s:
--- Quote from: IDEngineer on November 12, 2022, 04:37:51 pm ---+1 for CRT vector displays. Nothing rastered nor masked can match their appearance.
Did you ever play Gravitar? Vector perfection. I'd love to own one, but must be satisfied with my original Joust machine (which now needs debugging, sadly).
--- End quote ---
I have a Black Widow that had been converted to Gravitar when I got it but I converted it back. I tried to like it but I just don't, I think Black Widow is a lot more fun. My favorite vector games in my collection are Tempest and Asteroids.
IDEngineer:
Funny story there... I could never get the "hang" of Tempest. But my wife was amazing at it.
I really like Gravitar. Like Joust, it has an element of gravity and the additional realism that continuous thrust (engine in Gravitar, flapping wings in Joust) is required to offset that gravity. It felt more real to me in the way you had to control the ship. A lot of games (and TV shows, and Hollywood movies, and...) take shortcuts so I appreciate more true-to-life representations. Of course that kicks up the difficulty and I didn't have access to Gravitar long enough to get very good at it, which may be why I look back favorably - it's an itch that never got completely scratched!
james_s:
Joust is ok, I don't own one though. Gravitar is just too hard, I never could get anywhere with it. Tempest is probably my favorite game of all time, my high score of 374k that I set around 20 years ago is still on mine. It's one of those games where you get "in the zone" and the world around you just fades away. Another of my favorites in my collection is Quantum, it was not popular at all when it came out and is quite rare because of that, it's a really unique game though and with a Motorola 68000 CPU it is quite powerful compared to the 8 bit CPUs used in most games of the era, it is the only vector game capable of drawing solid objects.
Asteroids is easily the finest example of fully utilizing the capabilities of a monochrome vector monitor, the dynamic range is incredible and the gameplay is quite good too, the physics is absolutely top notch, it just feels good to play.
BrianHG:
--- Quote from: james_s on November 13, 2022, 01:47:47 am ---Asteroids is easily the finest example of fully utilizing the capabilities of a monochrome vector monitor, the dynamic range is incredible and the gameplay is quite good too, the physics is absolutely top notch, it just feels good to play.
--- End quote ---
Yes, especially if you happen to have a perfectly focused and strong CRT, nothing could compete with the simplistic monochrome vector display of the original Asteroids.
Though, I believe Joust was bitmap, not vector.
Tempest's color vector display was also impressive to see.
james_s:
Yes, Joust is definitely a raster game. It shares almost identical hardware with Defender, Stargate, Robotron, Sinistar and Bubbles. Of those, Robotron is the only one I have.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version