KittenMaster: In the newest version of Promotion there is a neat thing where you can toggle a mode which tiles your image and you can make a pattern in realtime without shoving the canvas around. You can even set it to have horizontal or vertical offset.

Sounds good, but the only reason I haven't stuck with ProMotion is because the trial period ran out and I don't have the money for the full version.

Inspired by BladeJunker's thread, I decided I wanted to try and make a mockup within Atari 2600 restrictions.  If this isn't considered true pixel art (and I can see why it wouldn't be) go ahead and move it to Low-spec or something.

The mockup is inspired by Strategic Simulations' AD&D games where map navigation is on a first person view, and baddies walk up to you before you go into combat (which is a separate screen which I haven't tried to draw yet).

I'm hoping to make sure the restrictions work out so hopefully BladeJunker will comment here.

Designed this so that the sky color can change and still look alright on daytime sky colors (also I just realized that I didn't adjust the colors on my desktop computer so the colors will most likely change).


This was fun to do.  I'll probably have to make improvements in readability for the armor.


Not sure what I want to do about the HUD at the bottom.  Not even sure what I want to put there to begin with since imitating the full statistical gameplay is out of the question.

EDIT:

Single tall sprite, no that is not the case in Frogger. Everything on the 2600 is being rendered in real time so it literally changes from one "bitmap"(Player0 or 1) to another bitmap over and over again as it draws the screen top to bottom. The 2600 doesn't have a frame buffer so it constantly has to manually refresh the pixels just to keep them lit. While this is a hectic process always "racing the beam" it makes the data highly modular thus using the same address or object across multiple sprites rather than one sprite per sprite like on other platforms. I know it sounds crazy the first time you hear it but that's the way it works.

I know that the 2600 is different from other consoles and that it's on a per-scanline basis instead of a per-screen one, but I'm still failing to grasp what is actually going on in your example.  Are you telling the 2600 to draw the player sprite's line again with different data and then on the next scanline starting from the leftmost sprite again, or are you changing the data of the player sprite when going to the next instance of a copied sprite?

I am thinking of just making a note in my summary about things changing within scanlines.

I edited my previous post based on your corrections.  When you said that a game might not use the entirety of the 320 horizontal resolution I thought you meant games like Pitfall which hid the part of the screen that would have had black lines.

Okay pixel sizes look accurate to what I described. However up to two unique sprites on screen isn't exactly true since you can vary the Player sprite vertically based on a set height resolution. Let's say you use a Player sprite that is 24 pixels tall, based on 192 lines of vertical resolution you could vary that one sprite 8 times. A good example of this feature is Frogger where the type of sprite switches from different car styles up to logs and turtles which all use the same Player objects but are isolated into vertical bands.
This will be featured as part of my scanline isolation post jsyk.

So...  Two unique sprites per horizontal scanline as long as sprites are not occupying the scanlines?  Or are you talking about a very specific programming trick.

I'm going to be honest, learning about Atari 2600 hardware restrictions becomes that much more difficult for the purpose of doing mockups (that have no programming backing) and pixel art when one also has to learn about every specific programming trick in very specific games that have broken the restrictions.  I'm hoping to mostly get a summary of the hardware itself with some minor exceptions that can be made.

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I did want to ask, is it possible to feasably alter a chunk of the playing field (such as the middle two columns) without affecting the rest of the playfield?  I'm thinking about doing an Atari 2600 mockup of a first person view AD&D style game and I'd like the view of a first person area to change to that of a detailed creature.

Okay so...  The missiles cannot intrude on another player copy's personal space just as another player object cannot?