Questions tagged [graphics]
For questions regarding graphical - as opposed to text - processing and display.
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What was the first games console to be as powerful as the Sega Model 2 board? [closed]
Back in the day, Sega's Daytona USA was the king of arcades. All those polygons flying around at 60 frames per second, it was incredible. It was also hugely expensive. What was the first games console ...
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DirectX 8 Win32 GUI Not Appearing/Flickering While Running [closed]
I am programming a game with DirectX 8, and I am trying to use the GUI options that are provided by the Win32 window that I am using. However, when I try to render a button or, in this case, a textbox ...
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How do programmers take advantage of programming languages to make graphics? [closed]
I was wondering for a pretty long time about graphics in all programming languages(no code available). Back in the rise of programming languages, such as C, Assembly, C++, and others, they had no ...
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Atari ST image viewer with unusual zoom
I'm looking for info on an Atari ST (16-color) full-screen image viewer that I once used. When zooming in the edges between colors were smoothly curved (instead of e.g. no smoothing or interpolation ...
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In DirectX 8, how can I have a texture cover another texture only partially? [closed]
I am creating a Real Time Strategy game with DirectX 8. However, DirectX 8 supports pixel shaders only minimally. Is there a way that I can change the colors of individual triangles before the mesh is ...
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Could some 200 line displays have been pushed to 240 lines?
Reviewing Raffzahn's answer about CGA emulators for Hercules displays, and especially his initial (now corrected) note about 720x350 being PAL's natural resolution, I was wondering if 200/400 line ...
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How did the SNES do the “pixelate” transition effect?
This effect is seen in many SNES games, including Super Mario World. The effect pixelates the screen, and makes the pixels larger, then smaller again when it switches to another scene.
It is done so ...
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What is the TPG file format used in the PlayStation release of Zork I?
I'm looking at the Japanese releases of Infocom games, curious to understand how the engine works. Four games were released for the PC98, one of which added graphics for the rooms (Moonmist). Later, ...
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Which plotter used these commands?
I've found a BESM-6 binary of a Pascal program which plots pretty pseudo-random pictures, like this
A date is given as the seed for the RNG, in a "horoscope"-like fashion.
After decompiling,...
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Is "scroll tearing" a symptom of scanline interrupts taking too long?
I was trying to implement multiple LYC IRQs to implement faux parallax effects (like in Game Gear Shinobi), and my method was to begin LYC interrupts at a particular scanline, say about halfway down ...
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What happened to IntelliFont (i.e. Amiga vector fonts)?
One of the oft maligned weaknesses of AmigaOS 1.x was that the included bitmap fonts were not very good, especially when compared to those included with Classic Mac OS. Commodore closed this gap with ...
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Who considered multimedia capability a liability for a business computers, and why?
For technical reasons, business computers of the late '70s usually had little multimedia capability. There have been modern claims (e.g., in the comments on this video) that such capability was ...
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Can the window only be moved once per frame on the Game Boy?
I wanted to cover the top part of the screen to use as a status bar for a game. My idea was to use the Game Boy's window feature to do so. But I ran into a problem: The window's size is fixed to be ...
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Did John Carmack really invent "Adaptive Tile Refresh"?
John Carmack is credited with making fast-paced arcade games like Commander Keen possible on an IBM-PC that had no specialized graphics controllers suited for those, thanks to the "Adaptive Tile ...
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Getting a loading seam to work with 2x2 metatiles
I'm working on a prototype for a scrolling loading seam similar to Pokemon where the screen scrolls incrementally by 8 pixels with each direction button press, and new tile graphics are drawn off the ...
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Why weren't 80s arcade games programmed in C?
I know many arcade games from the 80s were programmed in 68000 assembly. This carried on probably well into the 90s, even though Motorola C compilers existed in the 80s. Why then weren't C compilers ...
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Usage of Windows default 20-color palette
Currently I'm digging in the history of computer graphics and found the Windows default 20-color palette. It's based on the Windows and IBM OS/2 default 16-color palette but has the four additional ...
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What kind of graphics hardware did Nichibutsu's 1985 arcade game "MagMax" use?
The arcade game MagMax by Nichibutsu came out in 1985 and features for its time an impressive 3D scrolling effect which, in my observation, is not widely discussed yet, although it should be ...
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How did DOS games manage to have multiple background layers?
Seems like VGA only has one background layer, it appears to be a typical bitmap screen like most home computers of the 80s (Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 etc.) where each pixel's color is stored in a ...
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BBC Micro split mixed graphics modes, could Mode 7 teletext be mixed with them?
The Elite computer game was one example of different graphics modes being on the screen at once: Mode 4 (monochrome, 320x256) for the main wireframed vector graphics game play and Mode 5 (4 colour ...
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Windows 3.1 Hardware acceleration API
As far as I know, there were many video cards which offered 2D acceleration (tasks like line drawing, colorfill, bitblit etc.) on Windows as early as Windows 3.1. Did they have any sort of ...
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What operations could early PC 3D accelerators perform?
As I understand it, a modern GPU is actually just a Turing-complete processor which happens to be heavily optimised for massively data-parallel workloads. (You can even buy "graphics cards" ...
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How were "catalog" picture files created? [closed]
Back in the 1990s there were CD-ROMs containing a large collection of pictures split across several folders, where each folder would have a "catalog" file at the top. This file was basically ...
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Why did old IBM-PC-compatible computers only have 16 colors available?
In the MS-DOS Editor, the only choices for colors were a collection of 16 colors:
That's 16 colors:
Black
Blue
Green
Cyan
Red
Magenta
Brown
White
Gray
Bright Blue
Bright Green
Bright Cyan
Bright Red
...
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Performance characteristics of the DEC Type 30 graphical display
The DEC Type 30 was an early vector graphics display, that was used for an astonishingly wide range of applications for the 1960s. It used a 16-inch circular CRT with high persistence phosphor ...
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PowerAnimator System Requirements?
I was curious: what was the cheapest/wimpiest computer you could run PowerAnimator back in the day on?
My guess would be a base model SGI Indy.
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Was there an Evans & Sutherland display system capable of rendering ordinary data as motion through a landscape?
Around 1987, the investment bank I worked for had a high-end graphics device, possibly from Evans & Sutherland, which produced an "animated" display not unlike the view from the front ...
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Apple IIc : displaying HGR page 1 in AUX memory
I need to display HGR page 1 ($2000 to $3FFF) located in AUX memory (not in MAIN memory).
According to the "Apple IIc Reference Manual - Volume 1", page 45, I must first turn 80Store on by ...
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Was there a specific benefit to inverted (XOR) mouse cursors other than aesthetics?
As far as I can remember the inverted (aka "XOR") style of mouse cursor has been around as long as there have been mice. I mean something like this:
(source)
where the cursor shape is ...
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Hardware assisted Graphical User Interface?
I have read a fiction novel in which a manufacturer in the 80s provided GUI by adding a dedicated drawing hardware besides videocard or by extending videocard.
Fictional as it is, is this possible or ...
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Where did the # notation for hexadecimal RGB colour triples originate?
The hexadecimal notation #RRGGBB for RGB colour triples has been popularised by HTML and is commonly associated with it, even though nowadays it is not usually used in HTML directly, but rather ...
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Multi-GPU PowerMac G5?
I’ve got a 2005 PowerMac G5, Dual 2.3 GHz with a stock Nvidia GeForce 6600 running OSX 10.4 Tiger that I enjoy experimenting with, purely for fun and to learn writing legacy software in XCode.
Would ...
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How 3Dfx Voodoo 1 Emulator works
reading of this question brings up 3Dfx Voodoo 1 Emulator in my memories. I always wandered how did it work so good time as any to ask...
My memory is hazy on the details so I might miss remember ...
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How did the Rush 3D engine in Crazy Taxi: Catch a Ride work?
In an interview with the developers of the Crazy Taxi game for the GBA, they mention that they were able to achieve 3D graphics with a pure-software 3D rendering engine that they called Rush:
It is a ...
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Did the Power Macintosh 8500 have accelerated blitting?
Looking at online specifications for the Power Macintosh 8500, I was able to find few details on its graphics capabilities beyond quantity of VRAM and supported color depths, refresh rates, and ...
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NEC PC-88 video mode and resolution in games
I learnt that there are 4 video modes as described on wiki.
I came across many games for the PC-88, like Thexder (1985), which are in the aspect ratio of 4:3 and in more than 2 colors.
I don't ...
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Did the Tiger Game.Com include any hardware accelerated graphics?
I stumbled upon screenshots of the Tiger Game.Com handheld running its Resident Evil 2 port and I'm curious to know what its graphical capabilities actually are:
(from: https://twitter.com/_Kimimi/...
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Would there be any practical use of two or more VDPs or sound chips in a retro computer build?
Would that allow for better sound samples or double/triple the number of sprites & colours on screen or would that put too much pressure on the CPU or cause bottlenecks, maybe requiring 2 CPUs for ...
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How did 1980's 8 bit video game coders create realistic fireballs and explosions?
Back in the 1980's, I tried my hand at programming video games, mostly using Atari's player/missle
system which used sprites.
I could freehand draw most sprites but couldn't come close to the animated ...
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Did any PS1 games use 640x480?
I'm used to the idea that the maximum resolution there was any point in trying to generate on NTSC TV sets was about 320x224 (or 240 as a compromise figure between NTSC and PAL), but according to ...
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How did SNES render more accurate perspective than PS1?
The PlayStation was notorious for texture warp, because it didn't have the transistor budget to implement perspective: Why do 3D models on the PlayStation 1 “wobble” so much?
But wait a minute. The ...
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Why was the Nintendo 64 bad at textures?
The Nintendo 64 had a reputation for being great at drawing triangles, but not so good at texturing them, so that many games fell back on heavy use of untextured (though Gouraud shaded) triangles, ...
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What causes that "organic fade to black" effect in classic video games?
This happens a lot on older consoles than this, but for this specific example, I'm picking what I spotted today: Harvest Moon for PlayStation.
Here is a screenshot of the player just about to exit an ...
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Does an OS, in particular Unix, need special support for terminal colors? [closed]
Also of interest, would be the first OS to support color graphics in other ways (assuming it wasn't a Unix).
Background: I'm thinking of playing around with Unix v6 due to all the material available, ...
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What are these graphical display commands?
I have a Pascal program with a fair amount of inline assembly code in it which demonstrates the capabilities of «Электроника МС 7401» — символьно-графический видеотерминал (Elektronika MS 7401 - ...
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Why does the Applesoft BASIC have shapes?
Why did Apple include shapes in Applesoft BASIC? There are no sprites on the Apple II, but shapes provide a simple vector drawing tool. As graphics go the shapes are kind of an odd duck, they provide ...
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Was AGP only ever used for graphics cards?
Reading on the AGP spec, the little bits I've found on sites like https://old.pinouts.ru/Slots/agp_pinout.shtml, say:
The Accelerated Graphics Port (also called Advanced Graphics Port) is a high-...
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What exactly could cause corrupted graphics in WinG performance test?
Wikipedia article for WinG says the following:
WinG would also perform a graphics hardware/driver profiling test on the first execution of the program in order to determine the best way to draw DIBs. ...
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Vintage computer composite graphics
I am working on designing a vintage computer and I have been using the TMS9918ANL. After working with it for a month or two and not making much progress, I really want to switch to another chip. I am ...
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What kind of 256 color palette did the Enterprise 64/128 have?
The Enterprise 64 or 128 Home Computer apparently had a palette of 256 colors.
However, that is pretty unusual and doesn't fit evenly into the typical 3 channels for RGB. Wikipedia doesn't provide any ...
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