Re:Raw footage inside Sears with Atari 800 and 2600 (1982) [...
by cbm-vic-20 on Monday August 01, 2022 @08:12AM
(#32304875)
Another anecdote about the original Asteroids machines- the dynamic brightness of the vector displays added a great effect: the asteroids themselves were sort of grayish lines with very sharp, crisp edges, but shots fired from alien spaceships were searingly bright, and would and up also exciting the phoshor around the shot itself, lending a bit of a halo effect.
Re:Raw footage inside Sears with Atari 800 and 2600 (1982) [...
by joezydeco on Monday August 01, 2022 @10:38AM
(#32306583)
Jed Margolin, Atari engineer, wrote the ultimate papers on how the Atari vector games worked. These two pieces are excellent reading when you have the time:
The Secret Life of XY Monitors : http://jedmargolin.com/xy/xymons.htm
The Secret Life of Vector Generators : http://jedmargolin.com/vgens/vgmenu.htm
The first covers how the tube worked, the second covers how the Atari systems generated the graphics to show on-screen.
If you look carefully at a Star Wars arcade machine, you can see the shadow mask in the vector lines. You cannot see this on, say, an Asteroids machine or a Vectrex; on those, the lines are smooth and sharper than a draftsman's straightedge.
Everyone should experience an original Asteroids, or failing that something like the Vectrex, at least once in their lives. It's indescribably different from emulation; the long-decay phosphor and direct CPU control over brightness means that shots and explosions glitter in the dark in a way not even MAME can replicate.