A83: Re: The LCD Display
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A83: Re: The LCD Display
The TI-89 has the nicest display of any of the calcs, imho. Grayscale looks
the best, it has a nice resolution (making 16x16 sprites feasible) and it
doesn't blur nearly as badly as the other calcs. Of course, with all the
crap going on with the 89/92+, I wouldn't waste any time coding for those
calcs (heh, convince Rusty to write a new version of plusshell that would
fix all of that...).
Aside from that, the 86 has a very nice display. Games like galaxian that
move small sprites very fast blur, but not nearly as bad as on the other z80
calcs. Grayscale looks quite nice on that calc, and can be almost as
flicker free as on the 89 (under flourescent lighting the 89 still wins by a
small margin). In other lighting, the grayscale is flicker free. I believe
that the hardware on the 85/86 updates the LCD faster than the display
controller on the 82/83, which reduces flicker. You will notice that
Galaxian looks much better on the 86 than on the 83.
That said, there is one game on the 83 where the display quality surprised
me: the Sqrxz port. I never bothered to look at the source since I don't
program for the 83, but my guess is that he used a double buffer, instead of
the normal technique of writing to a memory area and then dumping it to the
display controller. The frame rate is probably less than the max that is
possible with the display controller, but this added time decreases the blur
that is normally associated with asm games on the 83.
The blur problem keeps you from writing games like a grayscale side scroller
on the 86, simply because it doesn't look very good, no matter what you do.
I asked Shepcar why most of his games were single screen, and that's the
reason he gave me. If you play old gameboy games on the gameboy color, you
will notice that small, fast moving objects blur even on that (Samus'
bullets in Metroid 2 come to mind). So even with a high quality LCD like in
the gameboy color, you will still get a small amount of blur.
> Has anyone found a way of effectively using the LCD display for action
> games so things just don't blur out of existence ; apart from making very
> solid graphics and moving things slowly ? I just wrote my game "Cookie"
> and had to slow everything down to make it visible :( which lost the game
> quite a bit in playability.
>
> Also, does anyone know if there is a deterioration in quality in the
> LCDs for 83s as they get newer ; the LCD controller is apparently
> slower now in v1.10 hardware; does this affect the visibility of the
> screen ?
>
> Are other TIs any better ?
>
> Paul Robson
>
>
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