Patterns -- ExUBF's Parlor_Free wheel as far as u can from UBF

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Date Posted: 02:51:17 02/15/05 Tue
Author: Mike K.
Subject: Patterns
In reply to: Chris 's message, "Re: Sinclair ZX81" on 12:41:44 10/16/04 Sat

SAVE "CRAZY KONG" ;-)
You mean
"SAVE "CRAZY KONG",1,1

... right?

Then, we had to press "record & play" on our old cassette recorder, and the video output would be replaced by a psychedelic mess of moving black and white stripes, since audio and video output were combined (Sinclair had used every trick to economise on components).

That had a different purpose, anyway.
General I/O mechanisms that came from factory with the products were usually slow and in some cases irreliable.
To alleviate this problem, "speedloaders" (and /savers) were intoduced. Some of them even featured simple mechanisms of data de-/compression in realtime.

As at that time, every bit of memory was precious, most speedloaders utilized the video area to buffer data in order to send them to the I/O devices.
I remember that at least in my time of the C64, it was more of a gimmick than a necessity to resort to the $D800-Dc00 area for I/O buffering, but usually I purposefully buffered selected data through the $D020 memory slot to create those nice colored effects while I/O and compressions were going on. It was a mere help to realize that something was actually happening, but it did create the psychedelic effect. Later, I had even mastered the art of realizing from the $d020 output what kind of data was coming in: pictures, programme or text... it evolved into a guessing game ;)

At those time, there was no separate graphics card or such, so one could utilize memory however one saw fit, quickly smart programmers realized that turning off the text area for I/O operations speeded up memory access, that's why you more often saw flickering bars than random characters on the screen.

Ah, anyways.
That is history.

I long back for the time when I had my own little share of fame for being able to do a realtime 3D ball with 700 dots per frame in black and white (today's graphics cards can do 4-5 billion texture elements of varying patterns per frame at a much higher framerate!).

But I never made a penny on selling anything - I was just the nerd who enjoyed doing those things and handing them out as freeware.

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Replies:

Re: Patterns -- Chris, 04:03:24 02/15/05 Tue