| Posted By
Murphy
on 2023-07-16
17:59:11
|  Carrion's 121 colors - new slideshow from Carrion
 Censor Design and Exceed released a slideshow at the Árok party 2023 entitled Carrion's 121 Colors. In the slideshow you can see 15 brilliant pictures from the works of the Polish pixel master Carrion. There will be some familiar images, but the selection also includes 3 completely new graphics. By the way, this is the first plus/4 release of the legendary C64 group Censor Design.
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Posted By
Murphy
on 2023-07-20
15:34:47
| Re: Carrion's 121 colors - new slideshow from Carrion
Since I've already posted about the technical details of the slideshow in a Facebook group, I thought I'd share it here, in case anyone is interested.
The slideshow contains 15 FLI images of 160x248 pixels with the two additional colors rasterized (without x-shift, you'll see later why).
The technically most important part of the slideshow was the image display routine, which required quite a lot of hacking.
- Since the plus/4 can only display 200 pixels high images by default, you have to start the image display earlier by fiddling with the vertical raster counter at the appropriate place
- Regardless, at the 200th line displayed, the machine would automatically start the border, so instead of using the Y scroll register method, I do the FLI by resetting the vertical raster counter continuously.
- Since the bitmap and color memories are designed for 1024 character elements, I have to swap bitmap and color memories at line 200.
- To avoid wrapping the internal counters within a character row, I start the image with a 24 character VSP, which requires the horizontal raster counter to be hacked apart, so that I can achieve that the internal counters will wrap to 0 at the end of the 25th line, and therefore have a relatively continuous image and color info in the memory.
- I'm using multispeed music, but the image is 248 pixels high, so I have to squeeze the 2nd update of the TED sound registers into the free cycles of the FLI routine. It's extra fun that the bitmap select register is also a sound register in TED for two bits. :) Fortunately, the player of the Knaecketraecker only needs to be called once per frame in multispeed, and it leaves the sound register update to me, so it fit well into my workflow. Thanks Degauss!
- The raster colors are immediately coded into the display routine, so the code had to be patched when the images were transitioned. Due to previous requirements, the display part of a line pair can be different, so there was a complication here as well.
- I used my own converter, but I absolutely tip my hat to IstvanV who discovered the 24 character VSP and ff1d FLI tricks back in the day. Without these tricks my life would have been much more difficult.
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Posted By
BSZ
on 2023-07-20
15:24:31
| Re: Carrion's 121 colors - new slideshow from Carrion
These little behind-the-scenes secrets are particularly useful. They are good to read!
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Posted By
seff
on 2023-07-25
13:06:17
 | Re: Carrion's 121 colors - new slideshow from Carrion
@Murphy I was under the impression that the effect of 288 vertical lines was first presented in Udo Gertz's Summer Events (Swimming). Or do I get it wrong?
And thank you for your technical explanation. When you cross the 200th line, do you need to reset the counters on every line (i.e. is it computationally expensive)?
Cheers!
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Posted By
Murphy
on 2023-07-25
16:51:26
| Re: Carrion's 121 colors - new slideshow from Carrion
@seff I don't know who was the first, but Udo Gertz was way ahead of his time, that's for sure. Attila Kosír, who I remember used the border in all the games he made, but those are from '88-89.
The counter reset is a bit special here. The $ff1d/1c counter would normally be set to 152 (200-48) before the 200th line and the screen would continue for another 6 character rows. Of course, at the end of the screen, the counter must be reset to the correct value.
What makes it necessary to write $ff1d every 2nd line is that I do FLI mode with this register. This takes up the whole CPU where there are graphics.
And the rest of the messing around is just to make the screen structure continuous, and thus make the image swapping routine much simpler. Normally, the color memory counter would go from 1000 to 1023 in the 26th character row, and then flip over mid-row and continue with the 0 to 15 area.
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Posted By
carrion
on 2023-08-05
06:44:16
 | Re: Carrion's 121 colors - new slideshow from Carrion
Hi
One more surprise for you all!
A pic that wasn't ready for Arok but is done now.... Attila23 is a remake of my first image on C+4.
Please click the link to grap small one-file demo by Murphy, Csabo and myself.
http://retronavigator.com/2023/08/05/attila23-2011-image-remake/
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2023-08-05
08:38:12
| Re: Carrion's 121 colors - new slideshow from Carrion
Lovely! Seeing the two images side-by-side (or... rather, overlapping) really makes one appreciate the improvements in your pixeling technique.
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Posted By
BSZ
on 2023-08-05
18:07:21
| Re: Carrion's 121 colors - new slideshow from Carrion
It's really interesting! The first version is great, but the new one is really better! 
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Posted By
carrion
on 2023-08-06
02:52:59
| Re: Carrion's 121 colors - new slideshow from Carrion
Thanks guys.
BTW: New fixed version is on my blog. There were apparently some minor issues with the TED tune. Fixed now. So please somebody here upload the new version too. Thanks
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Posted By
Lavina
on 2023-08-06
12:49:26
 | Re: Carrion's 121 colors - new slideshow from Carrion
It was a great treat watching these marvelous gfx's on the big screen at the party and somehow I was proud that the on-site and online audience once again was amazed by the graphical possibilities of our platform. This new "fixed" version is also great, however, there was nothing wrong with the original... Let's call this a V2, or upgrade. Would have been nice to include both in the slideshow, but anyhow, thanks for your presence on our scene. 
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