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NEW engine released: displaying full-screen hi-res 16-color graphics

#1 User is offline   Vacek 

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Posted 16 July 2022 - 11:34 PM

Hi everyone,

I’m Vacek, lurking in the MZX community since 2003 and this being my first ever actual release. :-)

I don’t know whether this would be of any use but as a technical first, it could be an interesting piece of MZX history. :-)

640x350 Hi-Res Graphics Demo

This is the first (AFAIK) 640x350x16 color hi-res bitmap display routine for MZX.

It actually uses 112 screen-sized transparent unbound sprites, filled up with differently colored versions of a char with only the top left pixel set, each layer displaced throughout the 8x14 pixels of a character cell. It is very, I mean VERY slow, but at least it looks nice. It uses a rather simple packed-pixel, memory-reordered 4bpp format I’ve named .UBS (short for unbound sprite). I’ve attached 10 .UBS files, plus a copy of title screen (the world uses a hard-coded copy of exactly the same picture) to test the graphical fidelity. I kept the MZX palette except for color 6 which I changed from the ugly brown to a more usable bright orange (RGB 63-42-00) and optimized all pictures to this palette.

I may release a .BMP to .UBS converter if anyone is interested.

https://www.digitalm...how.php?id=2711

Attached Image: screen2.png
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#2 User is offline   djtiesto 

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Posted 17 July 2022 - 07:20 PM

This is pretty neat, I played around with it for a bit just now. It's always exciting seeing a lurker for such a long time pop in and finally say hi and release something cool. P.S. I like the Faithless quote in your av :)

A BMP to UBS converter would be very cool.
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#3 User is offline   Vacek 

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Posted 17 July 2022 - 07:54 PM

View Postdjtiesto, on 17 July 2022 - 08:20 PM, said:

This is pretty neat, I played around with it for a bit just now. It's always exciting seeing a lurker for such a long time pop in and finally say hi and release something cool. P.S. I like the Faithless quote in your av :)/>/>/>/>

A BMP to UBS converter would be very cool.


Hi, thanks for your reply. :)/>/>/> I do plan to release more cool things when I’ll finally have time, same for the UBS converter. After all I have many ideas and two decades of hidden experience (although I was a wee kid when I started MZXing, so it’s rather like one and a half decades, but so what) so there are some cards up my sleeve. And I’m a man who hits on 20 and wins, so expect some great tricks! ;-)

P.S. I (also) like Faithless and thought it would be funny to combine the quote with the iconic Caverns healer’s hut where many a player had “healed their hurts”. I’m glad you liked it :-D
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