Quake on zx spectrum
technically impressive, but is it playable?
After Ball Quest, I'd like to see more MSX projects by "alone coder" who wrote also this Quake engine for spectrum 128k.
because (AFAIK) it does make a direct vram access i do not expect a such framerate on msx. at least on screen 2 mode...
However there are two considerations:
- the time the gfx are uploaded to vram are not the major bottleneck. maybe the time needed to build the scenario is more 'dominant'. so the relative inefficiency in msx vram I/O tends to be less heavy.
- would be fine to make use of msx2 bitmap modes/vdp cmds, instead of dithering. but i cannot see how could be done efficiently...
Yeah, I do not think the VDP is a bottleneck here at all, when I was coding Tales of Popolon, transfer to VDP is less than 10% of the time required to compute a frame. Anyone willing to try something similar on MSX?
My feeling here with 3D engine stuff is that framerate, smoothness and % of screen used are more important than detail or color. I know this is a very personal preference though.
But I'm sure the MSX1 is capable of a simple very rough (almost) full screen low-res 3D engine at 50 FPS (just updating name-tables). With the right choice of smoothed out graphics it might even look OK. But that will of course look nowhere near as detailed as that Spectrum quake demo.
https://youtu.be/BA3tXg12KFE
This is at 14Hz
Hehe, at 14MHz, you can see the artifacts of using low-precision arithmetics. It might be more playable, but it looks better at lower speeds hahaha
He didn't say MHz... He meant 14 fps think.
the title in the video is 14MHz
The video is very intriguing and got me interested in ray casting now. I am wondering what is actually possible with lots of pre-generated data... I have a 16Mb RAM cartridge that I barely use, so I may give it a try if I find the time.