new ideas wishlist & general chat • Re: Bombjack

So modern titles found a way around this by using even scanlines for the background, with one colour scheme, and odd scanlines for sprites, with their own colour attribute prepended

Apologies; it's one of the platforms my emulator supports so I felt the need to post a minor correction. Here's Stormlord:
So it's not that alternate scanlines are used for sprites and background, it's just that they're set to different base palettes and the proximity attempts to fool the eye. As well as the serial attributes, which for games like Stormlord mean that one foreground and one background colour is selected per line, the Oric uses only six bits per byte for pixels and one of the other acts as an invert bit, giving you the bitwise complement of the selected colours for that byte.

So if you zoom in on Stormlord there you'll see that some lines are consecutive groups of 6 pixels that are either black and cyan, or white and red, and the others are blue and white, or yellow and black. And then after that it's all just good design.

Endless respect should go to Twilighte, who was the master of these designs.

... and I don't quite know what's going on with the aspect ratio of the Bomb Jack logo posted above, but I get this:
Modulo that clearly I've some sort of timing error in the palette adjustment on the lower left-hand side, but that isn't a relevant topic.

Statistics: Posted by ThomasHarte — Thu Oct 02, 2025 3:17 am

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