| I think you remember wrong. Most of the games were ports from the Atari ST and seldom used the blitter, sprites or dual-playfield. When you have a 80's computer with pretty severe limitations you often design your game visuals around those limitations. As for your statement on "many of the 8-bit machines", only the C64 had good 50/60fps shooters of the 8-bit home computers. The 8-bit consoles had better graphics hardware than the C64 and sometimes had the better games. Properly implemented Amiga games were not that many though. It was hard to utilize the machine and it required good graphic artists to make it look fresh and sharp with the limitations of dual playfields. But take a look at these games, I think they all run on a 512kb chipmem only OCS Amiga. Mega Typhoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk3LNdPTnMw Agony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a839o59Bt4s Apidya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBJNbDidxcM And of course the R-Type and Turrican series. Those were 12 or 25fps on the ST but silky smooth 50fps on the Amiga 500. Especially Mega Typhoon looks like a Raiden clone. It's very hectic, lots of bullets and big enemies and snake formations. The only thing that stands out is the lack of colors. I suspect this is because of using dual playfield and that limits the number of colors to 8+8+sprite colors. I'm an old demo coder(C64 and Amiga) and was very picky about framerate back then. The only shootemups I liked that was not 50fps was Battle Squadron and Wings of Death. And then you talk vaguely about responsiveness. Do you mean the number of cycles spent by the machinery to process and IRQ? I never saw that as a problem. On the Atari ST they use timer IRQ's to make rasterbars in demos and games. Seems to me they would not do that if the cost was too high. The Amiga mouse-pointer was a sprite. I never saw a delay on that. It felt like a game character. At most 1 frame delay. And dragging Amiga "screens" up and down was usually only one frame after the sprite movement. But that's logical since the system copperlist has to be updated and that is definitely one frame delay on that. |