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Codetapper's Amiga and C64 Site
Personal blog · codetapper.comgameshistory
Codetapper's Amiga and C64 Site is a personal blog at codetapper.com about games and history. Since 2013, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Codetapper for its breakdowns of how Amiga and C64 games used the hardware, such as the sprite-tricks article on Shadow of the Beast, and an interview with a 1990s game porter.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-01-03
What Hacker News says?
Most Amiga games with parallax used dual playfields mode. AFAIK, you couldn't combine that with EHB. Shadow of The Beast used dual playfield graphics, not EHB. Agony too, for gameplay. Title screen etc could be EHB. https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...
Comment linking /amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/
on “The Polygons of Another World”Submitted Sprite Tricks used in Amiga Games as a story · 90 points
HN discussionCodetapper has a nice breakdown of how it did things https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...
Comment linking /amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/
on “The Polygons of Another World”Submitted Hidden messages in Amiga games (2017) as a story · 60 points
HN discussionThe first look-up table effect that really impressed me was to use them for making a textured tunnel. You have a look-up table such that for each pixel on the screen, you know its angle and distance from the center of the screen. With this you can pick which texel to put at each pixel location. It looks as if you are moving in a tunnel with 3D geometry, but it's so cheap you can even do it on pico: https://www.lexal…
Comment linking /amiga/sprite-tricks/stardust/
on “How video games use lookup tables”Submitted Zippy (2020) as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI love this sort of post, and it makes me miss programming (i'm a Linux sysadmin type now) The golden age of this stuff was when I was writing stuff for the Atari ST and Amiga. Fixed hardware, manuals that came with assembly instructions and timings, etc. My greatest moment was when rewriting the Atari ST text output function. For those that don't remember, the ST had an interleaved bitmap [1] and no hardware blitte…
Comment linking /amiga/maptapper/documentation/gfx/gfx-mode/
on “Why is this Go faster than the equivalent Java?”Submitted Stardust as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA nice breakdown on how it was done [1] [1] https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...
Comment linking /amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/
on “How Duke Nukem II’s parallax scrolling worked”Submitted How the Amiga version of Putty Squad finally ended up being released as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNote: Links to parts 2 and 3 didn't seem to exist anymore in that article. But they were easy to find just by changing the URL, so here they are: Part 2: https://codetapper.com/c64/diary-of-a-game/lemmings/the-maki... Part 3: https://codetapper.com/c64/diary-of-a-game/lemmings/the-maki...
Comment linking /c64/diary-of-a-game/lemmings/the-making-of-lemmings-part-3/
on “Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept”Submitted Shadow of the Beast attract sequence as a story · 1 points
HN discussionC64 Lemmings playthrough, all 100 levels: https://youtu.be/lTKmyqqugG0 Features scrolling (!), although with a narrower playground. C64 truly gets pushed hard here. Impressively, even Shadow of the Beast level is there: https://youtu.be/lTKmyqqugG0?t=2443 The biggest advantage for C64 is of course sprites. C64 version used them for the background, that's why it's narrower. More details about making of C64 Lemmings:…
Comment linking /c64/diary-of-a-game/lemmings/the-making-of-lemmings-part-1/
on “Apple ][ "Lemmings" Proof of Concept”A lot of games used more than 32/64 colours using the copper too though. E.g. things like background fades. Interestingly quite a few of the games with the most colours did not use the 5 bitplane 32 colour mode or the 64 bitplane Extra HalfBrite mode, but a combination of "dirty tricks" with sprites + copper. E.g. Shadow of the Beast used 120+ colours, but used dual playfields, which gives only 8 colours per playfie…
Comment linking /amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/
on “How the Commodore Amiga powered cable systems in the 90s”You might enjoy http://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/ , which talks through how some games use the Amiga's graphics hardware to achieve interesting effects - I found it really interesting!
Comment linking /amiga/sprite-tricks/
on ““No Man’s Sky” Displayed on the Amiga 1000”and oldie, but this is a great interview with a guy who did ports in the 90s, the Lion King segment is the most interesting http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/dave-semmens/
Comment linking /amiga/interviews/dave-semmens/
on “A look inside the Final Fantasy 7 Game Engine [pdf]”I don't understand why you want to slap the fanboy tag on me, when I actually said in my comment that I love both games. Also, sorry if I got you bored, I usually enjoy talking about technicalities and often forget that others around me might be uninterested. I accept your point about the colour mode, it seems [1] that SMW has more colours on screen as you said. Regarding the animation frames, I couldn't find info,…
Comment linking /amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/
on “It’s a-me: How Super Mario became a global cultural icon”I expect you are correct. The Amiga (except some early 1000s) also had a Extra Half Brite mode that has 6 bitplanes, 64 colours with the second 32 being half the brightness of the others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Halfbrite_mode The extra data fetching does slow things down. https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102990#:~:text=And%20... . The panel at the bottom looks like it uses the copper to have a dif…
Comment linking /amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/
on “Grind – A first person shooter for Amiga 500”Magicore Anomala seems to actually be a sideview non-scrolling bullet hell game for the Amiga, which came out in 1985. Teen me owned one of the first Amigas in my city and the in-progress videos I can find of Magicore don't feel too out of place with the games I was seeing on it by the early nineties. It's moving around a couple of sprites and rendering a single-bitplane image of projectiles, and has some basic copp…
Comment linking /amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-beast/
on “I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video]”
