Games

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Software Houses

Games Which use hardware tricks (on old generation cpcs)

Useful if you want to dissect games to work out how they did it.

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Page Flipping

Most good CPC games use the page-flipping technique in order to display sprites and/or scroll the playing area smoothly. In especial, two memory areas (instead of one) are reserved for the screen ram. In each frame, one of the two screens is displayed in turn, by using the hardware (exactly by changing the screen-offset, Reg 12 and 13 of the CRTC). At the same time, the next frame is being drawn in the non-visible screen until the next frame fly back signal. Then, the same cycle continues on and on for (each) next frame.

The big advantage of this technique is that we can use a whole frame's machine-time for our code (with no animation problems that arrise when we alter screen ram at the same time the electron beam displays it on the monitor). On the other hand, page flipping eats up a lot of memory area (which is crucial especially for 64Kb machines). This explains why a lot of games have very small game-areas !

Hardware Scrolling

R3 used to make an approximate byte lenght horizontal scroll (not really smooth)
R5 used to make smoother vertical scroll (1 line)

Title	Year	Vertical	Horizontal	R3	R5	Confirmed
Action Force	1988	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Anarchy	1988	No	Yes	No	No
Axys	1991	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Bob Morane Science Fiction	1987	Yes	Yes	No	No
Builderland	1991	No	Yes	No	No
FlySpy	1986	Yes	Yes	No	No
Fusion 2	1988	No	Yes	No	No
Gothic	1988	Yes	Yes	No	No
Ghosts 'n' Goblins	1986	No	Yes	No	No
Jinks	1988	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Killer Cobra	1987	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Led Storm	1988	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Legend of Kage	1986	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Leviathan	1987	Diagonal	scroll!	No	No	Yes
Le 5eme Axe	1985	Yes	Yes	No	No
Mission Genocide	1987	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Monty Python's Flying Circus	1990	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Octoplex	1989	Yes	Yes	No	Yes(?)	Yes
Out Of This World	1987	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Paraplane	1992	Yes	Yes	No	No
Prehistorik 2	1992	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Prohibition	1987	Yes	Yes	No	No
Rick Dangerous 2	1990	No	Yes	No	No
Roland On the Ropes	1984	Yes	Yes	No	No
Sentinel (The)	1987	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Skate Ball	1989	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Skate Rock	1987	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Skate Wars	1990	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Star Avenger	1984	No	Yes	No	No
Stryker In The Crypt Of Trogan	1992	Yes	Yes	No	No
Super Cauldron	1992	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Titan	1988	Yes	Yes	No	No
Ultima Ratio	1987	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Warhawk	1987	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes

Rupture (or splitscreen)

A technique to split the screen into more than one block vertically. (independant videoram offset) Used to hardware scroll one part of the screen while another is static.