Atari's Quadrascan Explained

How did Atari utilize vector monitors in their vector-drawn arcade games? It's all explained right here.
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[@Tigrou7777]

1:57 I love the fact you decided to display PAL signal with some shaking to clearly indicate phase is alternating.

[@Liggliluff]

The level of details on this channel is stunning. Small errors do creep up. But there's also small details added that some people might not notice.

[@lev7509]

Please elaborate.

[@sa3270]

Since NTSC has 227.5 chroma cycles per line, each line of NTSC should also naturally be 180 degrees out of phase with the previous line, shouldn't it? Or does NTSC intentionally reset the phase on each line? Regardless, most video display generators didn't conform 100% to broadcast specs anyway.

[@CptJistuce]

@@lev7509 PAL stands for Phase Alternating Line, because each line is 180 degrees out of phase with the line before it. This was intended as a sort of "error-cancelling", since an error caused by interference in one line would be compensated for by a mirrored error in the next line. It DID result in better color stability on receivers made with 1960s technology, something early NTSC televisions had difficulty with. (Those problems went away as receivers got more advanced.)

[@lev7509]

@@CptJistuce By line you mean scanline? If I understood correctly, you mean the phase is flipped every scanline to... prevent neighboring scanlines from blending too much?

[@jwilder2251]

I had a digital design course where we made our own vector games and displayed them via the XY input of an oscilloscope. Custom, hand-wrapped, controlled by a Motorola 68k running our assembly code. That was the closest I’ve ever felt to an old-school arcade designer until watching this video. This is stunningly thorough. Thank you for taking me one step further.

[@warmCabin]

10:45 "Well really, they don't talk to each other. It's just the main CPU telling the Vector Generator what to do." Sounds like my mom

[@videopsybeam7220]

And who would be the "Vector Generator" in this scenario?

[@forgiveman]

@@videopsybeam7220 It would be Joe.

[@CosmicNyan]

@@forgiveman correct.

[@byteme6346]

Relax, someday you'll have a wife take over from mom.

[@shaneplumb-saumure7723]

Vector graphics always seemed to be the result of some strange voodoo to me. Nice to have gained some understanding of the incantations , thx.

[@CptJistuce]

I've always explained it in an oversimplified way as an electronic equivalent of an Etch-A-Sketch(because the electron "pen" directly traces the image out on the screen).

[@thecodewarrior7925]

A couple years ago I went to an arcade with my family, and after drifting a bit I found myself oddly attracted to asteroids and tempest. The perfectly straight, piercing white lines of asteroids are almost unreal in person. It was honestly pretty moving.

[@xeostube]

agreed. I had no idea video games were ever that sharp in the arcades, especially when you consider the age. it is truly something you have to see to appreciate.

[@guitarskill]

Wow, that final animation is some of the most effort I've ever seen put into a youtube video. I can't fathom the time it must have taken.

[@lev7509]

Automation is win.

[@raafmaat]

i dont think he animated it by hand, like long-name-mcGee above me said, its automated, here is what RGME said himself: I took a snapshot of VMEM from an emulator, ran a script to convert the raw hex data into VG instructions, stripped the parameters from that file and formatted it into an After Effects keyframe format, then used After Effects expressions to pull from that keyframe data to make the animation.

[@Gereon_]

@@raafmaat Sounds impressive

[@QuotePilgrim]

He didn't animate it by hand and it's probably only taken him like a couple hours, if even that.

[@NickSchoenfeld]

@@QuotePilgrim How would he do this in under a couple of hours? What would the process be? Don’t disparage artists. This shit is hard work. This animation, combined with the framing and resolution doesn’t exist anywhere else. Someone created it. There is no “convert these vector coordinates from this other machine, into my computer, into Adobe Animate and/or Flash, in the exact way that my brain is thinking” button. It’s not as quick as it looks.

[@eddievhfan1984]

2:01 Holy crap, you actually animated the PAL colorburst phase-inversion on alternate lines. I applaud your attention to detail, sir!

[@rhysbaker2595]

Hm, curious what exactly the signal is though. Wonder if we could reverse engineer it and find a fun little Easter egg?

[@MattTrevett]

It doesn't show up on 30fps!

[@RadicDotkey]

Your procedurally generated videos are a piece of art. I'm really curious what tools you are using to achieve such fantastic results.

[@RGMechEx]

Mainly just After Effects! I do some preprocessing of data before importing it through various scripts, but most of it is just done within AE using its expression engine.

[@Kabodanki]

@@RGMechEx Pretty cool

[@SpringySpring04]

@@RGMechEx I think I remember you made a video on this, how you actually do the data processing for the scripts. Pretty interesting stuff!

[@JimLeonard]

@@RGMechEx Yes, but how did you obtain the arcade game data for this video? Is there an emulator with this kind of observability?

[@KieferSkunk]

@@JimLeonard Many emulators (including MAME) give you the ability to introspect into the memory of the system, and many of its parts. And there are a number of tools out there that can help. Digging into the MAME source code can also reveal a lot about how memory is mapped in the virtual machine. :)

[@samuelthehobo4441]

I’ve always loved the look of Vector style graphics, it’s got its own feel to it that I’ve always liked

[@johneygd]

I sadly don’t like it, circles look more like patatos being peeled off😒

[@samuelthehobo4441]

@@johneygd yeah I can see where you’re coming from with that, I’m hope no one makes any platformers using Vectrex style graphics, unless the shapes made from the lines were shaded or something

[@CptJistuce]

Me too. Having grown up with a Vectrex, I am perhaps biased, but I adore the look and feel of vector displays.

[@byteme6346]

The arcade Battlezone was FAR better than ANY raster version. I long for the day.

[@redleader7988]

@@johneygd What do low resolution raster circles look like to you?

[@SergioLeonardoCornejo]

Ah. Tempest. One of the games that made me a retro gamer. I remember playing it with no idea of what was going on.

[@rquinn1844]

Tempest 2000 got me into video game soundtracks

[@mechanismeight9565]

Was just about to mention Tempest 2000, but he beat me to it. Yeah that game is just Tempest but better in every way

[@KieferSkunk]

@@mechanismeight9565 I personally disagree on that. I never actually liked Tempest 2000 all that much - it just didn't feel the same.

[@mechanismeight9565]

@@KieferSkunk I can see where you're coming from, the two games definitely have a different feel.... I just like 2000 more, it's got style.

[@KieferSkunk]

@@mechanismeight9565 Fair enough. :)

[@discgolfwes]

TIL that pixel is short for "picture element"

[@SergioLeonardoCornejo]

I learned something new today.

[@internetuser8922]

And voxel is Volume + Pixel

[@nezatrebovan]

@@internetuser8922 You sure it's not Volume Element?

[@internetuser8922]

@@nezatrebovan Actually yeah, that makes more sense.

[@theblah12]

Also "bit" is short for "binary digit".

[@techobsessed1]

So the scale factor ends up being used like a Z coordinate in Tempest. Interesting.

[@nahometesfay1112]

That is so dope

[@lelsewherelelsewhere9435]

It's even funnier when you think about how the Playstation 1 makes everything out of triangles, and doesn't really have a "depth" but rather, has a "z" deformation value. It's like the same idea exactly! (I could be remembering it wrong though...) (Modern vintage gamer has a video about it vs the N64 method, which would be a good sequel to this, though it's about graphics generation, not screen writing.)

[@duuqnd]

Me yesterday: Hmm... I wonder how quadrascan worked. RGME:

[@BlackburnBigdragon]

I tell you what. Back when I was a kid, and even today, I much prefer the look of vector graphic games, when compared to ones that used raster. The vector graphic games just look.. more "video game" to me than raster graphic games. I just.. like the look of them.

[@Jeeves476]

Gaming visuals had essentially evolved from vector graphics to sprite-based raster graphics to 3D objects represented by vectors rendered to a raster display, all while at the same time the previous rendering styles became an art form for many contemporary games. This is among the reasons I'm looking for a way to express these styles in a series of videos I've been planning, and this video (the entire channel, even) is one of the core insights I've been looking for.

[@ballandpaddle]

I spent as much time as I could (which at 3 credits per play, wasn't very long) in a Star Trek II sit-down cabinet at the local arcade. It was more futuristic than actual Star Trek.

[@Green_Bean_Machine]

i like some of the games more, but the lack of shading and color kills it off for me.

[@EebstertheGreat]

At 1:38, the video says that the PPU "forms a picture" and encodes it into a video signal. I know what the author meant, but strictly speaking, the PPU never makes a picture. It takes the contents of VRAM, its line counter, its pixel counter, and other information to generate and send an NTSC, PAL, or SECAM video signal on the fly. It never has a buffer that stores an entire frame like modern graphics cards. No part of the image is ever stored in a form different from how it looks in VRAM, so in fact, if you are using a CRT, an entire frame never exists anywhere except in your brain due to the persistence of vision.

[@gabrote42]

Man, it always amazes me how you manage to explain everything so clearly and make some of the best dynamic graphics, heck, explanatory graphics in the platform. Cheers, dude.

[@internetuser8922]

I'm surprised how close this is to the line drawing methods in modern graphics libraries as far as the position, draw, brightness and color calls go. I wonder how hard it was for them to do fast rotation math on sets of points since all that floating point math would be really slow. Maybe hard coded lookup tables or some clever integer-only math. Your videos are super awesome man. Same level as something like 3Blue1Brown. It is very difficult to make good videos on CS topics specifically, your channel is one of the very few that do a really good job explaining topics that are super interesting and visually appealing. I've learned more about ASM from this channel than anything else. I'm a software engineer, but I've never needed to use low-level languages, everything I use is memory managed with auto garbage collection.

[@MattMcIrvin]

Most modern graphics libraries are based on research and precedents with roots in this era. I was wondering whether some of the other machines' vector processors had more features. In Asteroids Deluxe, almost everything on the screen simultaneously rotates, so without rotation support you couldn't just render them directly out of ROM. And Star Wars is doing perspective projections on 3D wireframes!

[@rose_allen]

They didn't do the rotation math, at least for asteroids. Haven't checked the other games. In Asteroids, the ship can face one of 64 directions, some of which are hardcoded into VROM, but some can be flipped from the hardcoded examples so don't need to be stored. The ship's thrust fire works a similar way.

[@kargaroc386]

for some things, fixed-point math (where each number is pre-multiplied by some constant, usually a power of 2) is adequate addition and subtraction in this format are the same as integer math with multiplication you multiply the numbers together and then divide by the constant with division you first multiply by the constant, and then divide the numbers together with complex math like atan2 or trigonometry you either use CORDIC or data tables as suggested.

[@WishMakers]

I never thought I'd be actually learning how these vector graphics work any time soon but I'm glad I have the opportunity to!

[@d.d.t8350]

Can you do a video about yoshis island advanced effects? Like the bosses and the nep-enuts ?

[@midnight2029]

Ooh, yes! That sounds like it would be really interesting!

[@williamdrum9899]

Was it just sprite scaling or something more complicated?

[@d.d.t8350]

@@williamdrum9899 it had a lot more complex effects since it had the super fx 2 chip. Some bosses like the sluggy have some crazy sprite deformation that i have yet to see in any other super Nintendo game

[@XaneMyers]

I'd be curious about how the layer 3 objects work in that game. They're almost 3D at times but yet seem to just be distorted tiles...

[@mypkamax]

What about Knuckles' Chaotix?

[@iau]

Modern games: 4K resolution! Vector monitors: That's cute

[@FlameRat_YehLon]

Rez Infinite actually almost looks like vector graphics if you crank supersampling all the way up, though. It's also amazing that you might still be able to get 200fps after that.

[@sofia.eris.bauhaus]

imagine using pixels smh

[@CptJistuce]

@@FlameRat_YehLon Yeah. Rez is definitely trying for the vector look a lot of the time. It is difficult to achieve, though. (In some respects, the Dreamcast version had it easier despite the lower resolution. Raster CRTs achieved much higher contrast levels than LCDs for a long time, and vector displays are very high-contrast by nature.)

[@FlameRat_YehLon]

@@CptJistuce Since we have OLED now, the same (infinite) contrast can be achieved again. Though Rez in a lot of cases don't use pure black background, and it's also apparent that there's a lot of textures going on, both makes CRT not having much advantage there.

[@CptJistuce]

@@FlameRat_YehLon You are indeed correct, and I can't wait for OLED to come down in price. (I hope it goes mainstream, and doesn't just become the quirky also-ran like plasma discharge did. (I actually fired up Rez Infinite for a little while last night after making my previous comment. First time I've run it without the VR headset, which is the absolutely Rezziest way to play Rez.)

[@TheThirdPrice]

When the world needed him most, he returned

[@ratvibe]

2:00 is genuinely the first time I've seen NTSC or PAL waveforms in motion like that. I love your visualizations and explanations of these topics so much.

[@komojo]

Ingenious animation at the end. I think using the scale as an inverse is a clever idea. Normally to get proper 3D perspective you need to divide by the distance, but that's expensive for computers and this lets you avoid it.

[@mousejuggler9331]

It is very impressive how you used vector graphics for your entire presentation. Keep up the quality work!

[@Bismuth9]

Hi I'm just here to feel inferior

[@allthingsgaming6]

Hey there! I figured you would watch this kind of video. I enjoy his videos and yours as well!

[@forgiveman]

A great man in here. I'll be watching your new video as soon as you upload it.

[@Controllerhead]

LUL you guys are both heroes

[@7overfour]

No way. Two cakes

[@slickstretch6391]

Where were you when I saw a girl standing next to an icicle! Really could have used you banana. For scale.

[@Phroggster]

Ahhh, RGMEx, I've missed you. Been a while since I've played any of these vector games, but it's nice to know how they did these things back in the day. Thanks for the info, you absolute legend!

[@renakunisaki]

It's surprising how much this old tech has in common with modern versions. 3D graphics are all vectors, drawn by display lists (which have subroutines, but no conditional logic) that use commands like "move to X,Y,Z, draw to X,Y,Z". In more modern systems there's a lot of indirection, but the concept is still the same. (Eg a command might be "using items 3-27 of the index buffer, draw triangles; each item gives the index of a coordinate in the vertex buffer" - that way you avoid specifying the same coordinates multiple times.)

[@KieferSkunk]

Goes to show that, like many other things in computer science, many of these problems were already tackled (and solved in most cases) many, many years ago. :) Most of what we have today is just the same stuff at far greater scale.

[@ecruells]

mathematically, is the same concept, vectors in memory to form a polygon in 3D space, but the draw part is classic raster

[@internetuser8922]

I was thinking the exact same thing. Even in software drawing libraries, the methods to draw lines are very similar as well as far as position, line, brightness and color go.

[@sofia.eris.bauhaus]

reminds me of writing/generating SVG. :)

[@MattMcIrvin]

The whole idea of a display list definitely goes back to this time. Even the Atari home computers had the concept, though instead of drawing primitives the display list controlled how video memory was mapped to different zones of the screen, as rasters or characters. I used a different version of them in the early days of laser printers, when you wanted to implement a page description language but didn't have enough RAM on board to represent the whole page as a bitmap. The trick was to divide the page into horizontal bands and have the interpreter parcel appropriately clipped graphics primitives (geometric shapes, font characters, scaled image patches) out between the bands. A second thread would run the display list renderer that would try to race the page through the printer, rasterizing the bands just in time to get them to the laser. (If it wasn't fast enough, the printer would have to pause and you couldn't print at speed.)

[@frisnitfrisnit]

Great video, with an incredible amount of work going into the visuals, especially the last explanation. Very impressive! I made an Asteroids clone last year where it read the data from the arcade ROM, parsed the opcodes you described and turned that into OpenGL lines (why draw your own graphics when you can instead spend many hours deciphering the cryptic rom data!), so I could have done with your help then. Gives a good understanding into the beauty and genius of the system

[@imaginaryboy2000]

Seeing the final animation made me truly realize the unnecessary precision of the Quadrascan. Compared to other home-console graphics, it was kind of incredible, and while I can see why later consoles would focus more on scanlines, it would have been cool to have some sort of progress on the processing power of the Quadrascan, given the relatively robust graphical precision.

[@nerdporkspass1m1st78]

Don’t mind me, just trying to pay attention to what’s going on on-screen while trying to ignore how impossibly beautiful everything looks.

[@agvulpine]

Amazingly well presented video and I'm stunned and awed by the visuals. You have some of the best production craft!

[@zeemee9631]

your videos are super informative and carries a lot of effort, they look like they're from a masterclass or something.

[@bperkins]

How I've missed this channel up to now is beyond me.. Fantastic video.. I need to watch it a few more times.. just wow... Subscribed.

[@G4mm4G0bl1n]

Best visualisation & explanation about a very complexe subject. Great work!

[@devmech]

The animations and general presentation in this video are amazing. Thank you so much for making this complicated topic so understandable.

[@clairekholin6935]

The font you use fits so well! It looks so good when alongside the vector graphics.

[@gabrielandy9272]

this is the best channel on youtube i love how technical yhou go there, and it makes me want learn more and more, and even try to see if can debug the games on my own after.

[@nickkapirnas]

What an absolutely fantastic video! The final segment with the frame being drawn blew me away!

[@AquariusTurtle]

I love this video. Having grown up in the 80s doing some programming, I can appreciate how innovative algorithms and techniques had to be to accomplish things with limited hardware. When I look at today's games/simulators, there's massive inefficiency caused by layers and layers of frameworks, APIs, wrappers, and sub-optimal routines.

[@chrisnizer1885]

How in the world you managed to figure out the inner workings of those components and how they communicate with each other is absolutely amazing. All that engineering technology could be accessed for a quarter! Sure was a lot of fun that's for sure. Thanks for the video my friend, excellent job!

[@cmillsap100]

This is amazing, essentially a GPU with late 1970s technology! Great video, by the way, especially showing the Tempest scene being drawn while the drawing code scrolled by.

[@PeranMe]

Thank you, this is one of those subjects I’ve wanted to learn about for many years, but never took the time! Excellent work as always!

[@tjsase]

You've done amazing work visualizing these concepts, you even have all the fonts use vector lines!

[@Kawa-oneechan]

Hmm. This is actually closer to Sierra AGI/SCI background artwork than I expected. Which is to say, not that close but more than I thought.

[@sofia.eris.bauhaus]

no idea how they work but it sounds cool 😅.

[@ipaqmaster]

The graphics for your videos are outstanding man! I love every upload so much.

[@Schimnesthai]

Vector drawn graphics are beautyful, thank you for explaining this well, giving the Quadrascan an spotlight and congrats on the great effects achieved in this video... that final part, really nice.

[@laurencevanhelsuwe3052]

What a superb quality video. I played plenty of Asteroids and Tempest in the 80s.. and programmed the 6510 in my C64, so this video really took me back in time! Thx!

[@CBaggers]

Incredibly clear, detailed, and well presented. Fantastic work

[@thygrrr]

The visualizations on this are UNREAL. Awesome !

[@gregorysharp]

Crazy high quality and awesome explanations. Easy to understand.

[@mrb5217]

Fantastic video and excellent animations. I loved the NTSC, PAL, and SECAM waveforms.

[@EricPenn1147]

Love the details... I spent many years in the late 70s with vector, and until a few years ago owned a Space Duel... Today I work in laser projectors, which is still using this technology, X/Y blanking and such... It still lives on! Thanks!

[@lucatarricone1047]

The level of detail in your animations is truly unbelievable

[@foamingstuffye3951]

Thank you for making such amazing content, I'm always waiting eagerly for your vids! Really cool stuff.

[@nrnoble]

Excellent Video. Back when asteroids was popular I ( along with others) could play forever on a single quarter. One problem that the game designers did not anticipate was that with each bonus ship it added more and more objects on screen. The bonus ships would line up across the top until they were off the screen. It was my impression at the time that the game logic was still trying to draw bonus ships even off the screen. The game became slower and slower, thus easier and easier to play. If a person kept winning bonus ships at some point (a few hours) a integer overflow would happen (256 bonus ships?) and the game would crash with a hard reset and the game would reboot.

[@davecool42]

That Tempest slow motion blew my mind. Thank you.

[@rinsatomi9527]

Your video editing skills are monstrous. Keep up the good work.

[@warmCabin]

Is that visualization at the end some kind of simulator program? I'd love to toy around with that!

[@RGMechEx]

You're expecting too much from me, haha! I took a snapshot of VMEM from an emulator, ran a script to convert the raw hex data into VG instructions, stripped the parameters from that file and formatted it into an After Effects keyframe format, then used After Effects expressions to pull from that keyframe data to make the animation.

[@tigerofdoom]

@@chyza2012 well, link us to your github when you've got it ready :-D

[@celestialamber174]

@@RGMechEx That's cool! I can imagine how satisfying it was to have directly converted the bytes from the game's memory from the emulator to After Effects through several steps and eventually have it work. It's definitely a cool way of doing it.

[@tigerofdoom]

@@chyza2012 lol, I get what you're saying and all, but if he did any manual intervention in the data to handle edge cases, that could end up being hours of scripting for something that he only needed once for the video. Would I have made a tool? Probably? But I get that's not for everyone or every situation

[@internetuser8922]

@@tigerofdoom "that could end up being hours of scripting for something that he only needed once for the video" - I would expect nothing less from this beast of a channel

[@grimcity]

I'm not a gamer, but I've been hooked on the creation and manipulation of computer-based vectors in one form or another since the 80's, and this was thoroughly enjoyable and brilliantly done. I know this has been up for a couple of years now, but I just came across it and as a dork that incorporates "vector" into his email addy, I had to stop and look. I loved this to no end, and even learned a number of things! Cheers from Louisiana!

[@paule6101]

Beautifully animated and presented thank you, this was really interesting.

[@logicprojects]

High quality video as always. Love to see wacky custom asm lanuages explained so clearly.

[@WinrichNaujoks]

Amazing video, wonderfully produced! Subscribed.

[@hammer86_]

You deserve some kind of youtube creator's award for that animation at the end. Amazing work.

[@Josuh]

Your voice is super relaxing, thanks for the amazing video bro

[@lahma69]

So cool.. It would be really fun to play around with one of these old "color" vector displays.

[@fireking99]

So over my head, but when I was a kid, Tempest was my favorite game :) Thanks for a look behind the scenes

[@dishmanw]

This brings back memories. I actually played Asteroids, Battle Zone, Star Wars, and Tempest. At college, they had a monitor that drew in line graphics, and programmed it in FORTRAN. I programmed it to draw a scene from.Battle Zone. I feel freakin’ old now.

[@gmanyyavailable]

Awesome visualizations as usual!!!

[@sergiomeyer]

Great video! Would really enjoy more arcade themed stuff

[@stephens7136]

It is amazing to watch your animation at the end, 102 seconds for 1 frame. I had to slow it down to .5 speed to catch some of the details, like how the colour resets to white between drawing each object. Oddly, the sunbursts specify "yellow 12-bright" twice during their drawing cycle.

[@erajoj]

I have always wondered how those games worked. Great vid!

[@pannekook2000]

Fantastic video, one of my favorite channels!

[@anthonydotmoe]

I watched this video once when it came out and I’m still amazed at the detail here. I love the NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM animation

[@MickyVideo]

The video's visual representation made everything clear, as always. Great job! Oh and uh... at 5:06 the subtitles say "absoslute" instead of "absolute".

[@mitchtom1409]

fixed

[@markguidarelli9542]

Great video, thank you for making this. Much appreciated!

[@FlyingSnake110]

Great explaining video! I love laerning about how retro game work.

[@ChantingInTheDark]

Incredible presentation!

[@AjinkyaMahajan]

Wonderfully explained. Thanks for sharing Cheers ✨✌

[@Goto10Gaming]

Wow you have an amazingly awesome channel, thank you for the content!

[@darvil82]

Fantastic videos as always

[@miliggi]

A very cool video, thanks! Your graphics are amazing... but the audio could be better. Have you considered using a wind screen for your microphone?

[@yemlivagnyul4052]

A new RGME vid makes any morning feel like Christmas! :3

[@BabusGameRoom]

Watching the frame being drawn at the end ( 18:45 ) was fascinating. In particular, watching it scroll through the lines of code...feels like CPUs were a lot faster back then than I thought they' be! haha

[@DJSArcade]

This is a great informative video! Thanks for making it.

[@Leadbraw]

New rgmex vid is always welcome. Keep it up!

[@alexjones3035]

Man that ending is *awesome*, that is such a neat way to draw graphics on a CRT. Your visualizations are always excellent, but that was really cool, one of my favorites yet. If I may ask, what font did you use on this video for the code? Is it Terminus blown up to a large size, or something else?

[@veschyoleg]

Can we appreciate how the font used in the videos is always fitting to the topic. Here the font is vectory. Cool!

[@AndrzejOkrutny]

Fantastic explanation! Thank you so much.

[@jeffb5798]

Excellent video, I learned a lot. I'd love to watch a similar video on how Zaxxon and its isometric scrolling and object hit detection was programmed.

[@janmagtoast]

The brightness value gives you 15 shades of gray. hot

[@FULLNinja69]

Really enjoyed your video. One of the best I've seen on Vector graphics. I really wish this tech was still being developed. I know it would be really niche but I can't stop thinking about how much further along it would be with all of the advancement in RAM and CPUs. Perhaps even a CRT with multiple guns so you could draws enough lines that every pixel on screen could be drawn to per frame. Then you could have Vector graphics that are more than just outlines. I know crazy talk but just imagine, (In movie theater guys voice) In a world where Vectors graphics never died.

[@turbofx4049]

Please do a video on the Vectrex! It's a super interesting console from the 80's that only uses vector based graphics. Would love to watch a detailed breakdown of how it works

[@Lee-ku3uw]

WOW. Best video I've seen in a long while. Very informative. Why do you think the blue background in tempest was drawn directly from VRAM rather than a CALL to a VROM template? Only reason I can think of was the colour change to highlight the segment in YELLOW. I am assuming that these vectors are accurate and overdraw could have been achieved. Looks like a few redundant SCALE instructions get generated in some place also. 10/10 for effort.

[@electronash]

Fantastic vid. The script for the end animation was very impressive. Have you considered writing FPGA cores for stuff like this yet? I think you'd be great at it.

[@klaxyrine979]

I am surprised by the level of detail your videos have. I was always curios about retro tech. Sadly, so much of the terms and concepts are on a high level and are unknown to me. But, they have sparked an inspiration for me to learn more.

[@MarkVrankovich]

Wow. Thanks for all the effort you must have put into this.

[@pentachronic]

Nicely explained. Thanks.

[@Damien.D]

Brillant explanations.

[@Erhannis]

Oh haha. I like the patreon icon walls; it's clever and fun and visually engaging and not tedious like reading a list.

[@xeostube]

this has a fantastic level of detail, and I apricate the effort put in. I do wish for a little more discussion of how the scaling worked, and perhaps a little less on how the opcodes were formed. either way, it's great work though.