Saurus Land | Scramble (Tomy Tutor ぴゅう太) - Chronologically Gaming (CG)

[@john2001plus]

I read that there was a Vetrex version of Scramble that the reviewers liked.

[@chronologicallygaming]

Oh yeah! Looking forward to that!

[@john2001plus]

The Scramble appears to use 8-pixel horizontal scrolling. Roughly 40 years ago, I played a Scramble version on the Timex Sinclair 20680 computer. I remember it having smooth scrolling even though the hardware does not support scrolling, but I could be remembering it wrong. It had a nice fireworks animation when you beat the game. I read that Tomy Tudor does not have hardware scrolling. If they move the entire screen in memory to scroll, that would be slow. A more efficient but more difficult algorithm would be to update only the tiles that change, which would only be a fraction of the screen. I notice that the star field doesn't move, which makes me think that they are doing the more efficient method. However, either way, memory copies can be expensive. I notice some artifacts where the trailing edge of the scenery will have duplicate characters for a fraction of a second. Each 8 horizontal pixels can have only 2 colors, although that is better than some computers like the Spectrum which have 2 colors for every 8x8 tile. This limitation would make it difficult to scroll by less than 8 pixels. It can be done, but it limits the number of colors you can use. The square blocks would have to be monochrome. The system has an impressive 32 8x8 monochrome sprites but only 4 can be on the same line. They might be using sprites for the stars, which would explain why the stars flicker. The flickering stars might just be a feature.

[@chronologicallygaming]

Thanks for the insights into the technical aspects! Cheers!