So you know, the 640x200 EGA dithering is very effective on 80's CRTs and TVs. On Zeliard I can barely notice the difference between MCGA and EGA on such a blurry screen.

Yes, Thexder 2 exists, my disk label even says Thexder on its brown label iirc.

leileilol wrote:

So you know, the 640x200 EGA dithering is very effective on 80's CRTs and TVs. On Zeliard I can barely notice the difference between MCGA and EGA on such a blurry screen.

I'll take your word for it. I've never owned a computer monitor blury enough to notice, but from a programming standpoint, burning double the graphics bandwidth and only attaining 11 or 12 simulated colours is kinda dumb when you have a palette of 16 colours you can modify. :P

I did however find a gameplay screenshot of the EGA mode of Fire Hawk online and saw the same dithering going on, so I downloaded it, did my colour comparison, and from only 7 base colours they're pulling off 24 simulated colours mid-game, so it looks like the sequel to Thexder takes much better advantage of the dithering effect. :)

I wonder if 640x200 is really that much slower in ega though since 16 color mode doesn't exactly have single pixel access mode and you might be able to setup the registers and pixels masks in a way to write 2 pixels at once.

Fire Hawk is a great game. Better than the first one, IMO. And the soundtrack is fantastic.

From what I can tell, the home version of Thexder was first developed for the Japanese PC88 systems, and then ported to other platforms. The graphics mode used on PC88 was 640x200 8 colour. On a system that only has only 8 colours, the dithering effect worked. The fact that the IIgs, Macintosh, Amiga and PC versions also use the same 8 colour 640x200 resolution (despite having more capable graphics) suggests to me that it was done more out of laziness than anything.

Harekiet wrote:

I wonder if 640x200 is really that much slower in ega though since 16 color mode doesn't exactly have single pixel access mode and you might be able to setup the registers and pixels masks in a way to write 2 pixels at once.

Hey yeah... that might explain why in the EGA and CGA modes the laser is much wider horizontally when it doesn't have to be. The horizontal granularity of the beam is probably based on how many pixels they're able to write at once. In the Tandy mode, the beam is only a single pixel wide which suggests they probably could easily write one pixel at a time.

MusicallyInspired wrote:

Fire Hawk is a great game. Better than the first one, IMO. And the soundtrack is fantastic.

Considering the Thexder robot is your avatar, I'd be surprised if you hadn't played it! ;D

Anonymous Coward wrote:

From what I can tell, the home version of Thexder was first developed for the Japanese PC88 systems, and then ported to other platforms. The graphics mode used on PC88 was 640x200 8 colour. On a system that only has only 8 colours, the dithering effect worked. The fact that the IIgs, Macintosh, Amiga and PC versions also use the same 8 colour 640x200 resolution (despite having more capable graphics) suggests to me that it was done more out of laziness than anything.

I've only ever seen resolution-reduced video of the PC88 version so I didn't even realize that. Considering the quality of the Tandy mode perhaps they figured most people would be using that mode anyways... or something. *shrugs*