BBC Micro Blues.. and Reds, or, A Colorful Rant

[Frederic_Freakazoid]

So I've been playing with my original Raspberry Pi B (in a C64 case w/keyrah), putting all sorts of emulators on it, learning to compile, failing at that, figuring more stuff out, failing again, etc etc. I figured I'd put every old computer system possible on it, but was stuck for a bit on the BBC Micro. I don't want to use RISC OS despite that it sounds like the emulator runs well enough on it, and I've heard the emulators under Raspbian are too slow. I don't plan to or want to upgrade to a Pi 2 for this. So digging around the internet there appears to be zero activity after late 2012 with regards to a BBC Micro running under Raspbian (without a Pi 2). I've been toying with B-Em since it seemed version 2.2 was never tried, and had (more/better?) openGL support. After getting frustrated with the whole process of trying to get it to compile, I decided to look up the "best" games for it (besides Elite).

Never mind.

I never would have thought it possible, for there to be more colors than what was available for CGA, and yet STILL look horrible. I now understand why people liked the Spectrum. Despite it's graphical limitations, the colors looked good. The BBC Micro? It looks like someone vomited blues and reds and purples on the screen. The only game I could look at without feeling a little sick (besides Elite) was a racing game that had lots of green on the screen. It's similar to having a blacklight poster turned into a video game, except the colors on the poster are meant to look neat and psychedelic.

I presume, back in the day, the scanlines helped.

So the good news is, I'm no longer going to have to bother with BBC Micro emulation, short of maybe having a go with Elite via my PC.

 

[chinnyhill10]

Part of the problem with the Beeb is indeed its palette. It is pretty garish. Although it can be used well if the graphics artist is talented. For example Arkanoid on the BBC looks very good and very similar to the CPC version (a computer with far more colours available).

The other problem is that the Beeb games market was so small that the big software houses didn't really bother with it. So while the top coders had time and resources to push the Spectrum, C64 and CPC at the top professional level and thus constantly advancing what was possible, the Beeb seemed to be stuck somewhere in 1985 with coders knocking out games in their bedrooms and then being published by Superior. Nothing wrong with bedroom coders, but they often couldn't compete with the resources of the programming teams at the likes of Ocean.

But it wasn't always terrible. Sometimes talented people pushed the Beeb into doing great things. Check out my review of the Beeb version of Uridium. Bit garish sure, but look at the speed and how well it plays! It's great and well worth a play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToTQN6dxwDw

 

[Frederic_Freakazoid]

Garish indeed! I certainly love games that are a grand technical achievement in any sense. I've found it interesting, watching 'let's compare' videos, and seeing how common poor screen-scrolling was encountered on systems other than the C64.

 

[TheCorfiot]

Interestingly the colour palette on the Beeb is the same as the spectrum, apart from half brite mode, and you can view it in RGB unlike the c64 and speccy, both with awful 2 colour per character position limitation.
I have always found the c64's colour palette to be very Brown and yellow.

Bottom line each has there own preference.
Games such as zalaga, arcadians, swoop, planetoid and hopper have in my opinion a good colour set.
But the Beeb does excel on playability, often matching the arcade originals.

As for screen scrolling, The Beeb uses full hardware scrolling courtesy of the 6845, as used in the arcade cabinets of the day.
Snapper anyone

 

[Frederic_Freakazoid]

I did take another look at some BBC Micro games (via a singular youtube video), and it wasn't as bad as the first time around. I still think the game Hunchback (might have a different title elsewhere?) looks awful vs the C64 incarnation.

Also on the poor color spectrum is the Apple IIe. They overused dithering so everything is a mess of purples, blues, reds, and white dithered together. Despite that I have some very Apple-specific nostalgia that predates our owning a C64. Canyon Climber, Autobahn, Snake Byte...