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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Ha! You call that parallax scrolling? Then take a look at this (Amiga, 1993): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoiHk_3siYg. In the first level, the bands of clouds are moving in (I think) 6 different levels of parallax, and also the mountain range and swamp below has different levels of parallax. Ok, this was a game that, as one reviewer put it, "squeezes all the graphic power out of the Amiga". Would you believe that this was a computer which was only capable of displaying 32 colors at once? Ok, that was without tricks of course, and this game probably uses every trick in the book...

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I mean the Duke Nukem 2 parallax is impressive because it's basically beating a square peg into a round hole.

The Amiga had a lot more helpful hardware. Lionheart really is an incredible title for squeezing so much out of the OCS chipset.

Not to take anything away from the developers but the Amiga does have hardware sprites, hardware scrolling, a blitter, the copper and dual playfield mode to make things a little easier

I’ll throw in Turrican II level 3-1: https://youtu.be/-TSjfMNAXwU

Cool, and technically impressive!

But this kind of game raises my stress levels :D

Yes, I used to play R-Type, Blood Money, etc. Then I realized I didn't enjoy them, I suffered them.

Oh R-Type... I had trouble beating the final boss of the first level, but once I got through once, I played on and on and on, getting to level 4 or 5, I think, and I had my hands literally shaking from stress, fearing to lose all the powerups.

Omg rtype! The jeopardy felt real!!

Amiga, huh?

The Commodore 64 had smooth parallax scrolling in 1986 without any hardware acceleration. Instead, they used a trick where they rolled the character set definitions, eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHrmjP6D1OU

More advanced examples appeared later. eg "Flimbo's Quest" in 1990 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCxXMquPKs

This video has an explanation for how it worked https://youtu.be/DQpLAIkNVLE?t=165

I think it's unfair to say that it's "without any hardware acceleration". These tricks work because the VIC-II can unburden the CPU a lot by letting it work with character cells and character definitions instead of individual pixels, and in Parallax, all the CPU needs to do to create the parallax effect is to redefine the 32 bytes that define the background characters.

I didn't know that Flimbo's Quest trick, that's cool!

YOu could also go back to Shadow of the Beast 1, much earlier on the Amiga, with a very impressive feat when it comes to parallax scrollings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9BltSvKMlQ

Honestly, PC games were a complete joke compared to whatever was on the Amiga, until Wing Commander 1 came out.

I still remember when I first played Shadow of the Beast, back in 1989 on my Amiga 500. It was incredible.

It was the future! Compared to all 8 bits games of the time it was such a HUGE step forward, everyone who saw it was absolutely amazed.

A nice breakdown on how it was done [1]

[1] https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...

That vid is a very bad example for the vid itself is not running at 50/60 Hz. And that was the whole thing back then: most great game on the Amiga (and the Atari ST) were running at "full frame rate". Arcade games too (except some still amazing ones like Outrun which was 30 fps IIRC).

A parallax a 50 Hz was silky smooth. A video of a game running at 50 Hz that is recorded at 30 fps doesn't do the original game justice.

The link to Shadow of The Beast (Amiga 1989) is much better in that you can configure YouTube to play the vid at 50 Hz.

While watching 50 Hz content, just need to set monitor to 50 Hz, 100 Hz to eliminate jitter. (Unless you have something like 240 Hz screen.)

> Ha! You call that parallax scrolling?

Don't get why you need to put down what someone else did because someone else did something better at the same time? Nobody claimed it was the best parallax at the time.

Perhaps a little context would help

https://genius.com/Monty-python-four-yorkshiremen-live-lyric...

That's a stretch. That sketch is about one-upmanship as to who suffered more. (Which is also toxic behavior when taken out of comedic contexts. I know people who do this unironically and it's not healthy.)

Agree with the parent, it's great to develop a richer context on top of the OP and have everyone benefit as a result, but there's no need to put one down in order to raise another. They're both cool and interesting.

In my day there were no graphics cards. You had to write the bits into special parts of memory yourself. And you considered yourself lucky to get 140 pixels on a line.

Seems an entirely unconnected bit?

While not nearly as lush, this is another impressive bit of Amiga parallax scrolling from six years earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwATApeN2Qw

(Also the only video I could find with the original, heroic-sounding music I remember, as everyone else seems to have somehow ended up with a disk image using an oddly-substituted filler track.)

Not saying that isn't impressive, but there are just two layers of parallax scrolling per horizontal line (= how it's usually counted) in that example.

BTW, many Amiga games could do 3 layers per horizontal line.

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