Mostly Random Technology Bytes

I recently purchased a copy of Atari Anthology for my PlayStation2 (I understand there are also versions for Xbox and PCs). It’s a collection of old video games titles, mostly Atari 2600 console titles, but also Arcade games such as Centipede, Missile Commander, Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Tempest, Battlezone, etc. (And for some of the games you get both the Arcade version, and the 2600 console version). I haven’t tried all the games yet, and may never get round to them all, but so far: The games seem to be very much like the originals (even down to the annoying flicker on the 2600 version of Asteroids that I remember making my eyes hurt when I played the game at my uncle’s house around 25 years ago), and I suspect the PlayStation is being made to run a software emulation of the original games.

As far as the 2600 games go, my memory seemed to have acquired a definite element of rose-tintedness over the past quarter century: I had forgotten just how primitive the games were.

The arcade games are a different story. Of course, they’re not up to the graphical standards of modern games, but some like Tempest, Battlezone and Asteroids are still compelling to me. One of the things that is fascinating to me, is that many of the Arcade games of the time, used Vector Displays to draw their graphics. These were displays that displayed smooth lines, circles and other objects using an oscilloscope type display - check out the screenshots of Asteroids (1979), Battlezone (1980), and Tempest (1981) - versions of all of which are in the Atari Anthology collection - on this page.

You can find an explanation of how Vector Displays worked here (strictly speaking the link is about Tektronix Vector Terminals, but I believe the Atari games with Vector displays worked along similar lines). According to that link, the advantage of Vector Displays is that they saved memory as compared to the Bitmap Displays - and so when the price of memory fell enough, Bitmap Displays totally displaced Vector Displays.

Now, I have to say that explanation strikes me as odd. While it’s true that Vector Displays have practically disappeared, the fact is they seem to have disappeared before they were made completely obsolete by improvements in Bitmap Displays.

Of course Bitmap Displays have always had their own advantages, for example, you can fill in solid areas of color using a Bitmap Display - but remember these advantages were not enough to surpress Vector Displays, until Bitmap Displays had matched Vectors’ other advantages.

Consider the advantages of using a Vector Display:

1. A Vector Display uses less memory than a Bitmap Display.
2. A Vector Display draws smooth lines.
3. Drawing a line on a Vector Display should be less computationally intensive than drawing a line on a Bitmap Display. This is because on a Vector Display the program just tells the display to X,Y coordinates of the two end-points, but in a Bitmap Display, all the individual pixels on the line must be calculated and drawn.

Of course, as computer hardware got better, these advantages mattered less and less. Memory became cheap, removing advantage 1. Bitmap resolutions became higher, and anti-aliasing software became possible as CPUs became faster, so bitmap lines no longer were obviously jagged, removing advantage 2. And finally, CPUs became fast enough for advantage 3 not to matter.

So, given enough improvements in computer hardware, and Bitmap Displays’ other advantages, one might expect Bitmap Displays to eventually displace Vector Displays… But my point is, that Vector Displays went out of fashion in the early-ish 1980s, but at that time, these improvements in computer hardware and Bitmap Displays hadn’t fully happened yet.

So why did Vector Displays go away when they did? Given just the technical factors I mentioned, one might have expected at least some common usage of Vector Displays to remain at least into the 1990s and possibly later. But Vector Displays disappeared before Bitmap Displays had fully matured…. why? I have my own theories, but that’s another story.

The last time I used a Mac seriously, Rick Astley was in the charts. I don’t have anything against Macs, but until recently I’ve never considered getting one - until recently. Why no Mac? I’m a programmer, and I’d always figured it too darn hard to write cross-platform (Windows and Mac) software, particularly when the Windows market is so much bigger.

Recently I came across BlitzMax, and it seems to offer the possibility of writing sophisticated apps, without all the usual hassles (unlike say C++), and with the full native look and feel on each platform (unlike Java). The nice thing about BlitzMax, is it supports Windows, MacOS and Linux.

I can’t currently justify buying a whole new computer just to run MacOS, particularly since I don’t have any firm plans for cross platform apps yet. But, one other potentially important thing has happened recently… Apple has switched to Intel CPUs (although when I went to the computer store today, most of the Macs there still seemed to be PowerPC).

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

I’ve been thinking it for a while…. it ought to be possible to have a triple boot machine, Windows, MacOS, and Linux all on one box.

Well it sounds like somebody has figured out how to do exactly this kind of triple boot, but when I read the details of the setup involved, my heart sank. It sounds complicated, and I’m guessing it may be that setting up triple boot is beyond somebody who isn’t familiar with all the obscure corners of Mac set-up lore. I hate fiddling around with computer set-ups (I just want to use and program the darn machines), and I’m kinda concerned that if I bought a Mac, I might simply be incapable of getting it to triple boot, or worse yet, trash the hard-drive.

So, Steve Jobs if you’re reading… your first decent chance to sell me a Mac in 20 years - start selling Macs that are already set-up to triple boot. And a side benefit: you’ll get my new apps, whenever they’re ready, running on your OS too.