The Queen's Footsteps: Physical release

[orion70]

Arrived yesterday
I'm at the seaside now, can't wait to fire up the VIC setup again and have some spare time for it.

So happy

[DarwinNE]

That's great, I'm so happy for you that the game finally arrived, Orion70!

I hope you will enjoy playing it.

[orion70]

YES! At last!

EDIT: mini characters not so readable on my 12" green monitor, it's like every other line is slightly misaligned

[Noizer]

Seeing this picture it looks like you really need the S-Video mod

[orion70]

Yep probably

[Mike]

mini characters not so readable on my 12" green monitor, it's like every other line is slightly misaligned

The game uses cyan as foreground colour. While this choice of foreground colour aims to reproduce the retro experience on colour monitors, certain colours - namely green, red, cyan, purple, orange and their light variants - suffer from pixel tearing over black or white background. This is especially noticable on PAL VIC-20s with CR mainboard (like mine is).

This comes because the video circuitry of the VIC-20 super-imposes the chroma signal on the luma signal to get composite video. Unfortunately, part of the chroma signal gets mistaken for luma, which results in aforementioned pixel tearing.

The S-Video mod prevents those two signals being mixed in the first place and sends them on two wires to the monitor. Of course a green monitor can only make sense of the luma signal anyhow, so ...

Seeing this picture it looks like you really need the S-Video mod

... if you're only ever going to operate this VIC-20 with the green monitor, you could quite as well simply de-solder the ferrite bead that is connected to the chroma pin of the VIC chip. Then the video output will only consist of the luma (and sync) signal, i.e. greyscale, and will be sharp - without any pixel tear.

...

Alternatively, DarwinNE could help out with a version of TQF which uses white on black characters.

[orion70]

Thanks so much Mike for your suggestions. I'd see if Darwin can do this small amendment for the monochrome maniacs, before asking my friend and his solder iron for the hardware mod .

Anyway, low readability is preventing me from playing this adventure - I'll stick to Two Days To The Race, normal VIC screen for now

[DarwinNE]

Oh, sorry for the issue!
I've used a monochrome monitor with the VIC for ages, but a few years ago I modded my VIC to get a s-video output and then I got a Sony PVM monitor. I tested the game on my machine and I thought the cyan was nice

I think I can definitely do something to solve the problem. Stay tuned!

[DarwinNE]

Hello again.

I added a version of the game using white text on black background. You can download it from there:

http://davbucci.chez-alice.fr/index.php ... /queen.inc

Let me know if the readability is better with your setup.

[orion70]

Is it too much to say I LOVE this forum?

Thanks so much DarwinNE for this, it's plain PERFECT . I'll dig into this wonderful adventure ASAP.

[Kweepa]

Wow, that's a huge improvement!
I may have to make a similar change to my adventures. (I know I used cyan for Cometfall and possibly for Yoho and Howay.)

[orion70]

Yep pretty please - it would be just GREAT to have both the YOHO and HOWAY collections ready for a monochrome monitor!

[DarwinNE]

Thanks so much DarwinNE for this, it's plain PERFECT

Thank you for the feedback! I'm happy to learn this. This was something I was not suspecting, I thought the cyan colour was bright enough not to be perturbed by the artifacts of chroma signal, but evidently I was wrong

EDIT: Orion70, I took the liberty to share your screenshots on Twitter. I really loved the splash screen on the green phosphor monitor! I hope it's not a problem for you.

[orion70]

Not a problem at all

[orion70]

... having fun the old way...