New Trick And No Treat - A Cautionary Tale
[ Atariscne.org - News ] New Trick And No Treat - A Cautionary Tale
When dealing with hardware like the ST, one of the most valued currencies back in the day were the so-called "hardware tricks"1. The limitations of the ST were so severe, that everything that helped mitigate that, even a little, was very, very welcome. May this be bigger 800k floppy disk formats, mixed resolutions, buzzer/digi-/SID-sound, the various overscan types and of course the king of the playground - hardware scrolling. Especially the last one was very shushed about by the people in the know and if one managed to catch a glimpse of how that specific magic machinery worked - oh boy, it was mind-boggling.
I am sure we all remember seeing the TCB Fullscreen, the ULM Scroller Fullscreen or hearing the buzzer or even YM-SID-sounds for the first time - this sense of the world expanding, like literally, is hard to explain - let alone to reproduce. The fact that this machine still produces new hardware tricks up to this day - like various new YM effects, generalized 4-bit hardware-scrolling, new screen resolutions just to name a few, is simply astonishing and keeps the platform interesting and challenging at the same time.
That's why the idea came up to take you, dear reader, on a small journey to where a new hardware trick gets discovered - and then even further down into it's ultimate culmination in... failure.