Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!husc6!yale!robertj
From: robertj@yale.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Mac II games revisited
Message-ID: <21821@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Date: 23 Jan 88 18:22:28 GMT
References: <21607@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <3475@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Sender: root@yale.UUCP
Reply-To: robertj@yale.UUCP
Distribution: na
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept, New Haven CT
Lines: 45
Posted: Sat Jan 23 13:22:28 1988

In article <3475@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> chow@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Christopher Chow) writes:
>It just occured to me that perhaps there is a way to get alot of game
>software for the Mac II.  What about having a Mac II emulate an Atari ST?
>Something like the inverse of an Magic Sac would open up a vast amount of
>game software for the Mac II.
>
>Of course, it wouldn't be quite as nice has having real Mac II games, but
>its better than nothing.  Has anyone else given any thoughts to this --
>are there any difficulties in getting a Mac II to emulate an ST?

Well, offhand, one difficulty that occurs to me is that the Atari ST
has a great deal of hardware graphics support.  Sprites, smooth vertical
and horizontal scrolling, fast color fills, etc., etc.  Whether the Mac
II has enough processor speed to smoothly emulate all of this is debat-
able, especially when you consider that game programs tend to push a
computer to its limits.

The Magic Sac has a simpler time of it; it doesn't need to do anything
except draw on the screen in a simple bitmap mode, since the Mac doesn't
have any of the fancy graphics coprocessors.  In fact, I heard (it may
not be true) that the Magic Sac is actually faster than a Mac Plus in
certain graphics-intensive applications, because the Sac uses the graph-
ics chips to speed up drawing on the screen.

What it boils down to is that the Atari ST line can do graphics much
more quickly than the Mac line.  Writing a Mac emulator on the ST is not
that difficult (or the Sac wouldn't exist).  Writing an ST emulator on
the Mac necessitates doing a lot of complex graphics stuff with only
the main CPU to work with.  Perhaps the II's 68020 is fast enough to
handle it... all I know is, if someone DID come out with such a toy and
it worked well, I would buy it pronto!

>Christopher Chow
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