The breakout clone that wouldn’t quit.
Okay I know you’re probably tired of hearing about this little breakout clone. But I found something out. I have a video-capture card with video out (the ati all-in-wonder 9600 xt) and sometimes I’m playing video off of my computer to my tv. When it comes time to record a tv show or whatever I turn the tvout off, presumably because vid capture will be smoother with it off. (Actually this does seem to be the case.) When tv out is on, the display is changed to 60hz refresh (I believe), probably because of the 60 fields per second aka 30 frames per second framerate of NTSC television signals. In any case. I had been playing the breakout game with tv-out on. Which means technically get game was “slower”, I don’t mean it still wasn’t fast, but somehow with the lower refresh the timing is such that it is a slight bit easier to play. When I shut tv-out off, the refresh goes back to whatever it is for 1024×768 resolution i normally use (I think something like 75 it might be higher but I don’t know for sure). I totally cannot play it this way. I barely make 200 when it’s like this. It’s like a new challenge. It was as if 384 wasn’t a real score. So i’m thinking of maybe finding a way to reset highscore (I think it should be in a file, if not i’ll have to redownload it to start clean). I did manage on this speed to get up to 257 though.
Also it makes me wonder about a friends system. He has an nvidia tnt2 based card (really old by nowadays standards). He said the game ran so slowly as to be unplayable and he mentioned having problem with alpha channel stuff. Now I think it may be refresh related. I remember hearing about older cards that would sync to the vertical retrace, and that you could turn it off for certain games and they would go faster. So maybe i’ll ask him if he can do this and see if he can’t play this game. Anyhoo that’s all i’m going to say about this, unless I get a highscore to beat 384.
Keith