Comment Bitmaps vs. Vectors? (Score 1) 221
(it's surprising how incompatible SuperVGA modes are with regular EGA/VGA modes)
And doesn't Rogue pre-date curses?
(as in it just reads
Atari BASIC rounds to the nearest whole number rather than just dropping the fraction; hence the use of "6" instead of "6.5".
(it's actually theï Atari OS doing the rounding, not the BASIC lang. cart. itself)
Or get a Atari 800 HCS (Home Computer System)! Four joystick ports, four sound channels, four Player/Missile Graphics.
(read: four complex and four simple sprites; the simple sprites can be combined into a fifth complex sprite)
And they're still making games for it!
(and it's the only home computer sporting a text mode that actually supports true lower-case text! (as in descenders))
In fact any program running as the "root" user can access any I/O port and map any memory locations into it's virtual address space.
The default mode that VGA starts up in is 720x400x16 text mode. This can be extended to 720x480x16 for 80x30 text. Switching to a 8x8 (from 9x16) character cell yields 90x60 text. 256-colour mode automatically makes the pixels twice as wide so photographic pictures are usually viewed in 360x480x256 mode (e.g. Linux's "zgv" viewer).
And, on a monitor with size controls (i.e. not an actual "IBM PS/2 Color Display" monitor), you can get 800x600x16 (thus 400x600x256) if you don't mind a incredibly low refresh rate (below 50Hz).
Not sure about the VIC-20 but the Atari VCS and HCS (Home Computer System) and Apple ][ came out in the 70s. ProLogic's "Flight Simulator" for the Atari HCS is a good example of a game that utilises multiple threads of execution to simulate flying a airplane via polygonal graphics. This is in contrast to most games that have a main thread and a background thread ran by the vertical blank interrupt.
(and perhaps a third ran by the horizontal blank interrupt)
And don't forget Texas Instruments' TI-99/4 (and 99/4A), which also came out in the 70s. And, for that matter, the Intellivision; whose OS would move sprites for you (i.e. the game programme) via a background OS thread.
All these 70s systems had graphics and sounds effects.
And, if you were using NDOS from Norton Utilities, then you were using 4DOS. Try it out at <URL:ftp://ftp.jpsoft.com/4dos/>.
Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.