Comment by weinzierl
6 days ago
The good old Commodore did not have nearly enough memory to store all these beautiful images as screen sized bitmaps. Most of the games used text mode with a custom character set.
I always wondered how this worked on the Amiga and PC ports of the classic games. Did they just copy the approach and use text mode as well or did they use proper bitmap images as backgrounds? Same question for games that were native to the 16/32 bit platforms. Did they throw bitmaps around like memory was cheap or did they ever use the text mode trick as well?
I'm not so familiar with the C64, but Monkey Island did indeed use graphics mode on all the 16/32 bit systems it supported - PC graphics cards had their video memory on the card (same as they do today), so saving memory by using text mode didn't make sense. The only problem with that was that the CPU had to be used for any processing of the video memory, so especially scrolling the whole screen was sometimes a bit slow with weaker CPUs. The Amiga and Atari ST didn't have a dedicated text mode.
Text mode with user-definable multi-colour characters was mostly a 8-bit exclusive feature. Another reason C64 used that trick was the hardware scroll feature, which allowed shifting the whole screen between 0 to 7 pixels. It was much faster to copy 25x80 characters (as compared to copying a hires/multicolour bitmap with a 8 pixel offset) after the 7th pixel, and reset the scroll bit to 0.
There was no native text mode on the Amiga at least.