i'm making a #QBasic game using mode 13h, 320x200 8bpp. i'm using the line doubling feature of the VGA card to make it 320x100 then manually doubling each pixel horizontally for 160x100
i realized i could use a palette with 3 bits red/green and 2 blue, and then do "subpixel" dither to generate the in between colors. i made a converter to test if that would look good, and it does
here's a thread of images showing what that looks like
This screenshot shows a part of room 19, there are 2 floors, in the upper one there are two big computers that sems pretty vintage with big reels. On the second floor there is a door and what it seems to be an hole in the wall with various cracks around it.
Fellow DOS/retro game devs: What are must-reads for 386-era game development? I've got Abrash's Black Book, but I'd love recommendations on more general game dev topics from that period.
What's the bare minimum #C89 needed to connect to the console in any OS and, in Windows (inc. XP), Linux & MacOS, enable raw mode? Asking for a friend.
Maybe there's a bare-bones framework out there for "give my app a terminal window and make the OS go away" that doesn't involve installing gigabytes of compiler suites and libraries :|
Bear with me whilst I work this out; my head has been in a spin for a few days with the infinite possibilities and loose ends.
#Forth is almost wilfully, aggressively impenetrable. I respect it for what it achieves with so little but it's not for me. I realised that unlike #uxn, what I really want isn't a stack-machine but a register-machine.
People keep talking about making "simple" software but really what I keep seeing is toys. I see this in uxn with its 8-bit CPU and 64 KB program space, or Pico8 with its ridiculous 128x128 resolution and 32K token limit. Limits like these don't actually make software simple, it places a greater burden on the programmer to do really low-level engineering that's just a distraction from the program they want to write. You only have to try writing an 8-bit division routine from scratch once to know what a brutal multi-day excursion that can be. If the programmer is having to manually implement allocation and virtual memory -- things that should be completely transparent to the program -- that's not simpler software.
Simple software can be serious, can be a replacement for big, bloated software. My ideal VM would be 32 (or 64)-bits wide and assume it's running on top of an already existing OS that has hundreds of megs of RAM. Manual memory management and virtual-memory won't be the programmer's concern, they won't even have to deal with it directly. Even a 15 year old computer is going to be able to run a single VM burning up hundreds of megs with absolute ease.
30 years later and I’ve finally got mode Y working (with hardware scrolling, gasp!) Extremely unreliable emulator numbers claim this is managing ~50fps on a 386DX/25 - though most of the time is spent playing the Cannon Fodder MOD 😂
Anybody got any tips on the most straightforward/automated way to match a bunch of images to the same indexed palette? Gimp can do it, but I think only one at a time. I suppose there’s always ImageMagick. Trying to remember what I used to do 30 years ago… I think it involved NeoPaint 😀 #RetroDev#DOScember
Some little progress on my #cga adventure RPG. This one shows that triggers can print stuff on the console, as well as uncover part of the map (e.g. when interacting with the statues).
This clip was recorded from Dosbox Staging, but I also tested it on an 8086 8Mhz with 512Kb of RAM (via 86Box) and basically works at the same speed.
Screen shot from Yurivania 3 showing a the witch Never meeting the zombie Mirna outside a cave mouth deep in the woods. Mirna says: "I have an excellent opportunity". The pixelated scene is rendered in greens.
A commission I completed for Riley of an apartment balcony scene during a vibrant sunset. Original characters Juno (she/her) and Yuzu (they/them) by Riley Luna (@(@yuzupup on Mastodon). I really enjoyed working on this!
This series by Geminorons goes into detail on how GB and GBC graphics work, but it does so with some really fancy interactive illustrations that can help explain the deets in a very visual way.
Regardless of your new social network platform, create yourself a blog too, for your work, studio or random stuff. You control it and will last longer than any other app. Don’t forget the RSS feed. If you have a gamedev blog post it below so I can add to my feeds.
Screenshot of a web page with the top text "GBDK Showcase", a set of filter controls, and then a grid of screenshots of games along with their titles, descrptions, web links and metadata tags such as platform, open source, cart release.