Spindley Q Frog @SpindleyQ@mastodon.social

Anyone happen to know of a way to upscale an arbitrary VGA signal to HDMI? Everything I can find just passes through 640x480 and up, and I 100% require PC textmode & 320x200 at minimum.

Alternatively, a capture card that can take such input directly would also be great, but I suspect that has even less chance of existing.

Starting to factor out the game loop; added the ability to pop-up the footer by tapping the space bar, which pauses normal game logic.

Implemented smooth horizontal scrolling, which in EGA makes the footer jitter. There’s a VGA-only fix but I think I’ll switch course a little and scroll the footer onscreen at times where the player can’t move. Of course getting rid of the footer ended up exposing a new delightful glitch

Aaaand it finally works as designed!

It's fun when figuring out a problem with something then uncovers exciting new problems with that thing

Coding in C for the 286 is kind of like coding in a dynamic scripting language except the only data types are "array of bytes" and "little-endian words"

Like these bytes have structure but it's probably more trouble than it's worth to try to explain to the type system what it looks like

I have unmangled my car sprite! Now to figure out why only the grass tile is being used as a background, and also wtf is going on with my pixel mask, jeez

Hey, I can see a mangled version of my car sprite! And it moves around smoothly!

Very important to document these glitches before I fix them IMO. I've almost got the sprites drawing in the right place, though they're not even close to the right data. I replaced the background tiles with the car sprites I drew just to make sure my TIF loader was reading them OK.

Improving...

Came up with my own strategy for sprite drawing; so far it seems to be going pretty swell

I'll probably have a quick look at the Keen Dreams source again and then just build something slow and naive

Trying to figure out how to efficiently draw semitransparent sprites in EGA. It is... not as simple as I thought. Reading the Graphics Programming Black Book chapters about fast animation and some of the methods he's describing are absurd - chapter 43 is like "if you don't mind having every sprite be 1 colour and only using 5 colours total, here's a neat trick" and no actually I do mind those constraints, that's not helpful advice

The Future of the Music Business Includes CD-ROM

T H E S K I N E R A S E R https://mastodon.social/media/nJXvf5qle4-pJqqvOVw

I really wanted to play with the split screen register, so now there's a static footer and I can scroll around the map with the arrow keys. Scrolling is a bit slower 'cause I have an actual map in RAM now. Name is absolutely not final.

There we go! https://mastodon.social/media/qBbVrs6TDxIE04AhoUY