Oh no help I downloaded Turbo C and I think I might start writing a DOS game aaaah https://mastodon.social/media/s3HaS-EB22oUvhgGdhc https://mastodon.social/media/e10RH5rx_zT5f_GoR1A https://mastodon.social/media/1uDvzJ1N3C7WmpoJhcU
Hello, old friend, today you're going to teach me how to hook the keyboard interrupt again https://mastodon.social/media/q_jH0jjh9xYy3GlHgKs
I have successfully loaded tiles from a TIF file that I drew in NeoPaint, converted them internally into EGA planar format, and drawn them to the screen. https://mastodon.social/media/Yg3wSvnVGXp8Foz1Te4
Just implemented page flipping, as a prelude to maybe implementing smooth scrolling.
It’s pretty amazing how little code this is? Like once you have a grasp on how EGA memory is laid out and you’ve got Michael Abrash telling you which registers you can poke to do neat stuff, it’s not complicated? This shit DESTROYED me as a teenager though, I never got ANY of it working outside the basic mode 13h linear framebuffer
It’s really astonishing to me how different the experience of programming a 286 is compared to what I do at my job, how starkly the priorities are different
At my job, I make sure the code I write is flexible and correct. I build safeguards to ensure bad things will not happen when someone makes a change or grows the system
For this project, I put together a pile of purpose-built subroutines and macros, kept simple enough that I could delete and rewrite any of them a dozen different ways
Mouse support is trickier than I expected! It would be easy if I just polled the state every frame but I decided to try to install a callback. I think I need to set the DS register at the start of the callback in order to access my data - I’m scribbling over something important and the computer hangs. But how do I know the value I should set it to? Is it even possible to do this in the small memory model? Argh
Got it! I looked at the generated ASM and figured out that DS was being ASSUMEd to a symbol called “DGROUP”; so I just explicitly set DS to that at the start of the callback and no more crashy!
I am definitely doing something to confuse CuteMouse’s cursor-drawing routine though... probably it assumes I have writing to all four planes enabled https://mastodon.social/media/uax66anGIreYRARWjGs
Well, definitely that, but it also plays _very_ badly with my page flipping implementation - you can see it writing into video memory when I’m flipped to the second page! sooo I guess I’ll be drawing my own damn mouse cursor https://mastodon.social/media/QGLwPAjaEOSkSqTnnq4
I’ve been pondering scrolling for a few days, and whether I could figure out how to write a huge smooth-scrolling playfield or whether I’d just flip from one screen to the next. This evening it occurred to me that surely at some point the Commander Keen source code must’ve been released and I could just see how they handled scrolling. And indeed Keen Dreams is GPLed! https://github.com/keendreams/keen
Hmmmm this is... a little overwhelming. Lots of extra stuff that makes me wonder if I’m missing something important. Gotta keep in mind that it’s an entire game, after many rounds of optimization, instead of a week’s worth of occasional hacking, and my slower, dumber code can still lead to an outcome I’m happy with.
Keen keeps track of which 16x16 tiles are dirty via a dirt-simple byte array where they mark each tile position 1 or 0 - because only 21x15 tiles are onscreen, this only costs a few hundred bytes and is a huge optimization. I’ll probably steal this idea. (Extremely common retroprogramming pattern that has basically disappeared from modern computing: knowing there are, at most, N of something, where N is small.)
The tiles are redrawn by copying from what the code refers to as the “master screen”, which is an area of video memory after the two pages.
I don’t know how this memory is structured, but I don’t really need to - because of the page sizes, I know that a full redraw into a page MUST happen regularly without slowing everything down. So as long as the tiles live in video memory and I have a reasonably efficient copy loop I should be fine.
Implemented my tile-blitting speedup
Pro: it is indeed much faster
Con: don't quite have all the bugs worked out yet https://mastodon.social/media/LEqZ5yj7ynPKv3PK5YU
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
@SpindleyQ great work. Enjoying watching this come together.
@RobF I’m glad it’s interesting to others! It sort of feels self-indulgent sometimes but I’m having too much fun not to share.
@SpindleyQ I'm also enjoying these updates from 286 Land. I hope Jorts can Quest all the Quests
@rabbitboots Yay! I’m gonna make Jorts drive around in a little car next I think
@SpindleyQ looks like maybe a stream about coding?
@SpindleyQ this is L337 as all get-out, good work
@jplebreton I could’ve just plugged it into my Raspberry Pi but it would’ve felt wrong
@SpindleyQ There is an compact flash to IDE adapter I'm sure is around here somewhere I used to use. I had a 4 MB card in it.
@SpindleyQ You want XTIDE: https://code.google.com/archive/p/xtideuniversalbios/
You can burn that image and stick it in the socket of an ISA network card. Or you can buy this PCB and build your own ISA card to put it on: https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/product/8-bit-ide-adapter-pcb/
@SpindleyQ
Rad as hell
@SpindleyQ a serial port is always the best solution - nice work!
There we go! https://mastodon.social/media/qBbVrs6TDxIE04AhoUY