Recent content by VileR

Glad you liked it! Ha- never heard of that game until now, but apparently there's a 'Super Life of Pixel' now which includes a "CGA"-styled world...

The per-frame code really doesn't take all that much CPU time - IIRC no more than ~20% in this version ("profiled" using border-color changes). Should be plenty left for game logic, but the real problem would be all the writing to video RAM, which has to fit in vertical blanking for a...

Yes, that's "ansi-from-hell" at 80x100 characters. That's why the tiles weren't simply converted from the arcade version (they had to be redrawn for optimal use of the fixed CGA charset). Are you saying you see visual glitches when Prohibition/Boulder Dash scroll sideways? I don't remember...

No, but perhaps it can help indirectly if your board and drivers let you use it as UMBs (or even just the page frame window) to free up more conventional RAM... I've seen reports about that being possible on a PC/XT. Supporting EMS directly would be cumbersome and probably not as effective as...

We do want to shrink that RAM footprint somewhat - there's quite a bit of flexibility as to when we can load and unload various bits of code, thanks to Trixter's loader system. Currently it requires about 560-570kB free, and that can be improved. 512kB systems are going to be difficult to...

Yes, please watch the second video linked by reenigne in post #4. The one in the OP was taken from the video shown at the party - we had to make that one on location using mobile capture equipment, so it has some issues and isn't 100% representative. The basic tricks for achieving 16 colors in...

Didn't they have that "manufacturing test" device mentioned in the BIOS listing, which loaded custom code through the keyboard port during POST? I can remember at least one commercial IBM PC game (Avalon Hill's Galaxy?) which was sold on disk, but had the option of saving to/loading from...

The 8088 only gets a small fraction of the total frame time to push all this data out, if you want to avoid display issues. That's a limitation of CGA architecture in this particular mode. I don't think the Amstrad CPC or Gameboy have similar constraints (could be wrong of course). The 'safe'...

Ah, ok. Something about that name "Updating" didn't immediately suggest that it referred to the vendor ;) The "MCGP" on the sticker seems to be a pretty generic acronym for Monochrome/Color Graphics/Printer. So with that "M" plus the existence of a crystal, and four(!) jumpers, I'd be...

Hey, welcome to VCF! Being a PC bitmap font junkie, this is some very useful data right there - appreciate the historical notes too... those dumps would fit right in in my quest for international charsets for the Oldschool PC font pack. What's "updating.bin" though? :) that one seems to contain...

Yes, my impression is that it really does depend. It's not that you *must* start with assembly language, but I don't see why the idea is so questionable. And whatever Microsoft did in the 1980s, it's saner than the way they developed Altair BASIC through BASIC-86 on emulators of Intel CPUs...

Self-hosting compilers aren't that unusual. Typically I guess you'd start developing the compiler in another language, say assembly, and once you have the capability to compile at least some C code, you can start replacing bits of the source with your version of C until you've got something...

As far as I know, it's possible to latch a new counter value so the PIT doesn't load it until the current one hits zero. But this only works if: * You're using timer mode 2 or 3, and * You write your value without sending a new command byte first. Unless both of the above are true, the new...

Hm, come to think of it, I remember seeing something weird with PCem's PIC implementation. I could be wrong, but my suspicion was it failed to set the correct bit to indicate that a given IRQ is in service. *If* that's the problem, and another IRQ is firing while your interrupt handler is...

Very nicely done! Gave it a go on my 5160 with an IBM CGA card and there's zero snow during the actual game. (It snows during the black screen just before the game starts, but at least that can be easily hidden by blanking out the video.) Curiously, in PCem I do see the snow... it starts about...