[HN Gopher] Commander Keen's adaptive tile refresh ___________________________________________________________________ Commander Keen's adaptive tile refresh Author : atan2 Score : 117 points Date : 2023-07-27 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (fabiensanglard.net) (TXT) w3m dump (fabiensanglard.net) | Dwedit wrote: | I see fabiensanglard.net, I upvote. | ekorz wrote: | He is a treasure. His CPS1 book is outstanding. | | If anyone knows other classic-gaming blogs, where there is | technical depth, please do share. https://nicole.express/ and | https://sudden-desu.net/ are my other favorites. | lockhouse wrote: | His Game Engine Black Book series is excellent as well. | | One of these days I'll make a retro DOS game for fun. Just | need to find the time. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | I mean, we were doing the wrap-around "trick" in 1981 on the BBC | Micro - and I didn't know it was a trick so much as in the | manual. The Defender and Scramble clones on the beeb were super | smooth. | clintfred wrote: | Anyone here read "Doom Guy"https://amzn.to/43DLW2U? I'd love to | hear what you think of it. | | I have really enjoyed Jason Schreier's recent books on game dev. | ant6n wrote: | I always recommend "the Masters of Doom". Probably mostly | accurate. Perhaps a bit exaggerated at times. But definitely a | great story, and well written. | bombcar wrote: | The linked article says Fabien loves it. | clintfred wrote: | Yep! I saw that he mentioned it and was trying to get some | more perspectives. Who am I kidding? I should just buy it. | :-) | mortenjorck wrote: | The fluidity of the scrolling in Commander Keen 4-6 was unmatched | on PC for years, even as games moved to 256-color graphics. | Between Carmack's incredible technical work and Adrian Carmack's | [1] art, Id had perhaps the best-looking PC platformer well into | the 1990s. | | [1] No relation to the more famous Carmack, but IMO the unsung | master of the 16-color palette. | AndrewStephens wrote: | I remember writing a tile-based game for Window98 using DirectX | 5. I originally implemented something similar to what is | described in this article. My case was not as complex because the | screen didn't scroll but large numbers of tiles could potentially | need redrawing. | | I ended up ripping out all of that code because when I tried to | profile the cost of drawing the whole screen with my RIVA TnT | card I literally couldn't measure the tiny amount of time it | took. | | I am glad I missed the EGA period of PC development, I never | would have gotten anything done. | icoder wrote: | I was the opposite, I loved programming so low level, | optimising using bitshifts instead of multiplications, writing | essential code in assembly, writing 16 or 32 bits at a time (as | processors developed). | | Continuously learning from the scarce resources I had (books | from the local library and a floppy disk with txt files). | | I was too young (mid teens) / unexperienced to get anything | finished but did manage smooth vertical scrolling and almost | got the horizontal stuff working, double buffering a rotating | 3D cube (z buffering, math, line by line polygon drawing). | | Then came DirectX and you lost all touch with the machine, a | rotating 3D cube was breeze, I didn't see the fun in that. | pengaru wrote: | If you ignore the GPU acceleration APIs and try programming | graphics the old fashioned way but on modern multi-core & | SIMD machines, you can more or less still have a very similar | rewarding experience. | | Sure it won't compete with the performance of GPUs, but I | feel like we should have a category of GPU-less PC graphics | for things like the demo scene. Where you strive to deliver | interesting results at modern resolutions but hamstrung by | CPU-only, incentivizing exploring parallelization techniques, | SIMD optimization that strongly resembles assembly coding of | yesteryear, and good old fashioned cleverness. | sdfghswe wrote: | Oh man Commander Keen was such a lovely little game. I gotta find | a way to run it again. | | BTW. Recommendations how to run this? As a "grown up" I haven't | used windows in about... 20 years? How do I play this on Debian? | elteto wrote: | You can start playing right now: | https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_1_-_Maroone... | lagniappe wrote: | you can run it in the broswer | nick_ wrote: | Dosbox is my guess | [deleted] | geon wrote: | I implemented the second method a couple of years ago, but | drawing even just the leading edge was very slow. I did it in C | though and have never really mastered asm programming. | | https://github.com/geon/kate/blob/master/src/platform/dos/eg... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-27 23:00 UTC)