Re: Your hardware

On Aug 17, 7:48 am, Krice <pau...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 17 elo, 12:39, Glyph <glyph...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Are there any other specical requirements that you have that
I might miss that could prevent you from being playing my game?

If some
people insist using outdated or wrong hardware then it's
their loss.


Since this is the RL hard core I have to beg to differ.

One of the great things about text-mode games is that they typically
really, really great on a 286, 8086, machines with 4mhz (6mhz
overclock switch on), monochrome screens, ega-legacy, off a floppy,
quick from source, and so on.

Though it's become a fairly flashy affair these days, with the
popularity of porting to a gameboy or what have you (even I have the
environment waiting to code for the game boy) and full graphics and
even sound, it was originally a text-mode enthusiasm. Hence the '@'.

My suggestion is to target your code for a 386, EGA text mode, 25x80,
in *nix and then port to DOS. Here's why:

1. Some time ago I would have said 286. Most people, though, have
better than a 386 these days. It's safe to go ahead and make the
assumption that, yeah, people can run some serious cycles, about five
hundred times faster than the 286 and about one hundred times faster
than the 386. Well, actually, 286 support and emulation has about
disappeared. 386 is the new legacy dinosaur, so I suggest aiming for
386. The same advance of the ages holds for apple; once I would have
said target the iic, now I'd say just write for powerPC because, hell,
they gave in.

2. EGA is designed around the byte. 4 bits foreground, 4 bits
background. This keeps things lined up with what you'll probably be
doing as well, focusing on what information you can pack into fewer
bytes to still provide you with the representation required to flesh
out your design. Meanwhile there are many largely unexplored
possibilities in EGA that can be fun just for their own sake. Turn off
the flashing bit, for one, and try hi-intensity backgrounds. Using the
'high ascii' shading blocks you can more or less come close to
emulating a VGA impressionism, if you check out the archives of 90's
ANSI art groups like ACiD, iCE, or TWiST (517 and good luck). Though
the tradition in roguelikes is to shy away from higher-end graphics,
if you're sticking to text-mode that's really a big long step back,
and I don't see any problem with exploring the information that can be
imparted through all those colors. One neat-looking game is
Legerdemain (check rogue basin).

3. 25x80 as opposed to the later 43x80 (EGA) and 50x80 ('ega-legacy'
i.e. ega/vga cards, my favorite graphics cards), why? Because it was
the predecessor. Yes, you can fit more blockyblocks into 80x50, and
have a higher blocky resolution, but it's still blocky, and meanwhile
anything made in the predecessor 80x25 will look squished in 80x50.
And 80x50, a-ha, can't fit on an 80x25. So simplicity tells me 80x25
is teh m0de.

4. The bash shell is a great environment for programming, especially
with gcc on hand. Granted you will want to use curses or ncurses for
your keypress grabbing, but you'll find that the weird spaghetti mess
behind the screen doesn't like you using ANSI codes. I'm still working
on how to get around that. But there you go, once you're ready for
dos, just ditch curses.h for conio.h to get your keypress, and make a
header that sends ansi codes for all your cursor repositioning and
color, create the mvprintw function to take care of that, use printf
to output, and let it rip. At the worst you'll have wrongly assumed
that somebody running DOS has ansi terminal capability. Anyways even
windows users still either a. run on top of DOS, b. have a fully
featured dos shell, c. have a dos shell terminal emulator, or d.
support for "dos environment" that windows will try really hard to
keep up with, and most running examples of c & d emulate ansi.
.

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