Writing DOS games and demos with modern tools | Hacker News Reader

Writing DOS games and demos with modern tools

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54 pointsmariuz20 comments

When you have your tool chain up and running, here is a collection of tutorials to work through:

Wow, so much nostalgia. I used this a lot back in the day, along with several TXTs describing file formats, such as MOD, S3M, etc.

Same, Asphyxia tutorials were considered very good back in the day for democoding in x86 asm. I think they were included in "Programmer's Heaven", a CD full of (obviously) programming guides, tutorials and technical manuals https://archive.org/details/Programmers_Heaven_InfoMagic_Mar...

The sad part is that this setup is probably slower and laggier running on top end machines of today than turbo c running on the actual legacy hardware back in the day.

The great part is that it's free, one-click to setup and you have full code intelligence and debugging capability.

It's actually pretty close in speed, and quite a bit faster to compile larger code bases. The key benefit is being able to debug while the program is running in VESA modes, something you couldn't do in Turbo C or similar environments.

You could do this with the Turbo Debugger when you had a Hercules board attached to a second monitor.

This seems like such a needlessly kneejerk reaction just to speculate and rag unfairly on anything modern. Couldn't you have actually done some testing and research first?

Maybe - if you're just looking at keypress to character on screen. But you're missing a ton of other advancements - higher resolution screens, better colors for syntax highlighting, intellisense, robust debugging, and, of course, access to the internet for help that you need. Back in the day I had a printed copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List that I just had to muck with and pray I got it to work without hanging my computer. With this if it hangs, no big deal.

So, yes, the raw response rate from key press to phosphors being illuminated on the screen might be less, but the overall productivity of a developer is probably and order of magnitude more.

Then again, I did learn to program from the online help in Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++, so maybe there's something to those systems.

DOS game/graphics programming with DJGPP is how I learned C, and later C++, back in the (very) early 2000s. Very nostalgic.

> A simple mode 0x13 demo app plotting pixels while waiting for a keypress

Been wanting to check out DOS programming for a while but tooling setup always seemed overly daunting. If this works on an M1 it would be amazing.

Why would you want to program for DOS on an ARM Mac?

It's my main machine. The DOS aspect I find irrelevant as you have to emulate on any other platform.

There's something really fun about programming directly for a DOS machine. Mucking around with the interrupts, copying whole off screen rendered pages to the video RAM to show the new page, needing to think about RAM consumption, diving into assembly to optimize routines (probably not needed anymore), palette changes to simulate animation. Some of those constraints really help to promote creativity.

It does work on M1, that's my personal setup.

I feel the title buries the lede here - they forked DOSBox-X and implemented support for remote debugging the virtual machine with GDB!

I recorded a couple video tutorials doing this with vim and openwatcom C. I never published them though.

I kind of want to start a channel for that sort of thing but haven't really decided on a format and keep going back and forth on it. I've built up a fair amount of unpublished footage at this point.

Just start, you can always change the format later.

By the way, there seem to be two main groups of programming-related channels on YT. One are terribly serious and a bit boring because of monotonous voice and in general, well, not much is going on. On the other end of the spectrum you got pure entertainment and almost no knowledge transfer (maybe except inspiration) like Dani. It would be great to find some sweet spot somewhere in between, for people with ADHD like me who quickly get bored and need some emotions in the video but at the same time want to learn something and not just waste their time watching half-baked attempts at crazy game ideas.

"Coding Adventure" is one I'd really like to emulate, I think he hits the sweet spot well.

This would be very cool, I love these kind of videos. Perhaps you can find the right format as you building up your channel. There are lots of Youtubers shaping their channels over time to improve, imho the most important part is to start and get the content public.

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