sparcie

Tag: Programming

  • Hercules Graphics

    Late last year I got a comment on one of my videos suggesting I could add Hercules graphics to my game project. It sounded like an interesting idea so I started considering how I would go about it. Hercules graphics isn’t that hard to program for, the main issue with…

  • Bob’s Fury Update: Bug Squished!

    For quite some time I’ve had a very nasty bug in my game, where basically it would lock up whenever a sound was played through any sound device on my microbyte 386sx machine. What made this bug tricky to fix is that it worked perfectly fine on other hardware I…

  • Bob’s Fury Update: Bug Hunting

    I’ve been doing some coding on Bob’s fury lately, basically making adjustments and making code faster in the hope that I could make it work well on a 286 class machine. I have been using dosbox to develop and test, but this doesn’t fully test the compatibility or stability of…

  • Modern BASIC: PCBasic and QB64

    Last month I had intended to make the next Sparcstation desktop post, but unfortunately have been having trouble getting the software I had intended to cover to build. So that’s still in the works and today we’re going to look at something else interesting: modern implementations of old BASIC Languages.…

  • Bob’s Fury progress update

    You may have noticed that I’ve been playing with a number of homebrew MS-DOS games lately. This has given me a little more motivation to work on my own project, my simple flick-screen platform game Bob’s fury. The main body of work left is to create the levels for the…

  • Making a new GWBasic game.

    When I was young I learned to code using GWBasic, a BASIC interpreter that came with MS-DOS 4.01. I’ve posted some code and talked about it in the past, but not really developed anything new, that is until today. I’ve re-written a game from scratch I had lost on a…

  • Creating a benchmark: part 6 problem solved!

    Quite some time ago, in fact more than a year ago now, I was working on a basic series of benchmarks to test the comparative performance of the Borland Graphics Interface (BGI) versus a hand coded graphics library. I ran into a problem with my hand coded library not working…

  • Huffman Coding – Compression results

    Before the Christmas break I started writing a encoding/compression library based on a technique called Huffman coding. I’ve since completed and tested the encoder and decoder, today we’ll discuss the results of several compression tests in comparison to the RLE encoding technique. Here are links back to the posts for…

  • Huffman Coding

    Quite some time ago I did a short post about a compression technique called run-length encoding (or RLE), that was a commonly used compression method for graphic and level data. At the time I wrote and implemented it for the graphics and level data for my home-brew game Bobs Fury…

  • QBasic Gorillas

    Today I’m looking at the classic old artillery game Gorillas, it was an example program for the Qbasic interpreter that was packaged with MS-DOS 5.0 and later. Because it was so widespread, being on practically every machine of its time, it was widely played and loved by many. I first…