When it comes to applications in the early days of DOS, space was typically more important than speed, so optimizing an application was a very different process for the programmer as you would be trying to make the program take up as little space as possible. Plus, you typically make content of some kind with an application, so developers had to come up with very creative ways of storing that data in as little space as possible, with one of the most common methods of data compression being RLE or "Run Length Encoding", or for something like a word processor or database program you would reduce the bits per character from 8 to 7 to completely ignore extended ASCII characters, or even down to 6 if you could exclude numbers, punctuations, or such, and even include special coding to indicate that a character or set of characters following required more bits than normal.

Also, I still use Deluxe Paint 2E. ;D

I do as well. Sadly grafx2 isn't stable and it doesn't offer noisy gradient.

Stojke wrote:

Roller Coaster Tycoon?

Well optimized, written in assembly, runs on any thing.

I went looking for info on Lattice and bumped in to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoCAD

When Marinchip Software Partners (later known as Autodesk) formed, the founders decided to re-code Interact in C and PL/1. They chose C because it seemed to be the biggest upcoming language. In the end, the PL/1 version was unsuccessful. The C version was, at the time, one of the most complex programs in that language. Autodesk had to work with a compiler developer, Lattice, to update C, enabling AutoCAD to run.

Nifty. 😀

Sometimes I wish certain games had assembly effort. Cave Story is one of them that had a lot of potential to run on 6th gen or 5th gen machines. 🙁

There's still a chance with a certain open sourced port out there I forgot the name of.

kao wrote:

Compare a game like Total Annihilation that was written in C++ which would produce horrible slowdown on that same P120.

I thought TA was rather forward looking. It scales ridiculously well. You can run the little campaign missions on a P120 if you must, but you can also have really huge multiplayer battles that benefit from a Athlon 64. It also simulates a lot of things that other RTS games don't and certainly didn't in 1997. Also, it will run entirely out of RAM, which I noticed because the HDD spins down during play.

When it comes to assembly, I believe it at least uses some MMX. I ran an Intel profiling tool against the game once.

swaaye wrote:

kao wrote:

Compare a game like Total Annihilation that was written in C++ which would produce horrible slowdown on that same P120.

I thought TA was rather forward looking. It scales ridiculously well. You can run the little campaign missions on a P120 if you must, but you can also have really huge multiplayer battles that benefit from a Athlon 64. It also simulates a lot of things that other RTS games don't and certainly didn't in 1997. Also, it will run entirely out of RAM, which I noticed because the HDD spins down during play.

On top of that, it's one of the oldest games (if not the oldest) that supports widescreen out of the box 😀
Big battles even made my Pentium 2 350 with 128 megs of RAM crawl 😜

Tetrium wrote:

On top of that, it's one of the oldest games (if not the oldest) that supports widescreen out of the box :)

The oldest game I have with native widescreen support is Wipeout 3 for the PS1. As such, running my copy in a PS1 emulator on my system with my 23" widescreen monitor at 1920x1080 looks spectacular for PS1 graphics. :3

Earliest widescreeny games I can think of are Fade to Black and Darklight Conflict.

TA enumerates every resolution your setup can display. It's not specifically widescreen. And unlike some games 10 years newer it doesn't have problems scaling its UI with this flexibility. That's magical.

I thought TA was rather forward looking. It scales ridiculously well. You can run the little campaign missions on a P120 if you must, but you can also have really huge multiplayer battles that benefit from a Athlon 64. It also simulates a lot of things that other RTS games don't and certainly didn't in 1997. Also, it will run entirely out of RAM, which I noticed because the HDD spins down during play.

FYI, I've run it on a Pentium 133 with 32MB and you could only do two player battles. It would slow to like 5 fps when there was a lot of stuff going on, but on Pentium IV and Athlon 64 boxes, it ran totally effortlessly. Even with 10 players and several hundred units moving around, there was no slowdown. Keeping in mind that this was all done with the game running in 640x480 resolution.

By comparison, Civil War Generals 2 is from the same year (1997) and it's leagues more primitive. Actually a dual-mode Windows 3.1/95 game (the executable is 32-bit, but it doesn't use any of the extended W95 system calls to ensure it will work on 3.1 with Win32s). It hogs 50% of the CPU and as soon as you start the game up, you can hear the fan kicking in.

I went looking for info on Lattice and bumped in to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoCAD

Hmm, now I just remembered that they had Aztec C on the Apple II as well. The Apples had a good amount of programming tools and even CAD programs which wasn't so much the case on the other 6502 machines. Atari and Commodore machines are pretty void of anything like that, but the the Apple II was more of a serious computer than them.

A real rarity would be the early versions of AutoCAD for the PC up to 1986, especially the first DOS 1.x releases. You could probably browse Ebay every day for a year straight and never find any copies of them.

I couldn't even find any old Usenet posts on Google Groups referencing them.

here's the original Lattice C source code for Digger: http://www.digger.org/digsrc_orig.zip
Pretty fascinating to look at, though the compiler itself is not available... a curious peek into how things used to be done back in the day. The source code for Styx is available from the same site.

urgh, once again I can't help thinking of porting Temple Run and/or Death Worm to CGA-equipped 8088s. 😉

here's the original Lattice C source code for Digger: http://www.digger.org/digsrc_orig.zip
Pretty fascinating to look at, though the compiler itself is not available... a curious peek into how things used to be done back in the day. The source code for Styx is available from the same site.

It's not really C, but a weird jumble of C, assembly, and even some BASIC.

urgh, once again I can't help thinking of porting Temple Run and/or Death Worm to CGA-equipped 8088s

How about SMB or Zelda 😉

Nah, maybe a little too ambitious. Anyway, I would love to port Digger for the C64. Ought to be super-easy since the 4-color CGA graphics can easily be converted for the C64's screen geometry (3-color tiles and sprites) and the polyphonic music should work well with the SID's natural twanginess.

You would have to write it from scratch though since the PC is so different from the C64 that it would be impossible to reuse any of the original Digger source code.

kao wrote:

How about SMB or Zelda 😉

or VVVVVV!

Shame it's not open, but there's nothing stopping someone to make a port that does. A problem would be trying to transform 320x240 to 320x200 while maintaining the sprites.

It would come as a nice full circle to see VVVVVV running on 4.77mhz. The music would have to be transcribed, and believe me, that's a much bigger nightmare than a code rewrite 😀

kao wrote:

I would love to port Digger for the C64. Ought to be super-easy since the 4-color CGA graphics can easily be converted for the C64's screen geometry (3-color tiles and sprites) and the polyphonic music should work well with the SID's natural twanginess.

Fun idea, I could take care of graphics and (probably) music - any C64 coders around here with some free time? ;)

leileilol wrote:

It would come as a nice full circle to see VVVVVV running on 4.77mhz. The music would have to be transcribed, and believe me, that's a much bigger nightmare than a code rewrite :)

Just tried a part of this song to brush up on my PC-speaker tracking skillz0rz... attached - transcribing it was much less of a pain than listening to the result :)

I did transcribe pushing onwards to .mod format once by ear. It turned out bad all over the place. I even snuck something awesome in the pattern view.

On topic, Turrican II for DOS runs smooth on the low-end 486s with full sound. 😀 Shame it has runtime errors for anything 6th gen and newer.

Fun idea, I could take care of graphics and (probably) music - any C64 coders around here with some free time?

A couple sprites I did in MS Paint (cherry is two hi-res ones as you can see). The background graphics...eh, hard to say whether they should be characters or bitmaps. Thinking the latter because C64 Dig Dug uses them since the "tunneling through the dirt" effect was easier to do when you can set individual pixels. The ball thing you shoot could be made with a tile/character as this was fairly common with projectile objects in C64 games to conserve sprites.

Obviously the music would sound vastly better with the SID than the PC speaker.

I find that Turrican 2 on the C64 is amazingly optimised. It's smoother than the Amiga version, which has slow downs all over the place 😀

I was also impressed by games that massive worlds on a single floppy, like Elite for example or lemmings.

I do a bit of programming, mostly C with the Arduino, a bit of C# with Visual Studio (the free version) and some python (there is an annual coding challenge here in Australia that helps me learn more). It's really more for me learn and stay "in the game" for my job.

But the most fun I have with higher level programming languages like Game Maker or Construct 2 because it makes things much more accessible and you can focus on the game WHAT and not so much on the HOW.

VileRancour wrote:

Just tried a part of this song to brush up on my PC-speaker tracking skillz0rz... attached - transcribing it was much less of a pain than listening to the result 😀

leileilol wrote:

I did transcribe pushing onwards to .mod format once by ear. It turned out bad all over the place. I even snuck something awesome in the pattern view.

Valiant efforts you two! 😁

I think VVVVVV's music has some post-production transforms on it that are outside the scope of trackers.

I once tried to transcribe Acidjazzed Evening into LSDJ on the Gameboy, I got about two patterns done before I threw it in, not due to difficulty, but for fighting with the controls of LSDJ. Trying to track with just a D-pad and two buttons is quite cumbersome.