HunterZ wrote:

Gemini000 wrote:

Also, I never understood the difference between BASICA and GW-BASIC. My Tandy 1000 SX system disks have BOTH and as a kid I just used BASICA instead of GW-BASIC for no particular reason I can remember.

Apparently BASICA uses code that is baked into a ROM on the IBM PC, while GW-BASIC does not require that?

Yep. BASICA is the IBM (PC-DOS) variant that strictly requires the code in ROM, which is in fact Cassette BASIC (and adds disk/file handling and other features, hence the 'A' for 'advanced'). 😁 GW-BASIC is the Microsoft version for OEM and retail MS-DOS editions.
Sometimes a tiny 'BASICA.COM' might be included as a simple loader for GW-BASIC for compatibility reasons (I think that's what Tandy DOS did?)

VileRancour wrote:

Sometimes a tiny 'BASICA.COM' might be included as a simple loader for GW-BASIC for compatibility reasons (I think that's what Tandy DOS did?)

I don't think that's exactly right as I do remember the startup text of both BASICA and GW-BASIC were different, plus they provided different "bytes free" counts.

SquallStrife wrote:

I see what you're saying WRT constants, but I don't agree. […]
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I see what you're saying WRT constants, but I don't agree.

Yes, a literal cannot be changed at runtime, much like a constant, but a constant has an identifier that can be used elsewhere. It's an important enough distinction, I think, that it's wrong to say that one is the other.

I understand that you know what you mean, and when you're a one-man-team, you're the only person it needs to make sense to, but if you want to teach others to program I think it's important to get the details consistent.

E.g. now, if you made a sequel, and decided to talk about the CONST keyword, you'd need to explain that what you previously called a constant isn't /really/ a constant. See where I'm coming from?

I don't mean to shit all over your work, it's a really top notch video, but I think this is an important distinction that needs to be made. :D

*nods* Next time I do a video like this I will do a better job of making the distinctions. :B

Ancient DOS Games Episode 181 - Redneck Rampage is online, Bronchitis be damned! ;D

No seriously, I got pretty darn ill immediately after getting my QBASIC video online. I'm about 99% better now thankfully, though I still have the occasional cough and my voice isn't 100%, which you can sorta tell in this week's ADG video, although there are moments where I sound mostly normal too. :B

As for the game itself... I can't believe there are people who actually like this thing. It's very badly designed and its poor design decisions are the focus of most of the video. That said, it's designed in such a way that so long as you have the game mastered, (or you cheat), you can still have fun playing it, but that's not the mark of good game design, plus when a game which was sold on store shelves can't even get saving and quitting working properly, you can bet I'm going to tear into it; screw the majority opinion! :P

The demo was pretty badly designed too, for the record.

What's the story with Redneck Rampage being designed for a resolution that isn't supported by the setup program?

They opted for high res artwork. The setup program doesn't list 640x400 as not all video cards' VBE has that res (same reason why C&C95/Red Alert 95 also had letterboxed 640x480 as an option). Build engine's 2d stuff are formatted for 320x200, so the minimum recommended 640x480 selectable (often a res likely available on VESA 1) gives ugly stretching..

(also you'll get a 'holy shit' if you attempt to select 320x200)

leileilol wrote:

They opted for high res artwork. The setup program doesn't list 640x400 as not all video cards' VBE has that res (same reason why C&C95/Red Alert 95 also had letterboxed 640x480 as an option). Build engine's 2d stuff are formatted for 320x200, so the minimum recommended 640x480 selectable (often a res likely available on VESA 1) gives ugly stretching..

System Shock is another game where 640x400 looks really good compared to 640x480 due to 640x480 simply performing an aliased stretch on the 640x400 graphics.

One of the things that's interesting with the Build Engine is that despite the limited options for selecting video settings, if you go straight into the config file there's a whole mess of things you can do, including setting non-standard resolutions and having them work, if your graphics card supports them. Heck, if you set the ScreenMode value to '2', which is used for "Screen Buffered", AKA "Mode-X Unchained VGA", you can set a whole slew of different width and height settings and will likely get a working result, particularly when using a multi-sync monitor. :B

Build even has Red/Blue anaglyph 3D support, but it kinda sucks since it tints everything straight blue and red, so you can't make out any colours at all and everything looks really dark and ugly. :P

Ancient DOS Games Episode 182 - If It Moves, Shoot It! is online!

...also, my voice is still knackered a bit from being sick not too long ago. Hopefully it doesn't come across TOO badly in the video. ^_^;

This game's about as obscure as they get, so it's no wonder no one even attempted to guess what game I'd be covering this week. Hopefully next week's game won't be so hard to figure out. ;)

Also, the whole thing with the EGA timing being messed with for death transitions... When I tried to record one of those transitions with DOSBox's internal recording functions I literally ended up with about 50-something video files, each a fraction of a second long! :O

Thanks for the video. I actually bought this game around 1989 for my XT. It was published by Martech in europe and was called Phantom Fighter. I don't remember playing it much as it was very difficult due to finicky controls and bad gameplay. At the time all my friends had Atari ST or Amiga machines with all these great arcade games running on them, and there were not many shoot-em-ups available on the PC... so when I saw this game I thought I could experience the same kind of fun too. However as you accurately pointed it, this game was a real mess 😒

Come to think of it, most of my early game buying experience for the XT at the time consisted of one disappointment after the other. I wanted to be able to play the same games I was playing at the arcades or at my friends, but it would be several years ahead until the PC would be ready to compete with them.

Never played this game, but it looks quite impressive considering it was released a year before Commander Keen and has scrolling detailed, animated backgrounds and large numbers of sprites.

Is the background animation done through palette tricks? What about in non-VGA modes?

I guess Stargoose was around the same time (maybe a year earlier?) and was probably a tighter shooter, but it didn't have animated backgrounds.

HunterZ wrote:

Is the background animation done through palette tricks? What about in non-VGA modes?

I took a closer look at the backgrounds and... actually... yeah, they're just palette tricks. They're done really well though and I really had to scrutinize them just now to realize that's what was going on. :o

Was that a shareware title? I thought I remembered seeing that name on BBSes back in the day. Maybe they were warezing the full game and no one realized it. I never downloaded it.

This might be a good game to test with Dosbox-X, it tries to emulate a lot of the scanline & timing hackery (it runs the "Copper" demo for example.) I don't know how well it supports *EGA* hacks though.

Very interesting... Maybe because of the fact that it's a port of an Amiga game, some of its technical trickery wouldn't translate well to PC hardware at that time.

Just for shits and giggles, I decided to try out the Amiga original "Phantom Fighter". The graphics are much more colorful and there is music (along with those two digital sound effects 😜), but the gameplay was no better even with the horizontal scrolling levels. It's a bit like that Zool port for DOS: A mediocre game that was badly ported over to an even less-capable machine.

The "timing tricks" just looks at a glance like it's manipulating the size of the framebuffer, which even the IBM CGA supports (it's used extensively in the 8088 MPH demo, for instance).

This is consistent with DOSBox's behaviour of creating a new AVI for each "stage" of the effect, since DOSBox (like nearly all emulators) doesn't emulate the "monitor", only gives you a more-or-less direct view of the FB, and it starts a new file when the resolution changes.

This is in contrast with the Sierra "screen shake" effect, for example, which manipulates the CRTC to begin the frame raster earlier/later.

Edit: Also, try this game in DOSBox-Daum, the PC Speaker sound effect sounds a lot cooler! 😉

Edit2: I just shot this (yep, it's crooked, deal with it!! 😜), so you could see what the effects are meant to look like. Gameplay starts at 2:09 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eNflid1XXE

SquallStrife wrote:

Edit2: I just shot this (yep, it's crooked, deal with it!! :P), so you could see what the effects are meant to look like. Gameplay starts at 2:09 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eNflid1XXE

Good call! I was completely unaware that it was possible to mess with the internal framebuffer of these old graphics cards! :o

Would you mind terribly giving the video a proper title and a description? I've had a couple comments asking if I'd bug Clint to make a video detailing this but now that you have I could just link to yours instead. :B

Done and done. 😀

SquallStrife wrote:

Done and done. :)

Thanks! I've posted links to it both on YouTube and on my website! :D

Ancient DOS Games Episode 183 - Alley Cat is online! :)

I'm actually somewhat surprised how well remembered this game is. It's one of the oldest games I've yet covered and it almost broke the record on correct guesses sent in, set by Duke Nukem 3D way back in Season 2! :o

In any case, this game was kind of a pain to deal with at first, but once I had it working it was a fun little thing for sure. Finding a manual for it digitized online really helped too and I'm not all THAT surprised at just how many things in this game have names, whether we get to see them or not. That just seemed to be common practice with early video and computer games: NAME EVERYTHING! :B

I remember playing a pirated copy of Alley Cat in the late '80s.

I had no idea it was originally a booter (but it's not surprising) or that it supported anything other than CGA. I wonder how many people actually played it on PCjr compared to standard PCs and clones.

For how well-known this game is, physical copies are preposterously rare. I've only seen a single one on eBay ever, and it went for over $400 (I shit you not). I seriously doubt that it was ever legitimately made freeware... because IBM and stuff.

Dunno about cycles=auto, by the way - most of the game runs fine this way, but the fishbowl subgame is way too fast; something more in the 4.77MHz ballpark (~300 cycles) would fix that.

re: "people pointing things out to me even when I don't ask" - gee, wonder what that refers to 😉