GloriousCow wrote on 2025-04-21, 21:22:

The best pel panning test for EGA is clearly Fantasy Land, but I'm wondering if anyone's aware of a text-mode pel panning demo for VGA.

I'd like to test my VGA emulation. Commander Keen works, but the VGA extends the pel panning by bytes as well as pixel, and there's a bit of a difference in how text mode pel panning works in text mode now that we have 9 columns.

If there's nothing out there I could hack up my own demo I suppose.

There's Tsengs' VDIAG, although maybe only for Tseng cards?
Then there's VGATEST. (https://github.com/barotto/VGATEST)
There's also tweak16b.
There's WHATVGA for easy coverage.
CheckIt Diagnostics (MS-DOS) tests some stuff too.
There's 'pgame' too (with source code), but don't remember where I found it.
Edit: Found it: https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3089

There's https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/ega … nlines.1246033/ too, but that's graphics mode.

Also interesting:
https://hackaday.io/project/6150-beckman-du-6 … -a-new-vga-mode
The myth of the vertical retrace interrupt on EGA/VGA

pgame is fun. I noticed that it uses the values of 0-F for pel panning in mode 13h.

Are you familiar with these demoscene demos? Yo! and Starport both use the textmode way beyond they were ever meant to, including scrolling.

digistorm wrote on 2025-04-25, 07:48:

Are you familiar with these demoscene demos? Yo! and Starport both use the textmode way beyond they were ever meant to, including scrolling.

Talking text demos, there's the whole tmdc entries too https://www.pouet.net/search.php?what=Tmdc&type=prod

digistorm wrote on 2025-04-25, 07:48:

Are you familiar with these demoscene demos? Yo! and Starport both use the textmode way beyond they were ever meant to, including scrolling.

Thanks, those are perfect.

Here's Yo! in MartyPC.
https://youtu.be/f2B63J8h7eQ

The scrolling effect on the top is very clever - they are animating a shaded box texture through the VGA's font glyph definitions, but also scrolling the top with the pel-pan register, which moves the attributes (and thus the colored regions) at a different apparent rate.

The part beneath the scroller has pel-panning disabled because it is a split screen, and pel-panning is set to disabled in the split screen.

Funny enough - Starport isn't text mode at all. It's 640x350 16 color mode. It's just designed to *look* like text mode.

lolo799 wrote on 2025-04-25, 12:56:

digistorm wrote on 2025-04-25, 07:48:

Are you familiar with these demoscene demos? Yo! and Starport both use the textmode way beyond they were ever meant to, including scrolling.

Talking text demos, there's the whole tmdc entries too https://www.pouet.net/search.php?what=Tmdc&type=prod

Tried a few of these, most of them are protected mode or windows console apps. Still cool though, just can't emulate them yet 😀