every image has a CRTized version made using https://mattiasgustavsson.itch.io/crtview by @Mattias_G and the crispy pixel original

my converter has a bias factor between 0 and 1, that biases towards non-dithered colors. it's kind of a push and pull between less busy dithering and more detail

2/5

little known fact: qbasic can produce mind boggling effects

i'm making this engine in qbasic for DOS as a challenge, using qb1.1, the interpreted one, without resorting to assembly language hacks. hence the low resolution (fewer tiles/pixels = better performance)

3/5

right now my qbasic engine can run locked to 70, 60, 35, 30, or 18.2 frames per second. @discatte tested it and it runs at 35 fps on a 486sx-20mhz

i intend for it to have OPL music and sounds, with a PC speaker sfx and no music fallback for the 18.2 fps mode

4/5

the images here are all wallpapers (except for the FF7 one) that i grabbed off reddit for testing many years ago. they were all unsourced

5/5

@eniko

This is magically nostalgic for me. I had many friends in high school who were really pushing what could be done with VGA graphics with the tools we had available at the time (when we were supposed to be doing arrays or something in Turbo Pascal)

@venya i never managed to get very far with qbasic game development back in the day. lack of resources in the backwater part of the netherlands

so this is kind of like a revenge tour where i bend qbasic to my will after having been a professional gamedev for 10+ years >_>

@eniko @venya One thing I hate about QBasic is the "medium" memory model: together with the way strings work, it fills up available memory space like crazy.

I'm learning to use the VGA as well and I didn't know you could force it to double the scanlines. I knew that 320x200 is actually 320x400 with double scalines so is the screen actually copying the same scanline 4 times? If so: wow!

Nice project!