i'm making a #QBasic game using mode 13h, 320x200 8bpp. i'm using the line doubling feature of the VGA card to make it 320x100 then manually doubling each pixel horizontally for 160x100
i realized i could use a palette with 3 bits red/green and 2 blue, and then do "subpixel" dither to generate the in between colors. i made a converter to test if that would look good, and it does
here's a thread of images showing what that looks like
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#PixelArt #QBasic #dos #RetroComputing #RetroDev
Some weird stuff going on with new literal strings that I add, where after like 10 characters it seems to add a NULL character and I don't know if this is a 16-bit thing or a WATCOM thing where there's just something weird going on when it's reading where the string is located because as far as I can see in the EXE, the string is properly formatted.
Finally adding the file browser felt good. Been thinking about this for months but finally found inspiration to just code it. Originally I wanted to extend the first function that lists all the files (I have since added functionality there with being able to go back and forth in that screen too) but I broke it out into it's own file to deal with the cursor better. Really happy with how it came out! I also have already reused it for the edit function, just need to add that to insert.
okay this is a shot in the dark but do any
#DOS folks know anything about where one would start with actually authoring PC speaker sound effects?
But it does feel good to add this after taking such a long break from coding this thing. Did struggle with some oddities with literal strings, which I don't know if it is a compile bug or what, but putting it in a variable first fixed that issue. Otherwise, somehow a null terminator was showing up in the string where I didn't have one and viewing the EXE in a hex editor showed the string the proper way. If I made the string the same as a different literal, it worked too. Watcom, what's going on?
I could technically remove the old LoadBox but I don't feel like ripping it out. That would require other code changes. I did select TAB to bring up the file browser here but I might need to change that to F1 so it will behave the same way if I do add it do picking BMP file names since in that box, TAB swaps between two fields.
Took several hours but managed to add the ability to finally browse for a file name when loading a project in this thing. The cursor code ended up simpler than in my other project but also this one has fixed dimensions so maybe that's why (always 4 columns max and 16 rows max). Still, finally having this text mode file browser is neat, though I don't know yet if i want it to support folders. I don't think it needs to. Next to adapt this for picking BMP files to select for the entries.
Tried to set up LSP with Sublime Text for my DOS stuff but the clangd setup is just, I dunno, I see the good stuff but then it does things like have issues with Watcom's header files and some other little things that just add up and make me not want to use it.
My hot take is no one should be using Unreal Engine. UE5 is a blight on the industry, and it gives Epic too much power. It's like Google with Chrome.
Not to be out done by John Carmack showing his entire ass again, Tim Sweeney proceeds to show his ass again too. Hopefully more people notice how fucking stupid both of them are.
Eniko Fox
