[HN Gopher] Commander Keen's adaptive tile refresh
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       Commander Keen's adaptive tile refresh
        
       Author : atan2
       Score  : 117 points
       Date   : 2023-07-27 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fabiensanglard.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fabiensanglard.net)
        
       | Dwedit wrote:
       | I see fabiensanglard.net, I upvote.
        
         | ekorz wrote:
         | He is a treasure. His CPS1 book is outstanding.
         | 
         | If anyone knows other classic-gaming blogs, where there is
         | technical depth, please do share. https://nicole.express/ and
         | https://sudden-desu.net/ are my other favorites.
        
           | lockhouse wrote:
           | His Game Engine Black Book series is excellent as well.
           | 
           | One of these days I'll make a retro DOS game for fun. Just
           | need to find the time.
        
       | lowbloodsugar wrote:
       | I mean, we were doing the wrap-around "trick" in 1981 on the BBC
       | Micro - and I didn't know it was a trick so much as in the
       | manual. The Defender and Scramble clones on the beeb were super
       | smooth.
        
       | clintfred wrote:
       | Anyone here read "Doom Guy"https://amzn.to/43DLW2U? I'd love to
       | hear what you think of it.
       | 
       | I have really enjoyed Jason Schreier's recent books on game dev.
        
         | ant6n wrote:
         | I always recommend "the Masters of Doom". Probably mostly
         | accurate. Perhaps a bit exaggerated at times. But definitely a
         | great story, and well written.
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | The linked article says Fabien loves it.
        
           | clintfred wrote:
           | Yep! I saw that he mentioned it and was trying to get some
           | more perspectives. Who am I kidding? I should just buy it.
           | :-)
        
       | mortenjorck wrote:
       | The fluidity of the scrolling in Commander Keen 4-6 was unmatched
       | on PC for years, even as games moved to 256-color graphics.
       | Between Carmack's incredible technical work and Adrian Carmack's
       | [1] art, Id had perhaps the best-looking PC platformer well into
       | the 1990s.
       | 
       | [1] No relation to the more famous Carmack, but IMO the unsung
       | master of the 16-color palette.
        
       | AndrewStephens wrote:
       | I remember writing a tile-based game for Window98 using DirectX
       | 5. I originally implemented something similar to what is
       | described in this article. My case was not as complex because the
       | screen didn't scroll but large numbers of tiles could potentially
       | need redrawing.
       | 
       | I ended up ripping out all of that code because when I tried to
       | profile the cost of drawing the whole screen with my RIVA TnT
       | card I literally couldn't measure the tiny amount of time it
       | took.
       | 
       | I am glad I missed the EGA period of PC development, I never
       | would have gotten anything done.
        
         | icoder wrote:
         | I was the opposite, I loved programming so low level,
         | optimising using bitshifts instead of multiplications, writing
         | essential code in assembly, writing 16 or 32 bits at a time (as
         | processors developed).
         | 
         | Continuously learning from the scarce resources I had (books
         | from the local library and a floppy disk with txt files).
         | 
         | I was too young (mid teens) / unexperienced to get anything
         | finished but did manage smooth vertical scrolling and almost
         | got the horizontal stuff working, double buffering a rotating
         | 3D cube (z buffering, math, line by line polygon drawing).
         | 
         | Then came DirectX and you lost all touch with the machine, a
         | rotating 3D cube was breeze, I didn't see the fun in that.
        
           | pengaru wrote:
           | If you ignore the GPU acceleration APIs and try programming
           | graphics the old fashioned way but on modern multi-core &
           | SIMD machines, you can more or less still have a very similar
           | rewarding experience.
           | 
           | Sure it won't compete with the performance of GPUs, but I
           | feel like we should have a category of GPU-less PC graphics
           | for things like the demo scene. Where you strive to deliver
           | interesting results at modern resolutions but hamstrung by
           | CPU-only, incentivizing exploring parallelization techniques,
           | SIMD optimization that strongly resembles assembly coding of
           | yesteryear, and good old fashioned cleverness.
        
       | sdfghswe wrote:
       | Oh man Commander Keen was such a lovely little game. I gotta find
       | a way to run it again.
       | 
       | BTW. Recommendations how to run this? As a "grown up" I haven't
       | used windows in about... 20 years? How do I play this on Debian?
        
         | elteto wrote:
         | You can start playing right now:
         | https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_1_-_Maroone...
        
         | lagniappe wrote:
         | you can run it in the broswer
        
         | nick_ wrote:
         | Dosbox is my guess
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | geon wrote:
       | I implemented the second method a couple of years ago, but
       | drawing even just the leading edge was very slow. I did it in C
       | though and have never really mastered asm programming.
       | 
       | https://github.com/geon/kate/blob/master/src/platform/dos/eg...
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-27 23:00 UTC)