[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Thu Sep 19 06:07:42 PDT 2013


On 19 September 2013 17:24, Nick Sabalausky <
SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 18 Sep 2013 13:31:48 -0700
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> >
> > I remember in the old DOS days, some games would load up custom
> > graphics into the video card's text font buffer, so that they can
> > draw sprites just by writing the corresponding characters into the
> > video card's text buffer.  You can get very fast drawing rates since
> > the video card does most of the work for you (and you only need to
> > transfer 1 byte per 8x8 block of pixels instead of 8 bytes or more).
> >
>
> That's essentially the same strategy behind the graphics hardware in
> most 8/16-bit consoles. Basically the ones from around SMS/NES and then
> up until 3D. You can identify them from the grid-based
> layouts (which were a huge improvement, for both gamers *and*
> developers over the "carefully time your opcodes to adjust the
> scanlines while they're being drawn" used by Atari VCS/2600 and, I'm
> guessing, probably the ColecoVision and SG-1000, which is what make
> them so amazingly affordable at the time).
>

Atari 2600 was the only scanline renderer I know of from that time, and it
certainly was made to be cheap!
ColecoVision and SG-x000 were not affordable by comparison to the 2600.

ColecoVision, Intellivision, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, NES, SMS (SG-1000 and
friends), Genesis, Snes, C64, etc, etc were all tile renderers, and the
first 5 items in that list didn't even have scroll-offset registers.

In DOS, a lot of CGA/EGA/VGA games used a similar approach as
> DOS-text-mode/NES/SMS/etc, but it had to be done in software.
> Obviously in those cases it didn't reduce the amount of data sent to
> the video card, but it did still reduce (significantly) the amount of
> HDD and RAM required to store the levels, and it somewhat
> simplified/reduced the amount of processing needed to render.
>
> (I've done a bit of old-school homebrew, and got my real coding start
> in DOS VGA gaming. Fascinating and incredibly fun stuff to develop for.
> I'd love to design/build my own tile-based console someday, just for
> the heck of it.)
>

Do it, it's surprisingly easy, but jolly good fun :)
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