Saturday, December 22, 2007

Continue to program in DOS graphics mode

Late 1997, although I've started to wrote windows program that suppose to be more advance than dos application, somehow I feel I'm being constraint with all the user friendliness of Visual Basic IDE. So I've focused back to my graphics mode programming in dos that gave me the room of creativity and satisfaction. Due to my sound foundation in Pascal, I've picked up C which will be taught in my course in one week time by writing two simple text mode card game blackjack & poker (This is listed on "My DOS Applications" blog with full source code) before my lecturer start the lecture ;)

1998, I did my first attempt in animation game programming by writing a horse racing game. By applying overlay, image scrolling and object refresh concepts, I've manage to get my horse racing game done with smooth animation effect ;) (You can get my horse racing game from "My DOS Applications" blog)

Mid 1998, my 2nd uncle passed me two programming books that were used by his friend's as degree reference book and told me it might be useful to me after seeing my bookshelf in my bedroom. I like to collect programming reference book, because the internet is so slow and expensive at that time, so books are my main source of reference material beside all the boring & very basic studies reference books. One thing I want to mention here is, one of the books given by my uncle is about graphics mode programming in dos ... :)

16h mode, with 640x480 resolution in 256 colors, my program will be more presentable. So I begin to read and write experiment program in 16h mode. I'm trying to convert my existing 12h mode GUI library to 16h mode (You can find LAMGUI in "My DOS Applications") so that I can convert all my existing program to 16h without major changes. The thinking is correct but it just didn't workout this way, I've forgot why I stopped to program in 16h mode after playing with 1 month but I believe it's beyond my capability at that time. So I sticked back to 12h mode which I'm more familiar.

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