I would choose c too. I used to know pascal, but I forgot ):

I'd chosen Turbo C or Turbo Pascal as that segmentation on 8086 is really awful. And both Borland compilers really create nice machine code anyway.

@@blackcathardware6238 - That brings back memories. Turbo C++ and Microsoft Quick C were my favorite. Sadly, I didn't start using Turbo Pascal until version 6.

@@classicnosh I never knew there was a QuickC - you've blown my mind!

@@benz0rx86 - Oh, yes. If you have an MS-DOS, FreeDOS or even a DOSBOX machine. You can get it from WinWorldPC. It's like QuickBasic with the IDE, help files built-in and everything. It's actually fun to code with.

i know right? it's dynamite

I think his own graphics had a certain charm as well tho

Evan Verburg Definitely!

That's because it's not available on anything but a few display cards, and it only works with a composite monitor. It worked on the PC Jr, for example, and (maybe) on the original IBM CGA card when plugged into a composite display, but once everyone went to RGB displays, that mode disappeared because it can't actually be displayed on an RGB monitor.

Tom Wilson Ooohhh, now that makes sense actually.

Actually 8 bit guy had a nice video about composite mode.

Yeah it looks great but has one flaw, AFAIK it only looks that good on NTSC composite TVs or monitors... So wouldn't work correctly in most of the world outside the Americas where PAL or SECAM are used.

MultiMidden any TV made since the 90s should support all three video standards; regardless of where it was sold.

jerrywh3 same, this channel is my favorite!

jerrywh3 What was the old name of his channel agin I forget iBook guy or I can’t remember?

If I could spare more per month I would gladly give 8bit guy more money for more great content

Tay Tay yes it was iBook Guy.

Celcius1au when things get better for I, I will gladly support his channel monetarily. I’m glad people like you are able to give anything right now so I can enjoy such great content.

Agreed , makes a yuge upgrade to the look. Well worth it

He is a workaholic nerd, probably sleeps just few hours a day xD

Does the game come with the map editor?

Andrew Long Green/Red/Yellow can be used to great effect; especially if low-intensity blue is programmed as the background/border colour.

Double that. Magenta on the black background makes eyes hurt after a while, red and green are much softer in that regard.

Were you able to afford the 10MB hard drive upgrade? Or is it floppy only? ;)

Oh yeah I got a sweet deal on the hard drive! It only cost a second mortgage and my firstborn son. I was totally stoked to get it.

speaking of which, I have an old machine I probably should get up and running, it is a very late DOS era machine though, it's from the later 90's using a Celeron and i think megabytes of Ram :/

UnAnonymous I love you

Perfect Focus I love you too. ;)

Great point, I'm sure lots of folks would support him there. This guy is awesome.

Yes please on Gog

You can download it from the 8-Bit Guys website and use it on DOSBOX.

Oh yes please put it on GOG :)

Yes! Please try to put this on GOG.

is that greentext on youtube

This should be the real name of the game

"Planet x86" 😂 But in reality, he released "Planet X1" on Commodore VIC-20 (or 16, but I can't really remember), and later he released X2 on C64.

Jaekoff for someone wstching a guy's channel about retro stuff you sure are not familiar with mailing lists and qutoing are you?

>using meme arrows on youtube

🤔

@DamnMerasmus blows marijuana smoke on your face vigorously

@DamnMerasmus He's telling you to chill the fuck out, get laid, do something. "His own website where he provides downloads" is not steam, and has nowhere close to the same exposure.

@DamnMerasmus and I don't think we could but such awesome emojis on youtube two years ago, so there's that. And you didn't use a hip term like "necro-posting". If you want to complain about someone resurrecting a thread, you have to use a clever term! ;)

@DamnMerasmus Because he's a moron. What kind of a normal person would respond just 🤔

The VGA pixel art is absolute TNT.

No the GCA composite is TNT. The VGA is ATOMIC BOMB.

For me, the VGA is absolutely a DUKE NUKEM

Correct.

Yes it is

I think he gave a download version with the purchase of x2, and I would imagine he would do the same with x3

The C64 version has always included a free digital download. The same will be true for the MS-DOS version. I fully expect 90% of users to be playing it in DOSBOX.

The 8-Bit Guy Count me in the DOSBox camp. I don’t own any retro computers.

I would try it on my Pentium machine a few times, but then I will mostly play on DOSBox

The 8-Bit Guy: To clarify, do you have any plans on selling a download-only version? 'Coz I don't even have a machine with a disk drive any more, so I wouldn't feel like I had any need for a boxed copy. This might also be a good excuse to get yourself an account on Itch.io or maybe even see if GOG is interested in it.

Also Adlib, General MIDI and Sound Canvas modes pls

I personally prefer SB 16 / OPL-3

And PC Jr./Tandy 1000 sound!

it should support pc speaker, adlib music, and sound blaster sound effects. (sound blaster can use the same adlib music to not make things too complicated with a different set of opl3 tracks, let it use the same opl2 tracks)

General Midi would be nice for newer systems, basically any modern machine can run it. Adlib would be nice for the older cards.

I'm actually now thinking a fun alternative graphics mode for it could be 640x200 16-fixed-colours. Only a few games ever tried it (and generally then, like with Monkey Island, it was in an attempt to recreate the VGA graphics on a CGA/EGA monitor, and generally looked like crap), but maybe it's time for another shot? With a more sympathetic pixel-arting approach it could look pretty lush. And be an interesting alternative on VGA (where it would actually still be as high as the resolution/colour combinations could go... just with line-doubling and more flexible palette). Or indeed even 640x350 16-colours-from-64, which is actually more common...

AirborneSurfer CGA mode should work with EGA, because of backwards compatibility, but no special graphic for EGA.

DDavidonetwothree You meant that EGA is backwards compatible with CGA, and not that CGA is backwards compatible with EGA..

+DDavidonettwothree ... well yeah, that's fairly well known. Although the compatibility is a bit limited, as it only supports the RGB monitor and a lot of the special tricks that could be pulled off by directly messing with the CGA registers won't work (and at worst could end up damaging your EGA monitor if you tried them) +SuperMushroomy ... er, yeah, that's kinda what I understood by what he said. The basic 4-colour CGA mode will work on an EGA machine, without any need for a special EGA mode. Nice as that would be, as an in-between step between CGA and VGA (or even _instead of_ VGA, especially if it was 640x200... enough old games simply used the EGA graphics with some extra hardware acceleration, or an altered 16-colour palette, if you chose VGA mode).

cat doesn't give a ehm..... cat or was it something else ;-)

I'm also recalling there actually were quite a few 286/386 laptops with EGA chips inside. That just doesn't always feel as obvious, if the display is still monochrome.

Yeah, lots I think!

These Toshiba Laptops had gorgeous orangescale displays, not boring greyscale. :-)

Just want to add - you also just gave me a reason to finally build a vintage dos machine!

The goal is the game should play full speed on a 4.77 Mhz XT, as long as you are using CGA mode. Now, VGA may be a different story.

It'd be rather amusing if you managed to throw in some routines that could detect an x87 copro and speed things up somehow using it... I think that's the one an only time I've ever heard of anyone having a 5150 with an 8087 in it (I didn't even know they came in 8-bit-bus compatible flavours...) so it would be essentially optimising the game for that one particular computer out of the whole world :D

that being said some indie devs are legit lazy

many are just making a cheap derivative puzzle platformers with pixel graphics

I agree. Like, come on. Let's make some cool artwork, great soundtrack, and a very original plot.

Banana Mustard - You can often tell the difference between the quality indie devs and the slack handed ones tho. Some are doing derivative projects and opting for 8-bit/16-bit GFX but the good indies devs will strive to produce good standard and then improved work and not handcuff themselves to a style/genre unless they really have rewritten the holy grail for that genre and people are shouting 'TAKE MY MONEY!' The thing is that old games, styles and genres are also being rediscovered, and with triple A developers also getting lazier by the day, maybe the leading indie devs are just the right thing to offer other people games, corner the market and at a reasonable price where you don't feel like you've been robbed and then queue up again to get robbed again when you're expected to pay more for triple A games.

Most of the time, you can tell, but also some devs like to test things out (what are the challenges/are my thories on how to solve said challenges good, if not I might be screwed here.../how the language actually works/etc). A crappy mario clone might actually be someone's first attempt at making a platformer. Key word here being "might" XD... Anyway, I agree that alot of AAA games don't seem to respect their fan base anymore and I'm amazed at 8-Bit Guy's motivation on making the planet X series :P

He also distributed a disk image for PX2, so you could have played it in VICE or Frodo or what-have-you.

Chicken Scratching(.com) partial screen updates aren't cheating; that's called being smart. And VGA doesn't limit you to the default palette in _any_ mode; you can easily redefine any on-screen colour to any one of 260,000 possible colours, even in text, CGA, or EGA modes.

The accelerator functions of VGA, along with its multiple pages, should allow you to do full screen writes without any flicker (something which should only be an issue on CGA and maybe MCGA cards; even Hercules allows two pages). Just have two copies of the screen on separate pages, and write to one whilst displaying the other. When complete, set a flag to switch to your newly completed flag at Vblank and raise an interrupt so that your code knows to start drawing again, just this time on the other page. Bank switching / page flipping / double buffering was a fairly common technique for avoiding flickering and tearing back in the day. It lets you make a reasonably smooth, break-free impression even if your code can't run fast enough to score a perfect 50/60/70hz (or even 25/30/35hz) every time. And, yeah, that "second black" is just an artefact of how, by default, the first 16 colours of the VGA palette are set to those of CGA/EGA TTL. After that you get a larger default gamut whose exact contents depends on what VGA BIOS is in use, but it generally restarts from black, and may run through, say, the 216 colours of the 6x6x6 web-safe cube (duplicating at least a few of the first 16 along the way, and adding up to 232 total) then finishing up with an additional spread of greyscales or the like to fill it up to 256. There's no real magic to it, it's just so that the CLUT is initialised to _something_ other than all black or random noise after startup, in case a program flips to an 8-bit mode but forgets to initialise its palettes. In actual use, most programmers would be expected to completely overwrite that, from index 0 to index 255. However, the wider colour palette itself is useful; it cramps one's style rather less than to sacrifice one colour of 256 to be always transparent (generally set to some glaring colour not otherwise present in the main set of colours, often primary magenta), or one out of a 16-wide sprite palette when you've got 16 different palette banks (or more) to pick from in the first place (only losing 16 colours total, so leaving 240 behind - and as they only need be transparent for sprites, the "missing" 16 could be reused for backgrounds anyway), versus 1 out of a fixed set of 16, or worse a fixed set of 4, which are the circumstances where you'd probably want to use bitmasking instead.

I do believe that VGA's default 256-color palette is same for every properly compatible VGA card... and that 6x6x6 RGB cube + grayscale colors sounds actually like the default 256-color palette of xterm ;) But the VGA-palette is different: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Y5-Bocac39-9pqc.html sorry about the HORRIBLE finnish computer generated speech - there's textings in the video in english... anyway, you should get the idea from this video. It's kinda a palette for HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) color set (instead of RGB).

Me too!

It isn't so much a matter of success as it is just a matter of polish and features. I can't be expected to produce motion-video intros and things like that. I would need 2 years of working on this straight and a team of artists to do stuff like that.

Shelby It's not basic

wooosh

@@generaltechnology8250 woooosh

Just type in the assembly or the machine code ROM :^)

Your channel pic looks like a piece of hair I was like why isn't this coming off when I blow on it

or planet x16

Holy fuck, this

Nintendo REALLY liked naming their games like that

Cause according to it's trailer,some space marines heading to a unknown planet code named planet x3

@@Beansman-gp3ws Yes, because for the Nintendo 64 there was Super Mario 64, Excitebike 64, and more.

Wow

BigChap J both

Yeah, but probably didn't _run_ in it. You can get BASIC compilers. It's just that the closer to the metal you code in the first place, the more you can hand-optimise the code rather than relying on the compiler to do it for you, as well as the larger a program you can make with any kind of ease because the programming and particularly compiling side of things tends to need a lot more memory (which at the very least may mean more disc accessing, maybe even disc swaps) than the final result does. With something like Ultima 1 where running speed wasn't really an issue even on a poor CPU (and the actual moving parts of the graphics were limited to a rather small part of the screen), and even memory maybe wasn't super pressing, you could get away with it. If you wanted to make a game which was signficantly more complex, and had more things happening on screen at a higher speed, you'd have to move into C or Pascal, maybe even Assembler. (and remember even ASM isn't true machine code - it still uses a lot of human readable mnemonics for variables as well as opcodes, doesn't need you to have an intimate knowledge of where every last thing will end up in memory, etc... the compiler takes care of that for you, as well as auto-optimising some common routines if it detects you're using a sloppy version of them, etc...) Some later versions of the language like QuickBASIC for DOS, or STOS/AMOS (and GFA Basic) for the ST and Amiga, added more low level features and commands and much more powerful compilers whilst still retaining their otherwise fairly friendly HLL interface, so you'll actually find some fully compiled programs and games, particularly shareware but even some commercial examples written using them.

Blake my thoughts exactly

One could do that - I'm betting, though, that he is using a fairly modern assembler that supports functions and such to do the actual coding so there is not much reason to use C IMHO. It would be cool to know what assembler is being used - I'm betting $5 that he isn't typing it in using debug.exe ;-)

It's not just the language, per-se, it's the associated tools that also influence such a decision: compiler (for C or Pascal), assembler and linker. In addition, "3rd party" libraries might play into one's decision of programming platform. The "standard library" for the C compilers of the time offered little, so you'd be using other libraries to implement core graphics features and other I/O features. Or you'd be writing all of those libraries yourself in 808x assembler.

Yep exactly!

This is just more heroic in assembly. In assembly you are the master of the world (at least a small silicium silice of it)

Kordanor's Reviews It’s the sound track from PX2 he released. Themes I composed with this release in mind, based on Dune2 from Frank Kleplacki. It’s available as a download under the PX2 lite version we’re selling: eox.no/product/planet-x2-c64-box-set/

Ah, cool. Thanks alot!

I'm always surprised to see what I thought was kind of an obscure game has so many fans.

Dune II, obscure ?!? LOL, dude did you live under a rock ? xD

I'm guessing that his "VGA" mode is actually MCGA mode (320x200x256).

Well, MCGA is kinda like IBM playing revisionist history. It was released the same year as VGA, and it supported the 320x200x256 mode 13 and 640x480x2, but it lacked enough video memory to have multiple pages. It was sort of a VGA-lite, with 64K of video ram, instead of 256K. It couldn't do 640x480x16 mode. AFAIK, it was a defeatured display card that was only used on the low-end PS/2 25 and 30. We had a lab of model 25 machines at my High School.

Ah yes! I miss my model 30... those where the days

I messed around with Mode X, Y and Q on my PS/2 Model 60. :) Mode X is really nice to work with! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X

There was also one Epson machine that had MCGA -- the Equity Ie. It was a strange attempt at making a PS/2 clone, and not many were sold. 0blivi0n100 did a video about it.