31–40 of 83 posts
Sorry for the "asking for more"-style comment, but it would be amazing if this came in epub and not just PDF.
Ie. Rendering to PDF or HTML would be pretty straightforward. Rendering to video, audio, or as a chocolate bar would require more authorship. Would epub be much more work?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's not obvious to modern readers why a PC with significantly more powerful compute capabilities would struggle to keep up with significantly slower Nintendo hardware at the time for sprite rendering. To put it briefly, 4th generation and earlier games consoles saved on expensive RAM by not having frame buffers [0]. The CPU wrote a description of how to construct the scene using tiles and sprites to a smaller video…
I get what you're saying, but the comparison to "racing the beam" is maybe a little misleading, because the point is that you aren't "racing" the beam. Rather, the system is operating in perfect lockstep with the beam. From the software perspective, you set the scene up and then sit back while it draws. And then in the abstract and from the hardware's perspective it's not even one line at a time, it's one dot at a ti…
That's the same as the Atari 2600. It just occurred to me that the name "racing the beam" is misleading because you can't be too fast either. "Matching the beam" would be a better name. My point is the graphics hardware in both the 2600 and in tile+sprite consoles assembles the graphics just before it's sent to the video output without buffering the whole frame. The main difference is the 2600 graphics hardware is typically reconfigured every line while the later consoles' graphics hardware is typically reconfigured every frame (although re-configuring between lines is usually also possible, and some games left it unchanged on some screen refreshes to save CPU time at the expense of lowering frame rate).
>from the hardware's perspective it's not even one line at a time, it's one dot at a time.
Mostly true, but I tried to make the description generic to as many systems as possible, so "line" is IMO more broadly accurate because a line is composed of dots. The Neo Geo is a tile + sprite system too, and it renders to line buffers.
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Author's note from the book: "...I discovered Fabien Sanglard’s website and began reading his Game Engine Black Books on Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Inspired by those works, I wondered whether I could do something similar for Commander Keen: open up the source code, explore the files, and piece together a picture of the overall architecture and the clever tricks used. The style, dimensions, and structure of this book ar…
> To give it a personal twist, I inverted the title and cover to white. That is a great idea.
I suppose there's still Quake 3 Arena and DOOM3 to complete the full "John Carmack" early 90s to early 2000s technical overview series.
Or maybe something with the Sega Saturn. I heard the Sonic X-treme team worked so hard to make a 3d Sonic game for that platform in the mid 90s that multiple team members had to go on medical leave!
this looks like a copy of fabien's site, plus the topic is very related and likely trampolining on his brand :/
57 lines of CSS and the only distinguishing characteristic, the use of Deja Vu Sans Mono, isn't present. This is trampolining on his "brand" as much as my text editor is
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57 lines of CSS and the only distinguishing characteristic, the use of Deja Vu Sans Mono, isn't present. This is trampolining on his "brand" as much as my text editor is
The book's source has verbatim copy and pasted TeX ripped from Fabien's books which was licensed under GPL.
Masters of Doom is a great book on the history of id software, which includes the origins of the development of smooth scrolling by Carmack and Romero, which was groundbreaking at the time on PC.
Fun fact for C64 guys: The underlying mechanics of Carmack's technique is very similar to the full screen smooth scrolling effect on C64 at any speed and distance. It is nowadays referred to as DMA delay. ELIF: You trick the CPU to display screen data at a different starting point than as designed by the hardware. This is tricky and need to be executed cycle exact. Here is the explanation in detail together with all…
heh, is there a new meaning for ELIF? im not sure that there are many 5 year olds who would understand that ;-)
Someone ping Fabien Sanglard! Looks so much like his site!
Masters of Doom is a great book on the history of id software, which includes the origins of the development of smooth scrolling by Carmack and Romero, which was groundbreaking at the time on PC.
Fun fact for C64 guys: The underlying mechanics of Carmack's technique is very similar to the full screen smooth scrolling effect on C64 at any speed and distance. It is nowadays referred to as DMA delay. ELIF: You trick the CPU to display screen data at a different starting point than as designed by the hardware. This is tricky and need to be executed cycle exact. Here is the explanation in detail together with all…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact for C64 guys: The underlying mechanics of Carmack's technique is very similar to the full screen smooth scrolling effect on C64 at any speed and distance. It is nowadays referred to as DMA delay. ELIF: You trick the CPU to display screen data at a different starting point than as designed by the hardware. This is tricky and need to be executed cycle exact. Here is the explanation in detail together with all…
> ELIF: You trick the CPU to display screen data at a different starting point than as designed by the hardware. This is tricky and need to be executed cycle exact. heh, is there a new meaning for ELIF? im not sure that there are many 5 year olds who would understand that ;-)
ELIF: explain like I'm forty.