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Tiny binaries probably relied heavily on the native OS's system libraries.
First to set the video mode, and then to set up a timer used to progress time.
Tiny binaries probably relied heavily on the native OS's system libraries.
How do you handle time with such small code size? I see a timer interrupt for the music, but what about the animation? Is it dependent on the speed of the underlying CPU?
Tiny binaries probably relied heavily on the native OS's system libraries.
- the graphics "driver" reads values out of certain registers (AL and AH?) at a set interrupt (maybe every X clock cycles?) and writes one pixel to the screen of whatever color those registers had in them
- by writing values into those registers and aligning the number of operations the program does with the frequency of the interrupts, you can get animation?
Even achieving any sort of flow control so you can switch between the effects is mind-boggling to me.
How do you handle time with such small code size? I see a timer interrupt for the music, but what about the animation? Is it dependent on the speed of the underlying CPU?
I used this to slow down my computer so that old games were playable. Hooked into the interrupt, wasted cycles, and could enjoy the game. :)
Tiny binaries probably relied heavily on the native OS's system libraries.
How do you handle time with such small code size? I see a timer interrupt for the music, but what about the animation? Is it dependent on the speed of the underlying CPU?
Later: Your question made me wonder what the performance of virtual 'target CPU' is - the 'cycles' setting in the config is 20000 and there's a rough estimate of what these numbers translate to here
https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Performance
So it looks like it's something along the lines of 'a 486 in the prime of its life'.
I've always thought the demo scene looked cool. Problem is, I don't really care about graphics and sound and am not an especially creative person. Are there are competitions that are purely objective? As in, the objective criteria is quantitative?