Chopper Commando Revisited • Hacker News Board

Re: Chopper Commando Revisited

#21

Post by frou_dh » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 12:43 PM UTC

loadzero wrote: post #10

loadzero wrote: post #2

Author here. I used to play this 2D flick-screen CGA DOS helicopter game as a kid, and I remember enjoying the simple presentation combined with what would now be called sandbox elements. I thought it was really cool that you could eject from the helicopter and still run around and do things as a little sprite dude, and then get back in and fly off. When I saw that the source was available, and had a poke around, I d…

As a postscript, For the web hackers out there - the lossless animation at the start of the article is not a or a gif. I got annoyed with how video codecs destroy pixel art, and other things, so I wrote my own. This was almost more fun than doing the port.

Incidentally, that's why I'm not interested in playing any games using a streaming service like OnLive, Google Stadia, etc.

Ever since PCs have had DVI and consoles have had HDMI, gaming has been pristine lossless imagery. Go to IP video streaming and have compression artefacts taking a dump on every single frame? No thanks!

Re: Chopper Commando Revisited

#22

Post by RhysU » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 12:50 PM UTC

transitorykris wrote: post #20

Ah yes. The Mark Currie zone. Going all the screens to the right and shooting a hole in the hill and flying through it got you re-armed. And don’t hit the text, it’s quite solid.

Aaaaahhhhh my head!

Also, the slowdowns on partially off-screen explosions.

Re: Chopper Commando Revisited

#23

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

loadzero wrote: post #7

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use something like freepascal with SDL bindings?

With these restoration projects, I am usually looking to maximise code portability and minimise dependencies, which for me means C. Sticking with Pascal would have been more authentic to the original source code, but I think that would have been more painful for me to deal with, and come with a lot of unknown unknowns. I would likely also have been sacrificing my ability to port it onto the web and other interesting…

Yeah, that makes sense, I mentioned freepascal specifically because it has pretty broad platform support (and can generate LLVM bitcode). But, maybe the cost of translating to C is worth it.