One clever thing to note is to compare the screenshots of Keen 1 to those of Keens 2 and 3, which despite using essentially the same engine, appear far more detailed. This is an art/design...
One clever thing to note is to compare the screenshots of Keen 1 to those of Keens 2 and 3, which despite using essentially the same engine, appear far more detailed. This is an art/design innovation, not a technical one: the tiles themselves are much more detailed, but the level structure in terms of tiles—which is what the engine actually cares about—is the same, with large areas of uniform tiles.
I was pretty into Keen modding back in the day, and none of the modders ever gave the slightest consideration to the redraw constraint (in fact, this article was the first I'd ever heard of it), presumably because nobody was developing or playtesting on a 286 with an actual EGA card; we were all using Pentium iiis or 4s with EGA emulation over a bus hundreds or thousands of times faster than ISA, and even if you forced a whole-screen refresh, it would have taken microseconds rather than a goodly portion of a second. I suspect a fair few of the mods would hitch pretty badly on actual period hardware.
One clever thing to note is to compare the screenshots of Keen 1 to those of Keens 2 and 3, which despite using essentially the same engine, appear far more detailed. This is an art/design innovation, not a technical one: the tiles themselves are much more detailed, but the level structure in terms of tiles—which is what the engine actually cares about—is the same, with large areas of uniform tiles.
I was pretty into Keen modding back in the day, and none of the modders ever gave the slightest consideration to the redraw constraint (in fact, this article was the first I'd ever heard of it), presumably because nobody was developing or playtesting on a 286 with an actual EGA card; we were all using Pentium iiis or 4s with EGA emulation over a bus hundreds or thousands of times faster than ISA, and even if you forced a whole-screen refresh, it would have taken microseconds rather than a goodly portion of a second. I suspect a fair few of the mods would hitch pretty badly on actual period hardware.
Oh man, I played Keen 4 on a 486 with 4 MB of RAM, I don't even recall what video card.
It was so smooth.