5 votes

Porting [Death Rally] from DOS to Windows

3 comments

  1. pseudolobster
    (edited )
    Link
    This is what I loved about DOS. Shove bits directly into the video card's single framebuffer, then peg the CPU at 100% to wait for a keypress. That was all perfectly normal and there was nothing...

    // Copy image to screen
    memcpy((char*)0xA0000, myImage, 64000);
    // Wait for key press
    getch();

    Copy data directly to video memory and busy wait for key - perfectly legal in the DOS era.

    This is what I loved about DOS. Shove bits directly into the video card's single framebuffer, then peg the CPU at 100% to wait for a keypress. That was all perfectly normal and there was nothing wrong with it. It was a lot more like programming a Commodore 64. You didn't have to worry about protected memory or interfering with other processes, file locks or multitasking. You just had full and complete control over the hardware. Everything was more difficult, but anything was possible.

    3 votes
  2. dblohm7
    Link
    I loved Death Rally! This is awesome!

    I loved Death Rally! This is awesome!

    1 vote
  3. what
    (edited )
    Link
    I love these posts about developing for older systems. This post was a very interesting insight into the porting process. Also, I added [Death Rally] in the title to make it a bit less ambiguous...

    I love these posts about developing for older systems. This post was a very interesting insight into the porting process.

    Also, I added [Death Rally] in the title to make it a bit less ambiguous than "Porting from DOS to Windows". I hope that's alright?