That's so random bc this game still pops up on my memory frok time to time. For a bit I had a 80286 and the actual CGA adaptor to play this game in the right resolution. But I also had a 486DX50 and this game careened by so fast it was unplayable swarm of beeps and screen tears.
Interesting to learn it was a special gfx mode. That explains why it ran at half height on most post 286/CGA systems and how it was so darn fast.
"Moon Bugs" came to be shorthand w my friends for anything fast, twitchy, and inexplicably pointless, like turning on the tv and seeing an explosion or someone driving by and yelling at you but being unable to understand a word.
Yes it was in the long, lost .com format - which you used to be able create on the fly with debug.com, found on every pc by default. IDE? Phooey! Just a list of segment registers pointers and data/code blocks and boom, off to the races. iiuc, no .com program could be more than 300k, bc they were 5 seg regs and each was limited to 64k.
That was when computers were still more bicycle for the mind than virtual exoskeleton.
Today I learned (!) What?! A .com file can have a full 64k for every segment! Amazing! All of my little experiments are .com files and I dread having to go to .exe at any point so this is great news.
The only question I have though is... How? I see DOS initialize all of the segment registers to the same address. Is this something DOS specific like special bits in _start or something? Or something I do myself?
I guess I could imagine my one mega .asm file that includes all my resources and then in _start I just set my segment registers to "further down in the file" using labels. But yeah, I'm a newb at this but love the simplicity of graphics programming like this, tips very much appreciated :)
That's so random bc this game still pops up on my memory frok time to time. For a bit I had a 80286 and the actual CGA adaptor to play this game in the right resolution. But I also had a 486DX50 and this game careened by so fast it was unplayable swarm of beeps and screen tears.
Interesting to learn it was a special gfx mode. That explains why it ran at half height on most post 286/CGA systems and how it was so darn fast.
"Moon Bugs" came to be shorthand w my friends for anything fast, twitchy, and inexplicably pointless, like turning on the tv and seeing an explosion or someone driving by and yelling at you but being unable to understand a word.
Yes it was in the long, lost .com format - which you used to be able create on the fly with debug.com, found on every pc by default. IDE? Phooey! Just a list of segment registers pointers and data/code blocks and boom, off to the races. iiuc, no .com program could be more than 300k, bc they were 5 seg regs and each was limited to 64k.
That was when computers were still more bicycle for the mind than virtual exoskeleton.
Today I learned (!) What?! A .com file can have a full 64k for every segment! Amazing! All of my little experiments are .com files and I dread having to go to .exe at any point so this is great news.
The only question I have though is... How? I see DOS initialize all of the segment registers to the same address. Is this something DOS specific like special bits in _start or something? Or something I do myself?
I guess I could imagine my one mega .asm file that includes all my resources and then in _start I just set my segment registers to "further down in the file" using labels. But yeah, I'm a newb at this but love the simplicity of graphics programming like this, tips very much appreciated :)
oh man, I apologize, I got it wrong! Sorry, the whole program can only be 64K in total, you're right!
how are you creating your .com files btw?