Notices by Eniko Fox (eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place)

i've been using qbasic for a few days now and damn this thing was nice for its time. it has breakpoints and step through debugging, and an immediate window where you can input code and run it to do stuff like print out variables

it's... really good? my biggest issue is that the text editor controls are kinda clunky, especially when it comes to indentation

also its bizarre how nice it is to program in a language where i don't have to worry about null dereferences (they're impossible in qbasic)

i'm making a #QBasic game using mode 13h, 320x200 8bpp. i'm using the line doubling feature of the VGA card to make it 320x100 then manually doubling each pixel horizontally for 160x100

i realized i could use a palette with 3 bits red/green and 2 blue, and then do "subpixel" dither to generate the in between colors. i made a converter to test if that would look good, and it does

here's a thread of images showing what that looks like

1/5

#PixelArt #QBasic #dos #RetroComputing #RetroDev

every image has a CRTized version made using https://mattiasgustavsson.itch.io/crtview by @Mattias_G and the crispy pixel original

my converter has a bias factor between 0 and 1, that biases towards non-dithered colors. it's kind of a push and pull between less busy dithering and more detail

2/5

little known fact: qbasic can produce mind boggling effects

i'm making this engine in qbasic for DOS as a challenge, using qb1.1, the interpreted one, without resorting to assembly language hacks. hence the low resolution (fewer tiles/pixels = better performance)

3/5

right now my qbasic engine can run locked to 70, 60, 35, 30, or 18.2 frames per second. @discatte tested it and it runs at 35 fps on a 486sx-20mhz

i intend for it to have OPL music and sounds, with a PC speaker sfx and no music fallback for the 18.2 fps mode

4/5

I can't actually remember, did qbasic (1.1) even run on 386?

Playing around with DOS is making me wanna try and make a lil qbasic game 🤔

PSA: Daggerfall released closer to Minecraft than Minecraft's release is to today

Finally picked an actual game to run on my dosbox laptop (I forced myself to pick from one of Twilight CD 1's games lol)

can someone make a DOS games wheel of fortune so i can just spin the wheel and it tells me what game i should play

thanks in advance

finally doing it. setting my laptop up as a dos box (using dosbox staging on linux mint)

i will probably regret this but, i am soliciting suggestions for chill DOS games and also DOS hidden gems

*going through miles and miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers*

what the fuck who engraved the word hate on each nanoangstrom of these

@cwebber this is so weird to read. "It's hard to say no" no it's not. Loads of us are saying no. It's as easy as saying no and not doing it, though I suppose from the vantage point of an AI addict that sounds preposterous

smh enis will create a whole ass block gaem rather than go to therapy

you can tell if someone's one of the real ones if they refuse to refer to twitter as X

hi fedi friends. search engines are shit now. can any of you dig up information on how relatively good or, much more likely, relatively terrible the integrated graphics in my amd ryzen 7 5700g is? especially when compared to like, actual at least vaguely modern dedicated graphics cards. i tried and could not turn up anything

thanks!

edit: wow okay i have enough now thank you. conclusion: my igpu is trash lol

it *is* actually faster than my 2012 laptops gpu! by 50%

lmao

to be fair my 2012 laptop was pretty good at the time (asus n56vz)

Who needs name recognition anyway. Who cares about a name that literally everyone immediately recognizes. Not them, they've got vaporware to shill

I'm tired of living in a world where so many of the most powerful people are such pathetic fucking losers