Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: gil@snsys.com (Gil Jaysmith) Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.programming.2d_graphics Subject: Re: pixels Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 11:53:36 GMT Organization: SN Systems Lines: 32 Message-ID: <5qfo6b$5na2@chuka.playstation.co.uk> References: <33c122d9.168381829@news.scea.sony.com> <33c3d7f6.4808700@news.scea.sony.com> <33C48A1C.3895@bc.sympatico.ca> <33c595c2.31159264@news.scea.sony.com> <33CB26B4.35CB@bc.sympatico.ca> Reply-To: gil@snsys.com NNTP-Posting-Host: gil.snsys.com X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82 Nick Porcino wrote: >I've bought a lot of the books, and most of them spend far too much time >teaching you how to access the VGA registers, and not enough time on >real meat. I could care less about the flipping VGA registers. I'd get a >hardware manual if that's what I was after. The only book I ever found which handed out useful techniques for games programming was "Advanced Spectrum Machine Language" by David Webb from about 12 years ago. In those days the computer magazines had technical staff who hacked into the top games of the month and told you how they implemented buffers, scrolling, sprites, jazzy colours, etc. Today's books like "Tricks Of The Gameswriting Wizards" or whatever are usually preoccupied with old hat hardware tips, like you say, or concentrate on techniques more suited to demos than real games. (I used to hijack techniques from how things were implemented on other machines. For example, the BBC Micro had hardware scrolling - the video memory was presented to the TV starting at a variable address with a wraparound within that area of RAM. So when I converted a hardware-scrolling BBC game to the Spectrum I had a software buffer which I dumped to video RAM starting at a variable position. I expect that's still possible. But finding out information about one machine is hard enough nowadays thanks to NDAs.) (And now I write linkers. Woe is me :=)) Gil Jaysmith SN Systems Software Ltd, makers of Psy-Q... http://www.snsys.com Disclaimer: What I say when I post here represents me, not my employers.