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Jill of the Jungle was one of those shareware games where the technology (and graphics) was not great, but the gameplay was! It came after id software had deve

Jill of the Jungle was one of those shareware games where the technology (and graphics) was not great, but the gameplay was! It came after id software had developed smooth scrolling games (albeit only in EGA) and the scrolling in Jill just felt pretty bad. Smooth scrolling was certainly possible in 256 color VGA, and they could also have used mode X to perform fast blits (4 pixel moves). They didn't use the smooth scrolling registers, and it didn't seem like they used mode X - at least the game did not feel like it. However, I think, keeping the scrolling implementation simple, enabled them to focus on gameplay and sound on the Sound Blaster -- a relatively cool and unique thing at the time! Thus a classic example of not getting distracted by the tech side of things, but focusing on user experience. I dazzled quite a bit with side scrollers then, and it took me a long time to uncover the possible ways to use the VGA hardware on the 286 and 386 for scrolling -- It was really hard to find information about the VGA hardware registers around 1990/1. By the time I had it nailed, the 486DX was already common and fast enough that everything could be done trivially on the CPU. Thus everything I had struggled to learn about smooth scrolling on the VGA hardware became obsolete. That was how I learned, not to spend too much time trying to optimize (prematurely) for current hardware!

johansch 10y ago
> I dazzled quite a bit with side scrollers then, and it took me a long time to uncover the possible ways to use the VGA hardware on the 286 and 386 for scrolling -- It was really hard to find information about the VGA hardware registers around 1990/1. By the time I had it nailed, the 486DX was already common and fast enough that everything could be done trivially on the CPU. Thus everything I had struggled to learn about smooth scrolling on the VGA hardware became obsolete. That was how I learned, not to spend too much time trying to optimize (prematurely) for current hardware! I did the same, but with the 486 in 1993! And I wasn't connected at all, no BBS:es, just sharing copies of copies of copies of floppies (etc etc). It's hard to imagine the dearth of information nowadays, and how valuable every scrap of information was. Now and then you'd get across this goldmine of information (in the form of some source code), and spend weeks/months understanding it all. I spent so much time experimenting with Turbo Pascal, inline assembly and VGA mode 13h and mode X. And trying to build the ultimate sprite and tile engine... The good thing about not being connected though: it was easy to stay concentrated on one issue at a time.

johansch 10y ago

> I dazzled quite a bit with side scrollers then, and it took me a long time to uncover the possible ways to use the VGA hardware on the 286 and 386 for scrolling -- It was really hard to find information about the VGA hardware registers around 1990/1. By the time I had it nailed, the 486DX was already common and fast enough that everything could be done trivially on the CPU. Thus everything I had struggled to learn about smooth scrolling on the VGA hardware became obsolete. That was how I learned, not to spend too much time trying to optimize (prematurely) for current hardware! I did the same, but with the 486 in 1993! And I wasn't connected at all, no BBS:es, just sharing copies of copies of copies of floppies (etc etc). It's hard to imagine the dearth of information nowadays, and how valuable every scrap of information was. Now and then you'd get across this goldmine of information (in the form of some source code), and spend weeks/months understanding it all. I spent so much time experimenting with Turbo Pascal, inline assembly and VGA mode 13h and mode X. And trying to build the ultimate sprite and tile engine... The good thing about not being connected though: it was easy to stay concentrated on one issue at a time.