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My first PC computer came with Hercules card! Awesome resolution, but barely can play most of the games. So I hacked one game https://www.mobygames.com/game/652
by malkia 3y ago
My first PC computer came with Hercules card! Awesome resolution, but barely can play most of the games. So I hacked one game https://www.mobygames.com/game/6522/trolls/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/6522/trolls/ to run on it.
Here is what it involved, although it was barely playable. I've found where the game references the 0xA0000 addresss - e.g. the VGA 320x200, then I wrote a stupid TSR program, and had to hack in few places the game to refer to a buffer I had in my TSR (it was at fixed address, so it was easier). Then on every interrupt (I can't remember exactly what), it'll read the pixels and transforms then (well in a shitty way, that somehow made pixels work - how that last bit worked without even caring about the palette I don't know - maybe I was lucky). It was fun experiment, and it worked, but maybe 8-10fps or something like this...
- malkia 3y agoI've also found this message - https://www.mobygames.com/game/6522/trolls/trivia/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/6522/trolls/trivia/ - but back then I could not read/understand english that well so wasn't sure what it was about, and that it was an actual trolling from the programmers - lol ;) - from the page above: "Trivia Hidden Message This message can be found in the program executable: "This game was written on a very slow schneider 10mhz 286 with lots of wait states. If for some reason on your very fast xxxx 25mh 486 this game seems to be fast or unplayable, do no blame us for it was a penny pinching boss who would not buy us reasonable pc's to work on. signed THE PROGRAMMERS OF FLAIR SOFTWARE"
- YZF 3y agoI'd guess the timer interrupt? Yeah, I can imagine that transferring an entire frame would be pretty expensive...
- malkia 3y agoMight've been or maybe I found where the "flip" code was in. Wow I can't imagine digging through compiled code like this today - lol...
- roywashere 3y agoBack in the day I guess for me and my peers it was pretty normal to use some CGA to hercules utility to be able to play Accolades Test Drive on our amber or green monochrome screens with Hercules cards. I always wondered what CGA looked like. Turned out it is really low res and the 4 colors are ugly. Hercules was the much better choice, especially for productivity
- nuxi 3y agoSIMCGA! Oh the memories... https://www.pcorner.com/list/GRAPHUTI/SIMCGA41.ZIP/INFO/ https://www.pcorner.com/list/GRAPHUTI/SIMCGA41.ZIP/INFO/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- malkia 3y agoWild! I wish I had that utility back then! I'm glad though so many other games supported the Hercules. The machine was used by my uncle who went to the States, and he used it mainly for AutoCAD.
- NikolaNovak 3y agoHercules was our first PC too, but I was 10, so it was more about learning to use SIMCGA :-). Good times though!
- bitwize 3y agoThat's pretty much how CGA emulation worked on Herc. Neat hack!
- fatneckbeard 3y agothats legendary amount of kludgery. one thing that was fun about bare metal that we dont get nowdays (and we coudlnt with all the viruses and ransomware)
- peterfirefly 3y agoI knew that Hercules existed but I had never seen one or found any documentation for its graphics mode. Then I saw some graphics code for it (which I disassembled with debug, probably debug.com and not debug.exe!) and stared at it until I had figured out how it worked.
- JdeBP 3y agoSee, for one, chapter 10 section 3 of Michael Tischer's _PC System Programming_, published by Abacus in 1990.