4 ms·
A lot of people talk about what a genius Carmack must have been to get those smooth animations in Commander Keen, especially considering that the EGA had a plan
by bitwize 3y ago
A lot of people talk about what a genius Carmack must have been to get those smooth animations in Commander Keen, especially considering that the EGA had a planar display wherein each byte represented one color plane for eight pixels, making placing of pixels at arbitrary locations hard. But the clever bit was in the smooth scrolling -- knowing which EGA registers to poke to get a particular horizontal offset and just-in-time fetching of tile data to fill in whatever scenery had just scrolled into view.
Getting smooth sprites on EGA? That was easy -- make four copies of each sprite image, one per two-pixel offset.
- a1o 3y agoIf I remember correctly the hack was in the level design where on each scroll there was a limited amount of tiles that could change, so one would only scroll these specific tiles and pretend the entire screen scrolled.
- Dwedit 3y agoThen Commander Keen 4 threw that solution out, and simply assumed that video memory would wrap properly if you went past the end, which it did on most cards.
- fabiensanglard 3y agoHere is a memory refresher :P https://fabiensanglard.net/ega/ https://fabiensanglard.net/ega/