iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Back at it again with the Lodev DDA (lodev.org/cgtutor/rayc...) ray casting experiments. This is running in Real Mode x86-16, with VGA using the tweaked 320x100 mode for double buffering. With just the minimal interface code for testing, the current EXE is about under 4KB. (Open Watcom C/C++ 1.9)

Black floor, white ceiling. The walls are either a monochromatic gradient, or the VGA palette EGA colors. Looking at a corner with a pillar covering the actual corner.
(This image has been Nearest Neighbor scaled from a 320x100 framebuffer to 640x480.)

132

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

this is mostly hard-coded, but once I have an interpreter made and running, this could be something. 640x480 16 color VGA, Open Watcom C/C++ 1.9 default graphics library. #retro #gamedev #VN #DOS #VGA

Blueish screenshot of a visual novel engine with green window descriptors on top of the 2 windows rounded in blue:

the first window is labeled 'Viewport', and has a picture of a beach at night, dithered into less than 16 colors, mostly blue with very tiny pink speckles on the clouds on the upper right corner. (Image from UNCLE MUGEN of the LSF fourms.) This image is surrounded by a black background.

The Textbox is in a similar window, with the black background more prominent here, but has the following text:
"
DOS VN ENGINE - (Pre-Alpha) Version 0.01

Your text here...

(Image from UNCLE MUGEN)
"

0153

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

more rendering stuff, here is a test room, now with a file format for the worlds.

A room with surrounding white wall, light grey floor and ceiling. There are 6 pillars, 3 on each side, going from closest to furthest, red, green, and blue on the left side, and bright magenta, bright green, and bright blue on the right. This is also within a viewport, with empty grey bezel boxes to the bottom and to the right of it. There is nothing on the UI for the time being.

Same tech as before, but a thing I forgot to mention, is that the rendering is symmetrical, it only renders the top half. Using the VGA latch and the appropriate write mode, the bottom of the viewport is copied mirrored.

040

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

gimme a day, and things happen it seems.

$A thick, dark grey UI rests on the bottom and right corners. In the viewport on the top left, 5 colorful walls are viewed from a hexagonal room from one of the corners, with the walls being red, pink, orange\brown, blue, and green. the floor and ceiling is grey. Anyways, if you are reading this thing, or need this text, I want to let you know that this was done with Bresenham-like interpolation with wall drawing, and at the moment, the walls are split into 4 to help with culling relative to the back camera face. In a 120x80 viewport, this is already very jaggy, but it can get worse at certain angles, as may be seen on the corners, but the wall slicing can compensate for one another. Which I think is pretty clever. According to DOSBox-X, on an emulated 286-25, this thing seems to run surprisingly smooth at the moment. The UI does nothing currently. Oh, and the OPL music driver is indeed, running in the background.$

130

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Have ambitions to cram a lite VN and a lite retro first-person thing into a game, making what may be a diet im-sim. (naive) Anyways, there be some rudimentary programming things happening. (this is also within a #DOS #VGA environment.)

An angled cyan wall, surrounded by a black void. This is within a viewport surrounded by a very grey user interface with round, 1-pixel edges. This is rendered in 160x120 8bpp, with the viewport at the top left corner, at a resolution of 120x80.

151

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

After going ham on the microstudio tutorial game, I decided it would be cool to port it to DOS, using a faux 160x120 mode via unchained mode, and halving the resolution via a register.

Screenshot of a game, a figure, brown hair, white skin and shirt, blue pants, and grey shoes, is running on the screen. Clouds, stars, mountains, and a green field can be seen across the stone tiles which the character is walking upon. Two spike traps can be seen ahead of the character.

(this has 9 layers of parallax in motion.)

(there is a binary, 8-bit score counter in the top left corner.)

121

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Random screenshot of a DOS programming project for a sprite-based 2.5D adventure engine. Preliminary work, just simple drawing routines, and some ISRs in the background at work. #DOS #C #x86Assembly #PixelArt #NonSquarePixels

Diagonal gridline in monochrome, some colors are visible in the thin stripe above. A mouse cursor is present.

(Rendered in VGA 256 color unchained at a tweaked resolution of 320x120.)

021

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

$C:>\ frick (a grey computer like setup on a grey desk in a grey room. there is also a grey box with a thin outline black square drawn on it's visible surface)$

000

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

back in business (320x100 256 color) i dread writing the clipping code for this (there is none at the moment)

A square room, red wall to the left, green wall in front, blue wall to the right. The ceiling is white, and the floor is grey.

070

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 23/03/2025

UPDATE: Works seemingly fine on the 286 build with a Trident SVGA card.

Colorful XOR pattern test screen, with text on the top-left corner "320x100x256 packed VGA". Captured from a 286 PC thru a TView Gold and a cheap composite capture card.

010

Fly256 @fly256.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Pentium 100 DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 build. With Open Watcom C 1.9, it can also be used for some retro development.

Barely lit image of an old mini-tower computer on a desk, a Cathode Ray Tube monitor is displaying the Windows 3.11 Program Manager, with most default apps present, along with icons from the Open Watcom C development enviroment. Keyboard and mouse is in front of the monitor.

020