LarsDu88
Lovely book. Skimming through it. One thing that might
help contextualize it is a brief discussion of the how
contemporary hardware like the SNES rendered sprites so
efficiently compared to the PC hardware at the time. It's
not obvious to modern readers why a PC with significantly
more powerful compute capabilities would struggle to keep
up with significantly slower Nintendo hardware at the time
for sprite rendering.
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nnnnico
this looks like a copy of fabien's site, plus the topic is
very related and likely trampolining on his brand :/
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> john_strinlai
probably worth linking to it, if that's the case.i
think you are referring to this one?
https://fabiensanglard.net/
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woutersf
If you want to play it you can do that here:
https://www.playdosgames.com/play/commander-keen-4
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pan69
Great write up. Reminds me of Cosmodoc, which is similar
source but analyzes Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure instead of
Commander Keen.https://cosmodoc.org
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evilturnip
Masters of Doom is a great book on the history of id
software, which includes the origins of the development of
smooth scrolling by Carmack and Romero, which was
groundbreaking at the time on PC.
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> hbn
It should be noted that John Romero released his own
book, Doom Guy, a few years ago which contradicts some
of the accounts in Masters of Doom. MoD is probably
the more thrilling read and I enjoyed both books, but
some of the stories need to be taken with a grain of
salt.I also think Doom Guy is worth a read because it
gives a lot more insight into what happened at Ion
Storm and how the Daikatana project fell apart. And
some important context about the infamous "John
Romero's about to make you his bitch" ad (mainly that
he really didn't want to publish it at all). But I
digress.
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> _the_inflator
Fun fact for C64 guys:The underlying mechanics of
Carmack's technique is very similar to the full screen
smooth scrolling effect on C64 at any speed and
distance. It is nowadays referred to as DMA
delay.ELIF: You trick the CPU to display screen data
at a different starting point than as designed by the
hardware. This is tricky and need to be executed cycle
exact.Here is the explanation in detail together with
all major top notch effects. The article is a legend
and kind of the bible of doing the most sophisticated
effects on C64. Some effects have since then even more
and better explained and exploited due to cross
platform development possibilities and better tooling,
but understanding all mechanics here is a necessity to
play a role in the Champions League of C64 demos,
besides and also being able to implement the
techniques mentioned here:
https://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cbm/c64/vic-ii.txt
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LarsDu88
Someone ping Fabien Sanglard! Looks so much like his site!
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ChrisArchitect
Of related interest:Reconstructed Commander Keen 1-3
Source Codehttps://pckf.com/viewtopic.php?t=18248
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46321982)
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