Allegro.cc - Online Community

Allegro.cc Forums » Off-Topic Ordeals » 54 byte VBE display hack for DOSBOX

This thread is locked; no one can reply to it. rss feed Print
54 byte VBE display hack for DOSBOX
Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
avatar

While you're all making fancy programs with DirectX and OpenGL, I'm going the other way with assembly language for MS-DOS for DOSBOX and Virtual Box.

Zipfile with source here

I somehow stumbled onto the fact that DOSBOX has a realflat mode (aka unreal mode aka voodoo mode) by default and came up with this little 54 byte display hack that blits repeatedly to a 800x600 VBE linear frame buffer. It only gets about 1.8 frames per second at the default 3000 cycles of a non-protected mode program, but if you change "cycles=auto" to "cycles=max" it gets about 25 frames per second, at least on this i5 cpu I have. I've also included a 320x240x256 version if you have nasm which gets about 8fps at 3000 cycles and somewhere around 130 fps at max cycles. I could have added sound at another 31 bytes or so to play audio using code for the Disney Sound Source (in DOSBOX by default in dosbox.conf) but even at 8 bit mono at 7K samples/sec a raw audio file
would be considerably more bulky.

DOS ain't dead yet!

They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas.

Go to: