|
54 byte VBE display hack for DOSBOX |
Arthur Kalliokoski
Second in Command
February 2005
|
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 DOS ain't dead yet! They all watch too much MSNBC... they get ideas. |
|