Author: james

  • Let’s recreate a 90’s PC BIOS Boot Screen

    Because why not, it looks simpler than it really is and we’ll get to fall down a rabbit hole trying to draw the Energy Star logo. “Hello World” is one of the most basic programming tasks we do. It’s the equivalent of getting a new car and taking it for a short drive down the…

  • Nostalgic DOS Development Part 2 – Writing our first programs

    This is part two, go read part 1 first. Last time we set up FreeDOS and installed DJGPP and RHIDE. Now let’s go through how to use them and write some simple programs. I am going to assume you know how to use DOS. If not, all you need to know is how to make…

  • Nostalgic DOS Development – Setting up the machine

    The modern world is far too complex. Software has become piles of APIs stacked on top of each other, running on virtual machines inside browsers. Even the CPUs themselves are too complex for anyone to understand. Let’s ditch all that complicated nonsense and go back to a time when computers were complex enough to be…

  • Forcing DOS onto an unwilling ThinkPad R60e

    I decide that doing DOS development means I need a real computer, rather than an emulator. I have an old laptop, surely making it run DOS can’t be that hard, right? The device in question is this. It’s an IBM ThinkPad R60e. It says IBM on the lid, it says IBM in the BIOS, but…

  • Tilemap Game Engine Development – Agon Light C Programming

    In this video, I’ll show you how I built a tilemap system from scratch in C for the Agon Light, and integrated it into my existing game engine. Getting the physics engine to handle collisions with the tilemap was no easy task, but I’ll walk you through how I made it work. On top of…

  • Bring back physical buttons!

    At least polling a physical button can be done with electronics that don’t require running code, meaning you can always program one of the buttons to be a “reset” switch if needed. Like in my car, when the infotainment system decided to lock up… No amount of frustrated tapping on the screen did anything, and…

  • Emulation Sucks

    … because it’s so realistic you still have to put up with the same problems you had 30 years ago… Ah yes, that’ll be the problem, something ate the system.ini file, because of course it did, didn’t it There’s some 30 year old muscle memory going on here, if I don’t think I can drive…

  • Dodgy DOS Development

    From the mind that brought you “let’s try to write games using just pure C” I have a new idea for making my life difficult. Let’s write DOS software using period correct tools… This is just me organising a thought, I’ve not started yet. Further research will be needed – or in other words, if…

  • Writing a game the hard way – from scratch using C – Part 2

    Join me on a journey as I attempt to write a game for my Agon Light using nothing but raw C programming. In this second episode I figure out how to make a very basic 2D rigid body physics system work. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have an Agon Light, I’m bringing you along…

  • Writing a game the hard way – from scratch using C – Part 1

    Join me on a journey as I attempt to write a game for my Agon Light using nothing but raw C programming. In this first episode I figure out what kind of game to make, look at some shareware games of the past and get a basic game engine working, using nothing but C code…