#MS-DOS

Think the old PC speaker was only good for making awful beeps? Yeah, me too—until I started digging into how it actually works.

Step back into the golden age of the demoscene as I dive into some of the most iconic visual effects from 1990s PC demos, all recreated under MS-DOS using Borland C++.

After learning about Mode 13h last time, I’ve been digging about in the ancient tomes of wisdom and discovered Mode-X. Let’s make a PC’s VGA card do odd things it was never designed for.

After learning about Mode 13h last time, I’ve been digging about in the ancient tomes of wisdom and discovered Mode-X. Let’s make a PC’s VGA card do odd things it was never designed for.

Let’s move into the 1990s and draw some graphics! I’ve got a whole 320x200 pixel screen, 256 colours and direct access to the video card. No APIs, no helper functions. Just me and the video RAM.

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.

I ditched DJGPP for now and am using Borland C++ 3.1 that I found on some abandonware website. I even sent the user manual to an online document printer to get it bound into a real book.

Thanks to @hobbified on YouTube, making the EPA logo look correct was quite straight forward…

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.

Come back to a time when 640k was enough, and when a 486 DX2/66 was considered a fast computer. None of this modern multi-core rubbish or branch predicting exploitable nonsense here. Just you, me, DOS and a C compiler.