Posted May 17, 2020 by Bad Sector
This update adds a slightly better Windows version that allows selecting a custom resolution. The game still uses GDI and scales to the desktop resolution, just now it isn't locked to 320x200 nor uses a hardcoded aspect ratio. Also the code has been modified to compile with Free Pascal 2.2.4 which is the last version that could create Windows 9x compatible executables, meaning that it will now work on retro PCs - at least retro PCs powerful enough to run the game in GDI anyway (meaning that you most likely wont get any decent framerate unless you both the game and the desktop is at 640x480 and you have something like a Pentium 3). Perhaps in the future i might add a DirectDraw graphics driver.
Note that even though you can select something like a 4K resolution, chances are that even on a modern PC the software renderer will be too slow to run smoothly. In general i do not recommend anything above 960x540 or so. The configuration dialog that appears when you start the game provides two automatically calculated resolutions based on the current desktop resolution, one that is always at 200 pixels high (so that in-game screens appear at their full size) and another that is the closest integer scale to 320x200.
In addition to the above, this update fixes some timing issues when the game was running at low framerate - previously the animation was using the current system time but because the current frame was also used for some events and state changes, these frames could be skipped, causing the events and state changes to not happen. Now the animation time is updated at a fixed rate synchronized with the overall engine update rate, meaning that no events should be missed due to skipped frames.
The full changelog is this: