Dustwar

RTS game for MS-DOS · By dustwardev

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Dustwar community

Ask me anything!

A topic by dustwardev created 17 days ago Views: 163 Replies: 9

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dustwardevDeveloper17 days ago (1 edit)

Place for questions and answers!

jordi16 days ago(+1)

Which framework or language are you using?

dustwardevDeveloper16 days ago(+1)

I use C for programming (no object-oriented programming or fancy data structures). I develop the game on Linux (I simply prefer using Linux). I do not use any special libraries. For the Linux version, I compile the program with GCC. For the DOS version, I use Openwatcom (open-watcom.owcc-dos4g).

If the Linux version works correctly, I compile it for DOS as well. Debugging and finding memory errors in a DOS executable are much more difficult.

dustwardevDeveloper16 days ago

Why not 386? (This question came on reddit)

The problem is that all 386 systems use ISA graphics cards. ISA is slow, it supports max. 16-bit data transfer width at 8 MHz, some ISA graphics cards achieve transfer speed only 1–2 MB/s.

A 320×200x8 screen contains 62.5 KB of data per frame. At 30 FPS, approximately 1.83 MB of data must be transferred every second. At 386 there is a very little time left for per-frame calculations. This is why 32-bit DOS/4GW games cannot run at full screen with an acceptable frame rate on a 386.

By comparison, VLB and PCI graphics cards can be 10–20 times faster at data transfers.

dustwardevDeveloper9 days ago (1 edit)