This section will cover the inner workings of the games I have made, and the various technics used in each game. As well as I am hoping to receive input from people such as articles to put up on other pages. Mainly this page will stick to how does Dragon Warrior PC and other games work, etc.

Eventually I will have this page structured, but right now I'm not quite sure how I'm going to lay it all out so please bare with me.

 

When I first starting coding games, I used mode 13h. This mode is the most easiest mode to use when first starting out programming. The mode is 320x200 and supports 256 colors.

Good things about mode 13h:

• Linear memory access is extremely easy.
• Easy to set the video mode to 13h.
• Fading the screen is relatively easy.
• Can do palette animation.
• Gfx takes up less memory.

And now the bad things about mode 13h:

• Only 256 colors.
• Pixels are not square.
• Low-res image quality.

The main point here is that mode 13h only has 256 colors, so it is quite easy to run out of colors quickly, and managing the palette can be a pain sometimes.

Because of this it wasn't long before I was looking to an alternative to mode 13h. The answer was VESA modes. Now the first VESA 1.0 video modes weren't that great, often difficult to deal with because the video memory was segmented into pages. However VESA 2.0 soon came along and fixed this, giving programmers the option to use the VESA LFB (Linear Frame Buffer). Using the LFB modes video memory in VESA 2.0 behaved exactly like mode 13h. Which is great for coders. In a Vesa 2.0 mode you can use as many colors as the mode supports, from 8/15/16/24/32 bit color!

Sounds good doesn't it? Well it would be great, but unfortunately not all Video Card Manufactures choose to abide by the Vesa 2.0 standards, so if you use a VESA 2.0 mode your game might not work on all computers. But more and more Video Cards are supporting VESA 2.0 modes, so its not that bad actually.

Setting a VESA 2.0 mode from dos in protected mode, is kinda a pain. However once you have the code written you never have to write it again.

There is a solution to all this, and that is to use DirectX. That way you know that your game will run on all video cards. However to do this you must learn to program in Windows, which can be a pain. To keep it simple go with a VESA 2.0 mode, to go Commercial use DirectX.

And so, choose your video mode wisely, each has its ups and downs, I really love VESA 2.0 modes but it's kinda fustrating that my games won't run on all computers when using a Vesa 2.0 mode.

Enough Said.