Today I got a package from fellow retro nerd Matze79, aka Retroianer. He sent me two PCB kits for parallel port sound cards: The TNDLPT and the LPTsnd. The former is Tandy compatible sound device by Serdaco, who sells quite a bit of retro kits, and the latter is a DAC for the printer port by Matze79 himself. The two boards let you add either 3 voice synthesized music or 8 bit PCM playback capability to retro DOS machines. A lot of very old games don’t support SoundBlaster or Adlib cards so these are options for getting better sound with your gaming experience. Also many old laptops of the 386 and 486 era don’t come with builtin sound cards, which is why these devices here are useful as well.
Author: root42
Let’s Code MS DOS 0x13: VGA Mode X Fast(er) Blitting
Today we continue on our quest to make a small VGA game. So far we learned how to initialize Mode X and use some of its nice features. Copying images from system memory was painfully slow though. So let’s make it faster with a small trick!
The Best Joystick for the Atari 2600?
I am not very content with the original CX40 joysticks that came with my Atari 2600. While they are iconic pieces of hardware, actually playing with them gives me hand cramps and their innards are prone to breaking. Instead I am using a custom arcade controller right now. For two player games a second one was in order. So I picked an arcade joystick kit by Monster Joysticks. It recently arrived, so what else to do than assemble it and take it for a spin! No soldering required…
Letscode Episode 0x12: VGA Mode X Panning & Scrolling
The next part in the series about VGA Mode X programming. Let’s do some smooth scrolling. We already did that in text mode, but not in graphics mode, and not in a horizontal direction. So let’s lay down some basics!
Let’s Code MS DOS 0x11: The Mysterious VGA Mode X
Today we’ll tackle a more complicated topic. That’s also why the video is rather long with 40 Minutes. However I think this is necessary, given the importance of the topic. The VGA card is surprisingly feature rich. However a lot of these features are not accessible from the standard 256 color mode 13h. That’s why we take a look at Mode X today, which unlocks such features as page flipping, scrolling and giving access to the VGA’s full memory.