- #Old ms dos games how to#
- #Old ms dos games drivers#
- #Old ms dos games software#
- #Old ms dos games code#
At around the same time, Microsoft created the DirectX library for Windows which was similar to OpenGL. Early 3D games like MechWarrior 2 had different releases for 3dfx Voodoo, S3 Virge, STB Velocity, and so on. Originally, graphics card manufacturers would work with game studios to create a version (release) of their game that would be accelerated by the specific graphics card. The same problem existed in games development.
#Old ms dos games software#
OpenGL provided access to underlying hardware features, and if a feature did not exist on the hardware, OpenGL provided a software implementation. Later when graphics cards started gaining accelerated functionality, SGI created the IrisGL API, which later became OpenGL, in order to simplify CAD (computer aided drafting/design) software development for those graphics cards by providing a standard API that video hardware manufacturers could support and developers could design their software against.
#Old ms dos games how to#
You had to write your own line drawing and fill routines, and if you wanted 3-D, you had to know how to project it onto a 2-D screen, how to remove hidden lines and so on. You had to figure out how to avoid flicker and how to prevent tearing. You had to know how to put the card into graphics mode and you had to know the memory layout, palette, and so on.
#Old ms dos games code#
As you said, some games would ask what you had and you had to know what the right answer was, otherwise the game would not work.Įarly on, you had to explicitly code your game for each graphics card you wanted to support: Hercules, CGA, Tandy, EGA, VGA. If you bought a VGA game but you only had an EGA card, then the game would not work at all. This would be listed in the software requirements, and you needed to have the right hardware to support the game. For example, a popular display mode was VGA 640x480 with 16 colors. However, these were typically slower than what would be required for building action type games.Īn action game would typically be optimized for a particular graphics display mode on a particular card.
#Old ms dos games drivers#
There were some systems like the Borland Graphics Interface that abstracted graphics drawing primitives into an API with different drivers that one could call to draw things on different graphics cards. Entire books were written about how to write efficient code to draw graphics. There were no drawing APIs to call, if you wanted something to appear on the screen (whether it be a pixel, a character, a line, a circle, a sprite, etc) you would write the code to move the bytes into the right places in display RAM. Instead, graphics cards, at least in DOS land, all had memory mapped display RAM, and extensive documentation was available about exactly how setting various bits in display RAM would affect the pixels that appeared on the screen. There was the concept of a Video BIOS, which were extensions to the INT 10h BIOS video services, that were effectively limited to initialization and switching video modes. Early graphics cards had virtually no callable code associated with them at all, the concept of "drivers" had not quite become a reality yet. Microsoft MS-DOS 6.00 (Upgrade) (5.25-1.Did every programmer of every game implemented all possible various API's that old graphic cards supported? Microsoft MS-DOS 6.00 Plus Enhanced Tools (3.5-1.44mb) Microsoft MS-DOS 6.0 Plus Enhanced Tools (3.5-1.44mb) Microsoft MS-DOS 6.0 Plus Enhanced Tools (5.25-1.2mb) Product type OS Vendor Microsoft Release date 1993 Minimum CPU 8088 Minimum RAM 512KB Minimum free disk space 6MB User interface Text Platform DOS Download count 1390 (72 for release) Downloads Download name
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