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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   2711 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 7, 2022

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Well, I mostly wrapped up my EGA sprite editor in assembly. There are a few more things I may change for my own convenience as I proceed to actually use it to make a game. But I think it was a good enough exploration of doing most game related tasks in assembly. I processed a bunch of mouse and keyboard input, save and load files, did a bunch of EGA graphics, allocated a bunch of memory, even did some fun things with the different pages in mode 0Dh.

It was probably totally unnecessary but I wanted some practice, so I split the program into two assembly files, operating in two different memory segments. Made juggling the current data segment a little annoying, so I'll need to think carefully about how I go about that more in the future.

Possibly the only thing I might add to it is a preview mode where I paint the sprites over the screen and see how they look against each other. And maybe a few other UI niceties.

With that more or less in the bag, I've moved onto starting an adlib tracker. Turns out there is more or less only a single extant document about how to program the registers on an adlib compatible card. A short, 9 page document called "Programming the AdLib/Sound Blaster FM Music Chips Version 2.0". It's dated Feb 24 1992 by Jeffrey S. Lee. It begins like this

Two of the most popular sound cards for the IBM-PC, the AdLib and the Sound Blaster, suffer from a real dearth of clear documentation for programmers. AdLib Inc. and Creative Labs, Inc. both sell developers' kits for their sound cards, but these are expensive, and (in the case of the Sound Blaster developers' kit) can be extremely cryptic.

This document is intended to provide programmers with a FREE source of information about the programming of these sound cards.

The information contained in this document is a combination of information found in the Sound Blaster Software Developer's Kit, and that learned by painful experience. Some of the information may not be valid for AdLib cards; if this is so, I apologize in advance.

So I'll be bit banging against 244 registers or so. Only so many are useful, but I'm curious what many of them sound like. Yeah, yeah, I know. There are so, so many adlib trackers already. But where is the fun in that?

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