> Can you point me to any good ressources regarding FreeDOS game > development, e.g. good articles tutorials or books. Topics should be > mouse, keyboard and maybe joystick input, graphics and sound.
If you want real-world examples, a number of popular DOS games from the 90s are now open source, so you can see how they did things or just base a new game off a complete code base. For example, some of my favourites: Duke Nukem 3D - https://github.com/videogamepreservation/dukenukem3d Heretic - https://github.com/videogamepreservation/heretic Wolfenstein 3-D - https://github.com/dos-games/vanilla-wolf3d Commander Keen - https://github.com/dos-games/vanilla-keendreams Kiloblaster - https://github.com/dos-games/vanilla-kiloblaster There are many others that are now open source too. > Regarding graphics, is there a way to support larger resolutions and > bit depths than VGA (e.g. SVGA/VESA)? The later games like Duke 3D have VESA support for larger resolutions. > Is there any development environment or compiler you would recommend > for gamedev? I don't think there were any development environments for games back then - each game engine had its own set of internal tools for development and few of them were ever released. Many of them were custom tools for each game. I have a personal project in running the DOS Game Modding Wiki at http://moddingwiki.shikadi.net where we are documenting the various file formats used by DOS games, with the goal being to write editors for them so fans of the games can make their own levels, change the graphics, etc. As an example of this, there are quite a large number of modifications that have been made to the Commander Keen series of games, turning them into virtually entirely new games. Here's a list of just some of them: https://keenwiki.shikadi.net/wiki/Keen_4_mods Although quite a few of these involve patching the machine code in the .exe to change game behaviour, that's not a requirement. Cheers, Adam. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
