Mike's PCjr Page

Hi!

I'm working on a game called StellarRoads for DOS/PC Booter, and recently I have begun testing it on my PCjr. Version 0.6 works reasonably well on it so I thought this would be of interest here.

Here is the game's home page:
https://www.raphnet.net/programmation/s ... dex_en.php

There are still a few occasional slowdowns, in particular when moving very fast in dense areas, but there is room for improvement and optimization in the platform drawing code, so there is hope. But otherwise, when there is a slowdown it kind of feels like dodging bullets in slow motion, so it's almost a feature...

The game must run in "fast" memory and requires 96k or contiguous RAM above 128k. The "Tandy" version (stelltga.com) is the only PCjr-aware flavor of the game, so this is the one you should run.

The game uses the 320x200x16 video mode and supports the 3 channel sound chip. Here are a few screenshots:


Test reports, comments, suggestions are all welcomed!

Noticed this in the changelog: "check if the program is loaded in fast memory (above 128k) and relocate if necessary." While that's nice, it shouldn't be necessary to do that since your game will always be loaded in DOS, and anyone with a memory sidecar/expansion will be running jrconfig.sys or equivalent to set up that memory. Relocating programs above 128K is necessary for booters (Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.13 does it and asks the user) but no DOS application need concern themselves with it. (And if stellar roads is moved to a ROM cart, it still doesn't need to worry about it since it's running out of ROM.)

Yeah, I had a feeling I was probably doing too much... Though I must admit that I'm lazy and simply haven't installed jrconfig.sys yet, so it was useful to me.

The mark of a true hacker: Writes code to move program in memory because too lazy to install a device driver :-)