New software (and PAC-MAN) for the Mindset

[tschak909]

Hi,

 

Most of you know me from my work on the Atari 8-bit, or for my work on IRATA.ONLINE, but I have been given a rare opportunity, of which I am taking advantage.

 

As some of you know, I have been porting PLATOTERM to every computer platform on Planet Earth, and one of the machines that I was given access to, was a Mindset.

 

What's that?

 

It's a very rare MS-DOS (not IBM PC Compatible) machine from 1984, which was very unique in that it had graphics acceleration hardware in the form of a pair of graphics/display processor chips, which included a BLITTER for fast data moving, as well as a 512 color palette, sitting atop a 6MHz 80186 (no, that is not a typo), and packaged in a _very_ attractive modular chassis.

 

Due to a massive stroke of luck, a few of these systems were found at the Computer Reset liquidation in Dallas, TX. I had a discussion with the owner of one of these new systems, and he agreed to let me borrow the system for a few months.

 

I agreed to write a version of PLATOTERM for the system (50% done),

and he kindly asked that I also write some games (to which I also agreed.)

 

Since the machine is MS-DOS (and x86) based, Watcom C had no problem generating runnable code for the system, even with 80186 instruction generation, and it so happened that Al Kossow @ Bitsavers had just released a scanned copy of the Mindset Software Developers Guide, which contained tons of useful information for new software development, including the calls exposed by the ROM BIOS for the extended graphics functionality, and their parameters:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mindset/Mindset_Software_Developers_Guide.pdf

 

I took this, and built libraries I needed to start writing software, essentially binding these calls to C functions, a simple, but laborious task (still to do, snd and misc): 

https://github.com/tschak909/mindset-c

 

And have been folding this into a series of examples, showing the capabilities of the system:

code: https://github.com/tschak909/mindset-examples

 

Some vids of examples:

 Raw blitter speed (copy)

 

Using the BLITTER to draw a mouse cursor; mouse movement. (mouse)

 

BLITTER demonstration, animating a scene (pacman-cutscene)

 

Blitter accelerated text output using BLT STRING (font)

 

So now, to fulfill the second part of my promise, I'm working on a port of PAC-MAN to the MINDSET, here is the first part of the ATTRACT running on the composite display, which shows arcade accurate colors:

 

I've hit my first snag trying to use BLT STRING to output the maze (because I need to scroll it to fit), so I am experimenting with blitting the entire maze in one transaction, to see if I can make it fast enough....

 

if I can't, I'll have to squash the maze and "sprite" graphics to fit the display. I say "sprite" because the Mindset only has BLITTER OBJECTS, not SPRITES.

 

More to come!

 

-Thom