A New Graphics Library - With a New Game!

Saturday, 4th July 2020

I've been doing quite a bit of DOS development work over the past few weeks, not all of it directed in an organised fashion. I've done a bit of work on Star Governor. I've got a good way through a conversion of my ZX Spectrum game Ossuary to DOS. And I've developed a graphics library (twice) and written a game to demonstrate it.

CGALIB is a specialised graphics library for writing turn-based games, aimed at DOS machines with CGA graphics. It's taken me three attempts, the earlier two being either too complicated or too slow. This third attempt, developed in parallel for the OpenWatcom and Personal C Compilers, has been more successful.

The library comes supplied with some very rudimentary utilities for creating graphics data (bitmaps and fonts) from images saved by PCPaint. It also comes with a little demonstration game, an implementation of the classic Droids game.

It's a complete library as it stands, but I have plans for future development. I want to develop the utilities into more friendly sprite and font editors. And I'd like to add simple sound and keyboard support into the library to make it more useful for DOS game development.