More on CGALIB

Sunday, 5th July 2020

After playing the Droids game a few times, I've noticed a little bug that affects the Personal C Compiler version. The randomiser doesn't seem to work, so you and the robots will start out in the same place each time you play. I'll correct this next time I work on CGALIB. The OpenWatcom version doesn't suffer from this bug.

Another more significant oversight is that I neglected to provide the source code for the droids game in the CGALIB binary packages. While it's there in the source packages, it's supposed to be showing off not just CGALIB's capabilities but also how to use it, so in future releases I'll remember to include the droids source with the binary libraries. In the mean time, download a source package to see the source for the droids game.

The library's not one day old yet and already I've made a custom version. I'm porting my ZX Spectrum game Ossuary to DOS. I started coding it up to use OpenWatcom's bundled graphics library, but I quickly found that that was too inflexible and too slow to achieve what I wanted on a 4.77 MHz PC. It would be a good fit for CGALIB, except for the fact that it uses 8x8 pixel fonts, where as CGALIB only supports 4x8 fonts.

The problem was solved by making the aforesaid custom version of the library, which uses 8x8 fonts instead of 4x8. I'm not planning to make that version of CGALIB a general release; instead I'll work in future to make the font sizing a bit more flexible without sacrificing speed.